The bottom line is, in a highly competitive marketplace, you want to have more positive reviews than your competition. Let Us Respond’s quick review responses and easy-to-use platform is helping us improve and grow our clients’ reputation.
– Jay Moreno, Red Flame Media
We recently spoke to Jay, founder of Red Flame Media, about the importance of review response management and why he chooses to work with Let Us Respond. Read his thoughts below!
What challenges did your company experience that Let Us Respond helped solve?
We consider reviews and review responses a really important part of marketing. Before we found Let Us Respond, we didn’t have a single platform where we could access all the reviews in one place for multiple customers [like Trip Advisor, Yelp and Google Business Profile]. When you’re trying to manage multiple businesses, you’re logging in to multiple review platforms constantly with just one client. Imagine having several clients! It was hard to keep track of all the profiles for the different businesses we work with, and it was tough to respond quickly to reviews.
People want to be heard and it’s so important to not just respond with an appropriate response, but also in a timely manner. If you can’t respond initially, at a minimum respond and let them know someone is taking action.
Put yourself in the shoes of someone that has had a really bad experience at a restaurant. You will likely want to get online and vent a little and share your experience. Once done, if you don’t get a response, chances are it will make you feel like you have not been heard. Often, this escalates the issue. A one star review on one site now ends up being a “Don’t Recommend” on Facebook, and if it was a particularly bad experience that review could end up on multiple review sites.
We do a lot of work helping our clients get positive exposure online. The internet is very peer-oriented these days. People are constantly checking reviews before going to restaurants, so it’s extremely important your reputation stays positive.
We work with small to medium-sized businesses. You will find a lot of other digital marketing companies skilled specifically in one field or another (for example just SEO or website design), but these things can take a long time to start generating business leads. What sets us apart is we don’t focus all our attention on just one aspect of digital marketing like a great-looking website or just SEO; we focus on getting our customers new leads and business through multiple means from day one, including conversion rate optimization, social media and traditional marketing campaigns — web design and SEO are just the tip of the iceberg.
I’ve worked with multiple marketing companies and felt that a lot of focus was specifically on SEO or just the website whereas really the main aspect that is often overlooked is that personal connection and generating leads. Just because you are on page one of Google doesn’t guarantee you leads.
What made you realize using a review response management service like Let Us Respond would help your company?
I’ve learned replying to reviews helps with your overall reputation. Sometimes I’ve seen negative reviewers adjust their reviews to be more positive after receiving a great reply.
The bottom line is that in a highly competitive marketplace, you want to have more positive reviews than your competition. Additionally, when you pay attention to your reviews, you can identify common problems and address them as need be with your client.
The biggest thing for me is putting yourself in the reviewer’s shoes. If you go to San Antonio and you go to the River Walk, and there’s only a restaurant that has two stars and one with five stars — which one are you going to go to?
I’ve always believed replying to reviews is essential. There are still a lot of companies not responding or using canned, automatic responses which don’t have that personal connection. You don’t want the same response over and over. You should also be thanking people as well for positive reviews. That’s something Let Us Respond does well.
What results have you seen since you began working with Let Us Respond?
One thing that stands out is how review monitoring helps us help our clients improve their business’s reputation. Recently, a server’s name kept coming up (positively) in reviews, so we did a post about her on social media and that post got a great response and blew up virally. On the other side of the coin, if people complain multiple times about something, say that the music is too loud, we can inform our client and they address that.
What we do in addition to responding to reviews is we run a report every week and give those to the client. We actually go through and highlight all the bad reviews and put similarities into a report. We will generate a review score system on Facebook, Yelp and Trip Advisor. That helps our clients understand what their customer feedback is like.
Let Us Respond’s service ensures we aren’t missing reviews. Now all the reviews have an initial response (from Let Us Respond) that our team can also edit as needed. The service certainly saves us time.
Why did you ultimately choose Let Us Respond?
I’m very analytical and I researched and compared a number of different companies. I called in one day and spoke to Tony and I liked what he had to say. I said, ‘okay, let’s give you guys a try.’ The price point has been great and the service has been great, too. The range of third-party platforms you engage with, the ability to customize our responses and the fact that your platform is easy to use — this all helped my decision to continue working with you.
What is the one big reason you would recommend us?
Definitely customer service. Everyone has been great!
About Red Flame Media
Red Flame Media delivers a digital marketing strategy that helps you grow and allows you to focus on what you do best… Running Your Business. We love what we do and we love helping others succeed at what they love to do too. There is nothing more to it — it’s that simple!
About Jay Moreno
Jay Moreno is happily married with three children. He lives in San Antonio, Texas, has 25+ years of marketing experience and is the founder of Red Flame Media.