Another great Cadence Connect event in the books! For our first Cadence Connect of 2022, we were lucky to welcome Co-Founder of Opiniion, Alex Bennett, as our sponsor and guest speaker to chat about all things reputation management! We also got to hear from Andrew Perry, President of Trellis Management to share his “Top 10” as it relates to reputation marketing.
It's no longer just your residents who are looking at your reputation, ratings, and reviews. Potential employees, business partners, vendors, investors, and owners are actively using brand reviews and reputation to make decisions as well. Marketers are finding themselves spending more time than ever before on content & campaigns to attract potential employees and retain top talent. Brand reputation at the company level has never been more important. This conversation was a good one, with many key takeaways and engaging collaboration. For those that missed it or would like to reference back, the recording of this event can be viewed here. Take a listen and let us know what you think! And as always, be sure to watch for information on the next Cadence Connect event!
Read on for a few of our key takeaways from this exciting session.
1. Go For the Ask!
In his "Top 10", Andrew shared the progression of his thought process when it came to reputation management & technology and how it could be better implemented at Trellis. He really saw the benefit of getting more feedback from ALL residents, as opposed to just the dissatisfied ones who were the majority of current reviews. And he didn't stop at just residents, he took a holistic approach to capturing feedback from employees, vendors, and even owner partners to reflect the corporate brand. He knew that by giving all the opportunity to share their experience, he would be able to identify what is going great, and also any organizational opportunities that needed to be addressed.
This effort was very successful, and the Trellis brand and online reputation greatly improved in less than a year. It turns out there were way more happy customers than dissatisfied ones, and brand ambassadors appreciated the opportunity to have an easy way to share their experience with Trellis.
Andrew’s biggest advice to us? Go for the ask!! If you don’t give ample opportunity to all who experience your organization to provide feedback, many times the feedback you do receive ends up being only the negative.
2. Keep it short & sweet.
A question we really dove into in this conversation was why people take the time to let you know when they are unhappy but not when they’re happy? The consensus from the group really was, if a feedback survey is straightforward and is quick to complete, recipients would be way more likely to participate and share their experience.
3. Your company’s digital presence MATTERS!
Whether you realize it or not, many people's first impression of your company and brand comes from your digital presence! Prospects look at your property reviews, and potential employees, owners, investors and even vendors look at your company reviews to get a better idea of what it would be like to work with you.
As an industry, we've been so focused on property specific reviews, we've neglected to capture the essence of the overarching corporate brand (also mostly impacted by just resident reviews).
Corporate brands are getting viewed on Google too, by residents, potential employees, vendors, and potentially owners looking for management partners. Does your corporate Google listing reflect your culture and your strengths? Competition for talent to fill job openings is fierce and candidates are definitely researching their options to gauge your employee satisfaction and culture. Glassdoor and Indeed provide prime opportunities to solicit current and past employee feedback and to market you culture. If you haven't looked at your presence on these resources yet, pause now and do so. Then, take a look at your peers in the industry - if you were a candidate, which company would you pursue? There's a lot of opportunity not being utilized on those pages.
4. Volume matters!
Recent data indicates that increasing your reputation score isn't the only thing Google likes about fresh reviews. Google loves the volume of new user generated content on your business listing. You'll likely see an increase in phone calls, direction clicks, and CTR on your listing from the increased volume, even if you already have a 4-star or above rating. That's an added *free* bonus when you commit to working on your reputation score.
5. Automation, anyone?!
It is clear that ratings & reviews are important now more than ever in consumer decision making. But manually managing reviews can be quite time consuming, as well as thinking of creative ways to solicit feedback, building surveys, etc.
Enter, Opiniion!
Opiniion integrates with the majority of PM platforms to gather real-time customer feedback for your business. Get resident feedback on maintenance requests, community events, move-in experiences - all automatically! The best part? Opiniion allows you to address potential negative feedback to give your team a chance to change the resident’s experience before posting it online. Opiniion gives your team the ability to provide excellent customer service, and you can even send polls to gauge interest in resident events.
And beyond just residents, Opiniion can also be used to solicit feedback from your employees, vendors, and business partners to build your company’s corporate brand online presence.
To schedule a demo with Opiniion, reach out to: alex@opiniion.com.