Reputation Management

How long does effective reputation management take?

For moving companies it can take within 3-12 months to repair a damaged brand. For movers, reputation is usually measured in online reviews. The challenge is, oftentimes the worse your reviews are the harder it can be to start getting more reviews as you may have fewer opportunities to work. 

 

Depending on how many bad reviews you have, it may take a very long time to get enough positive reviews to counteract the bad ones. If you’re having trouble getting leads online, you may need to try finding business in real life with physical advertisements like billboards or postcards until your digital brand has been repaired.

 

The other challenge comes in actually getting people to leave positive reviews. You may need to send reminders to your previous happy clients 1-2 times before they actually leave a review and some may never actually do it. Unfortunately, bad experiences are often more of a motivation to people to leave a review than very good ones, so if you’re trying to build positive reviews you need to make it as easy as possible for your clients to leave them.

 

Why is reputation management important?

Reputation management is important because moving is typically thought of as being a stressful experience for the average person so they want to make sure they are working with a company that is going to do a good job. In order to gauge how good of an option a moving company is, they will often look at the experience of your previous clients through Google or Yelp reviews.

 

The rise of AI has made gathering reviews even more important as now Chat-GPT and Google AI Mode are reading the content of your reviews and using what they learn about your moving company in responses to user questions. 

 

For example if a user asks Chat-GPT, “Find me moving companies that are great for families” the AI will look at your reviews to see what your previous clients say about how your team works with families. You want to do the best you can to make sure the message it takes back to its user is a positive one.

 

What are the four elements of reputation management?

Monitoring, responding, building and protecting. For moving companies specifically though, here’s why these four elements matter:

 

Monitoring: This means keeping track of how your moving company's brand is talked about online. This could be on social media, your Google reviews or on websites like Reddit.

 

Responding: How you respond to positive and negative feedback about your business is important. Always do your best to make up for bad experiences. AI models will look at the entire history of your company to determine if they should recommend you to users or not so bad reviews from 10 years ago can still hurt you today.

 

Building: This refers to the work of building more positive reviews. Building a strong brand is a difficult and long prospect. Especially when your moving company is young it is important to be doing consistent quality work that brings in a reliable source of positive reviews.

 

Protecting: Claim business profiles on as many websites as you can to make sure bad actors aren't masquerading as your business on different websites. Protect your brand by making sure the people who represent it reflect your moving company's values.

The Marketers for Movers Take

 

Positive online reviews are the lifeblood of your business in the digital age. We help our clients build reviews with our reputation management service. 

 

We’ll help you automate outreach for new reviews, create QR codes your movers can give to your customers on moving day that take them directly to your GBP via hyperlink and give you best practices for responding to both positive and negative reviews that will increase the chance your moving company is viewed positively by AI chatbots like Chat-GPT and Google Gemini.