Financial services providers, including investment firms and CPAs, rely heavily on word-of-mouth marketing to grow their businesses. When your clients are satisfied with the services you provide, they will tell their friends, family, and co-workers, and this can lead to new business. Yet word-of-mouth is just one way your business can grow with the help of happy customers. Online reviews for CPAs are another. Yet, having online reviews is not sufficient. For your financial services company to grow through reviews, you need to manage them well. Here’s how you can do that.
How to Manage Online Reviews for CPAs and Financial Services Providers
If you work on online reputation management, you must manage your reviews, know what is being said and where, and have a plan for responding to those reviews. These steps will help you do both.
Step 1: Generate Reviews
Before you can manage reviews, you must have some. People who are upset or angry with a business are often going to leave reviews, but those aren’t the ones that help your business grow. For that, you need positive reviews, and sometimes you have to work a little harder to get those.
The best way to get positive reviews is to go above and beyond for your customers. If you truly exceed expectations, they will likely leave a good review on their own. The other way to generate positive reviews is to ask for them. The more clients you request reviews from, in theory, the better your online reputation will be. Create automated marketing systems that automatically request reviews from your clients through email and text marketing to keep the process in their minds. You can even incentivize people to leave reviews, which may generate more positive ones.
Step 2: Find Your Reviews
One of the challenges of review management for CPAs is the vast number of review sites out there to monitor and manage. While some, like Google, are obvious, others may be less so, but can still impact your reputation.
Using review management software for investment companies and other financial services providers will make monitoring and managing these reviews much simpler. You can set up alerts for mentions of your business, which allows you to find it even if the review is not on one of the top review platforms. The right program, such as the review management system built into Surefire Local, can put all of your reviews in one convenient place so you can monitor them easily.
Step 3: Manage Reviews
CPA online reviews are not something you should just request once and consider it finished. You need to manage them effectively for them to work well as a marketing tool. Typically, managing reviews means responding to them effectively.
General Tips for Responding to Reviews
When responding to reviews, make sure you respond to all of them in a personal way. Don’t have a generic response you use every time, but instead pull information from the review to create a custom response.
In addition, make sure you respond quickly. Timely review responses will ensure you don’t forget the services you provided and will also make your business look like one that cares.
Interacting with Positive Reviews
For positive reviews, don’t just sit back and assume all will be well because you have positive reviews. You can utilize these to your advantage by interacting with and responding to them. When you do, consider these strategies:
- Incorporate your target keywords – If you use your keywords in your response to the positive reviews, you can support your other online marketing goals to boost your search engine visibility.
- Highlight a service – Your reviewer may not call out the service they received, but you can highlight it in your response.
- Thank them – Show that you are a business worth working with by thanking them for their review.
Interacting with Negative Reviews
So, what should you do if you get a negative review? While it’s tempting to ignore these, especially if they seem unfounded, or to become defensive and defend your business, neither of these is your best choice. Negative reviews are to be expected because any financial services business that’s active and working with clients is going to have an unsatisfied client from time to time. However, if you ignore them, negative reviews will hurt your business. Many potential clients will walk away if they see a number of negative reviews.
Instead of ignoring them, use them as a chance to show that your firm is, in fact, run by humans. These strategies can effectively deal with those negative reviews and transform them into a potential opportunity to attract new clients.
- Respectfully call out untruths – If the dissatisfied client states things that did not happen, you can respectfully call them out.
- Apologize for mistakes – If something legitimate happens to make the client unsatisfied with your services, apologize and outline the steps you will take to make it right.
- Make amends – While it may not win you back your unhappy client, offer an option to make amends. Even if they don’t take it, it will show other people that you are a firm that values its clients and wants to provide exceptional service to them.
- Don’t get offensive – It can be tempting to get defensive with a difficult client who leaves a negative review, but avoid this temptation. Use your response to provide context without being defensive. Those who are looking for a financial services provider in earnest will see the difference.
- Grow from your mistakes – Instead of viewing negative reviews as an attack against your firm, view them as an opportunity to learn and grow. If there’s an area of improvement to make, go ahead and make it.
Step 5: Use Your Reviews
Finally, use your reviews to your advantage. You can highlight positive reviews on your pages, including social media and your website, to show potential clients the solid financial services you provide. You can also print them on marketing materials you use offline. Let your potential clients know if you have a particularly high “star” rating on any review platform.
Review Management for Financial Services Providers Is Easier with Surefire Local
Tracking, responding to, and managing your online reviews can be time-consuming. Surefire Local makes it easier with streamlined processes that help you generate more reviews and manage them when they come in. Surefire Local is the top online review management software for CPAs, accountants, and investment firms, with a focus on the specific needs of local service-based businesses.
Request Reviews Automatically
Asking your clients to review you can be difficult, but you need those reviews if you’re going to grow your business effectively. Surefire Local can send review requests, highlighting satisfied customers specifically, to help you grow a solid online reputation. These review requests, sent by text or email, give clients a simple, one-click option to leave reviews, increasing the likelihood that they will.
See Reviews in One Place
Surefire Local connects you with the top review platforms, including places like LinkedIn, Google, and Facebook, and then consolidates your reviews from those places into one convenient location. You can log into our platform and see them all in one spot. You can set up alerts that will help you notice negative trends if they develop or highlight particularly excellent reviews.
Write Your Responses
With all of your reviews in one place, you can quickly write and post your responses, and Surefire Local lets you do so without logging out of the platform. This means you can respond quickly without having to log into multiple platforms. We will post it for you, and all you have to do is write a personalized response to the review.
Integrate Review Management with Other Online Marketing Tools
Finally, once you have a handle on your online reputation management, integrate it with your other online marketing tools. When your reviews align with your social media and SEO, they will be valuable tools in your marketing toolbox. Because Surefire Local puts all of those tools into one convenient toolbox and lets you manage them in one place, you can implement these tools easily.
If you want to learn more about Surefire Local and how it can help you market your business effectively, reach out to our team to schedule a demo of our software.