How to improve your brand reputation for your business

Welcome to Boostly Podcast Season 11 Episode 61. This is a recap of my interview with Hostfully where I talked about how to improve your brand reputation.

Here's the audio for this episode:

Here's the video for this episode:

Timestamp

00:00 Start
01:30 Why online reputation is important
02:10 One tip to improve your brand reputation
03:00 Guests look for social proof
04:00 How to get reviews

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Transcript from the Episode

We're in an industry, whether we like it or not that we live and die by our reviews. And obviously, every single person who is tuning into this is an amazing host, and you get the best experience every single time and you know, you've got fantastic reviews. The problem is, is that we don't showcase them enough, specifically on your website.

One tip to improve your brand reputation

So one thing that I recommend to improve your brand reputation is there's a couple of really cool tools. One is called Repuso. And what this tool does, and there's another one coming out, which is specifically for hospitality. I think it's called reviews. But please do check it out. So anyway, what you can do with these kind of tools, is it gathers all of your reviews coming from Airbnb, from your PMS, from Google, from Facebook, from from anywhere on the internet. And what it does is it clusters it all together. And you can set a filter system. So you can say, Well, I don't want my one star review showing up. But I you know, I want my four and five star reviews. So you can set the filter. So say four stars. And what it does is it updates it in real time. So whenever you get a new review come in, it updates and shows it on your website. And again, this is really powerful, because one of the main reasons why people leave your website is because they're looking for that social proof.

Guests look for social proof

There was an insane stat last year and it hasn't been updated since but 92% of guests will look for some form of social proof before making that booking. And again, if you want to increase your direct bookings if you want to get more people onto your website and turn lookers into bookers, you can box off so many of the potential obstacles that are going for our guests' mind. But if you're not having reviews and real-time reviews on your website, then you're missing out on improving your reputation. And the most common thing that I see, unfortunately, is that a host will go in, copy and paste a review that they found online and just bang it on their website, so to speak. And that just looks fake. You know, as honest as you may be, it literally looks fake. So if you can have it, where it looks real, where it's working in real time, they can have a date on there, they can see where it's come from. It's super powerful. And again, the cool thing about Repuso, I believe still is only $9 a month. So return on investment-wise is massive. And again, it just is always working in the background. It works automatically.

How to get reviews

But again, how can you get reviews? How can you get bookings now? We both know, Danny from optimize your b&b very well, he, I think pretty much pioneered this in his book and he talks about it a lot. It's all about the psychological aspect. But he basically talks about implementing that five-star service into your guests head right from the very beginning, because they don't really know what a five-star stay is. So if you say to them, hey, David, thank you very much. I'm really looking forward to giving you a five-star experience when you come and stay at our property, you start implementing that in and obviously, you've got to back it up, you can't say you're going to get a five star, and they walk into a dog spot to speak. But you know, you're obviously everybody in here has got fantastic properties. That's what about saying, you've got to start telling them that and then, you know, given the good service, and then ask for a review, that's really key. Don't be timid. Don't be you know, don't be shy, shy kids don't get sweets. Ask for that review. Don't ask for a five-star review. But just ask for a review. One of the ways that we, our family business went from zero visibility on TripAdvisor to the Top 3 in the space of 18 months, and this is when TripAdvisor was actually relevant. This is back in 2011 2012. But they were in 2012. That was like the one place you go for reviews. And the way that we got literally from nowhere to the Top 3 in such a short space of time, is by asking, and what we did on the back of every door, because we had a bed and breakfast and rental accommodation. On the back of every door in the b&b we had a little laminate and it basically said leave us a review on TripAdvisor. We even had a little QR code. You know, we're ahead of our time because phones back in 2013 2012 was shocking compared to what they are now. QR codes are everywhere. But we had a little QR code. When they scanned it. It took him straight to TripAdvisor to leave a review and we were just always asking, we're just always subconsciously putting it into into the guests mind. And if you ask you get and you combine that with everything else that we've said it'll just really help and reap rewards in your reputation.

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