Turning Negatives Into Positives

Building your brand is like life. You decide who you are by defining yourself (Step one, marketing circle). What you want people to think about how honest you are, or whether you have customer relation skills is part of that reputation. We can use all of the steps from The Marketing Circle to do this.

If you ever wondered what is all the hype about social media. Social Media Marketing is building your brand and your reputation.

Admit it, every time a bad review comes in you cringe thinking about the best way to handle it. You could just ignore it and tell yourself that you can’t please all of the people all of the time. Surely your customers could understand that. Except what if they can’t? How about this: Have you had that one question asked that you just can’t answer, and everyone else seems to have the same question? Again, do you just ignore it like it never happened? As hard as these questions are, they are important to care for quickly and with concern.

Scenarios such as these may be why many companies don’t utilize their social media marketing at all. It is hard–and time-consuming–to stay on top of what the community is thinking and saying about you. Our suggestion: Stop and turn that frown upside down! Your brand is what people think of you and your business. It is important to create a positive look in everything you do.

If you look at the 5 simple steps in social media marketing, you can easily turn every negative into a positive, while creating a business brand to be proud of.

Brand = Reputation

Bad Reviews

Nobody likes to get a bad review. They can be very hurtful, but if you think of them as educational material about your demographic and better customer communication flow then a bad review becomes a positive. Put yourself in the place of that patient that came into your clinic for the very first time and went to check-in, but nobody was there. Face it, it happens. Once they come back they walk back to their desk and start back up with their work as if they were never there. This is a perfect example of reviews that we see all the time on social media. How would you handle this? I would start with the issue at hand. Employee training is vital to company success. In this case, it’s ok to not be present at the front desk, but the first rule of customer service is acknowledging every single customer promptly. I’m not here to tell you how to train your employees, instead, I would like to talk about your online response. Using “The Marketing Circle” is a great way to use this as a marketing experience.

First: clarification. Clarify what your customer is saying to you with their bad review. Put the components together and write down what items you would like to acknowledge and what you can do to change them.

Second: Communicate. Respond to every single bad review in a very timely manner with a response that you would like to examine with the current customers’ complaints and anyone else who may have the same concerns. You will be respected more by responding, than ignoring.

Third: Educate and Inspire. This is a great time to ask your customers if their treatment was what they expected. Start a good conversation that keeps your customers engaged in your business on a personal level.

Fourth: Convert. At this point, you can bring this customer and many others back to the process of your service and expertise.

Fifth: Evaluate. Take the time to evaluate what went wrong, and how you benefited from the experience.

After you see the benefits of learning from reviews, remember this can go both ways. If you see a positive review, make sure to respond quickly and with a personalized message.

Controlling a Run Away Post

A run-away post is when you put something on social media and someone comes in with a negative post and runs with it.

These are my favorite negatives because you can use them as an opportunity to educate others about your product or service, become a part of the conversation, and leave with a bunch of new followers. You can be your influencer.

I remember a time when I was running a promo on bath remodels with stone. Someone chimed in and proceeded to explain all of the reasons why you shouldn’t install stone in your bathroom. How do you clean stone? A valid thought, but it doesn’t have to be, consider the only reason that it is difficult to clean your stone, is that it was not sealed properly, if at all. Good sealers come in wet-look, matte, natural, and anti-fungal, as well as an all-purpose stone cleaner. All you have to do is spay it down, let the soap run over the sealer and wipe it off. Without going into more detail, it’s no different than cleaning tile and grout.

Do you remember step 4? We just used step 4 to make an up-sell.

Your reputation is your brand, and your brand is how customers remember you. The negative will always be remembered more than the positive that counteracts it, so the process of turning negatives into positives helps others to leave you with a positive outlook and will not have a reason to tell others that their experience was bad enough to not come back.