How Important Is Plumber Reputation Management

You could have the most skilled plumbing crew in the world, but without a strong online presence, your business is considered dead in the water (excuse the pun). 

One of the most crucial aspects of your brand is your online reputation. Doing online research has replaced personal recommendations, so maintaining a solid standing in the eyes of digital citizens is critical for receiving a steady stream of new clients.

Luckily, plumber reputation management can fit right into your current marketing strategy, and there are plenty of tools that make this job significantly easier.

But before we get into the nitty gritty, we should first cover the few basics of plumber reputation management.

Let’s get cracking!

What Is Reputation Management?

Reputation management is the practice of monitoring and boosting your business’s reputation. In the digital era, this mostly refers to maintaining a positive image in search engines and more importantly, managing customer feedback on review channels such as Facebook, Yelp, Google, and other third-party websites.

These sites can shape all kinds of purchasing decisions, and almost all clients use them to form an opinion of the company they’re researching. 

Benefits Of Plumber Reputation Management

To grow your company, you have to reflect on its public image. Here’s how plumber reputation management can help:

• Boost Sales

The majority of homeowners scour online reviews before booking a plumber. Since customer feedback comes from legitimate sources, companies with stellar reviews simply attract more clients. 

• Build a Solid Brand

A single negative review can impact client loyalty and harm your business in the long run. Yet, with a clear reputation management strategy in place, you can stay on top of any challenges and build a perception of a business that cares about the customers. 

• Amplify Your Online Visibility

Since search engines like Google want to provide better search results to their users, higher-rated businesses will receive a slight bump in their organic search rankings.

• IncreaseTrust

By increasing the number of positive reviews and working extra hard to respond to negative reviews promptly, the customers browsing your listing will automatically perceive you as trustworthy. 

How To Manage Your Online Reputation

To effectively improve and maintain your online standing, you can implement some of the following strategies:

1. Keep A Close Eye On All Your Online Listings

An efficient online plumber reputation management strategy requires monitoring the discourse around your business on various platforms. Although you can set up Google Alerts to notify you whenever a new piece of information pops up, this may not be enough if you have listings on other review sites. 

To overcome this challenge, we developed ReviewArm, a reputation management platform that provides access to all the review sites in a singular dashboard.

You can set up ReviewArm to alert you whenever your business receives a new review. No more going back and forth between different sites as you can monitor your reputation from one place. 

2. Ask For More Reviews

Think of reviews as powerful marketing materials you get to receive for free. The more you have, the higher your rating and the higher the amount of homeowners you can attract. Moreover, positive reviews also lessen the impact of negative reviews, which means that generating more feedback ensures your reputation always stays safe. 

How can you generate reviews, though?

The easy way is to just ask. But there are also other challenges you need to address. You want to avoid pestering your customers so the most you can do is to ask them to leave a review after they’re done with the service appointment. 

Without following up, you run the risk of a happy customer forgetting about the review. Factoring in that they also have to navigate to your listing, chances are they’ll simply procrastinate until the idea of leaving you feedback falls completely by the wayside.

The best way to lock down the review is to use ReviewArm. The tool allows you to automatically send review requests to your customer’s phones via email or SMS with a direct link to the platform to leave the feedback. As such, you can easily refresh their memory, and since it’s convenient to click a link where you can rate a business, they’re more likely to make the effort. 

3. Invest In Local SEO

Another major aspect of plumber reputation management is SEO. Think of it this way:

The sheer fact you showed up at the top of the search results automatically signifies you offer good services. Combined with a positive Google rating, a customer coming across your page will be more inclined to click on it, and if they like what they see, they’ll fill out your contact form. 

Considering a high number of reviews boosts your SEO efforts and the improved ranking also positively impacts your reputation, generating more reviews is a win-win scenario. 

4. Respond To All Reviews

When you get a review, respond as fast as possible and offer your gratitude, regardless of whether the feedback is negative or positive. 

This is important as it communicates to your current and prospective customers that you care about their opinions. Plus, since you’ll be consistently responding to reviews, it won’t seem off when you start responding to potential negative reviews as a form of damage control.

While we’re on the subject of damage control, how should you respond to negative feedback?

Even though scathing feedback sounds defeating, it’s actually an insight into which areas of your business you can improve. If you have a solid plumber reputation management strategy, you don’t need to worry that much as you can easily avert the damage (and even turn the negative into positive if you do it right). 

Try to establish a human connection with the reviewer and thank them for their effort. Validate their feelings, apologize, and if possible, invite them to contact you personally so you can resolve the issue out of the public eye. 

If you have no time to respond to all the feedback manually, ReviewArm has got you covered. We recently implemented an AI feature that analyzes the context of the review and automatically crafts multiple contextual responses. You only need to choose the one that you like and off you go - context-aware reviews galore.

Plumber Reputation Management Made Easy

Reputation management, although worth the effort, can put a significant strain on your time. But with a modern tool such as ReviewArm, you get everything you need to efficiently manage and boost your online reputation. 

Best of all, it fits right into your existing marketing stack and perfectly integrates with other platforms you may already have. Plus, there are no contracts as ReviewArm implements a pay-as-you-go model, which allows it to scale with your business.

Want to see it in action? Sign up for a free trial now.