One thing the Internet isn’t lacking is places for people to speak their minds about your dealership. From consumer-focused review sites like Yelp to automotive-specific sites like DealerRater (not to mention plain old social media), there are plenty of opportunities for customers to cement your business’s online reputation—or to sink it.
So where does that leave you when it comes to managing your reputation? That’s the question 3 Birds is here to answer.
The real value of online reputation
Do you know just how much an online review is worth? That value goes up considerably when you consider that 80 percent of people will change their mind about a business after reading unmanaged negative reviews (Cone, Inc. Online Influence Trend Tracker).
For a 28-store dealer group with 5,212 visits in one month, that means over 4,100 prospects potentially lost due to bad reviews—on a single site alone. When you do the math and multiply this number by what you pay for a third-party lead or, worse yet, your PVR, that is a lot of potential lost revenue.
The path to accumulating balanced, organic positive reviews
With these numbers in mind, it’s clear that you can’t afford to focus on only one or two sites. However, the other extreme is just as costly. Some companies will charge you to monitor literally hundreds of review sites, which means spending valuable time and money on a large number of sites that may never come up in user searches (this especially applies to directory listings).
The truth is that dealers can't just ignore certain review sites because they present challenges or haven't paid off in the past. That's why 3 Birds focuses on the 10-12 most-trafficked review sites (depending on region), including Yelp, Google+, CitySearch, and Cars.com. Our customizable review-building strategy directs satisfied customers to a varied distribution of these sites so that your positive rating grows on each. Meanwhile, customer concerns are directed to your dealership team before impacting CSI scores and public online reputation.
See real results from your online reputation
Continued attention to online reputation reaps big rewards. Dealers with an average star rating of 4 or higher experience a 21 percent higher year-over-year sales increase than dealers rated 2 or lower (IHS Automotive Provides Proof That Positive Consumer Reviews Drive Business). In addition, stores participating in the 3 Birds Dealer Digital Evaluation who improved their online reputation the most saw an increased web traffic of 20 percent.
As you might guess from the numbers above, it doesn’t take long to start seeing the results from the 3 Birds approach to online reputation management. The sooner you start accumulating positive reviews, the sooner you can start seeing more customers and more sales each month.
