As a marketing agency, managing online reviews for your clients is essential for building and maintaining their online reputation. However, manually handling review management can be a time-consuming and often overwhelming task. The good news is that automation can make this process much more efficient and effective, allowing you to provide exceptional service to your clients while streamlining your own operations. Get started with these six steps to automate review management for your clients.

1. Select a Review Management Tool

Start by using a single platform to manage all of your clients’ reviews in one place. This will make it easier to keep track of which reviews have been responded to and which still need attention. There are many review management platforms available that can integrate with popular review sites, such as Google, Yelp, and Facebook. — including Grade.us.

2. Automatically Generate Reviews

Local businesses need reviews. But customers are less likely to leave reviews if the process is complicated or involves too many steps. 

With an automated review generation tool, you can email or text your clients’ customers for reviews. Customers see a landing page with the request. In the request, they get multiple review site options where they can leave a review or rating. They choose what they want and post the review or rating. You keep the review funnel going. It’s as simple as that.

3. Set Up Monitoring Alerts 

If you don’t know when reviews come in, you’ll be slow to respond or fail to respond at all. Potential customers searching for local businesses notice these things—for better or worse. Best practices say you should respond to a review within 24-48 hours.

With automated review monitoring, you can monitor reviews across a wide variety of industries and sites. The moment a new review shows up, you get alerted by email. You can also set it up so your clients are notified as well. Once notified, you can respond to any review—positive or negative—in a timely manner. This will show your clients that you are actively monitoring their online reputation.

4. Use Templated Responses to Respond Quickly

Create pre-written response templates for common review scenarios, such as thanking a customer for a positive review or addressing a negative review. This will save time and ensure your responses are consistent across all clients.

5. Automatically Share Reviews

What good is a review if no one sees it? Reviews are a powerful marketing tool that helps people decide to do business with your clients, but those reviews must be visible.

An automated review-sharing process allows you to post customer reviews on your clients’ websites and automatically publish them on their social media profiles on Facebook, Instagram, and others. Sharing your clients’ reviews widely extends their reach and visibility, and enables your clients to capitalize on the positive things people say about them. If you’re also managing a comprehensive social media strategy for your clients, sharing reviews can be a key part of it, providing additional value. 

Reviews are a powerful type of social proof that leads to higher conversion rates on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

6. Automate Reporting

If you’re running a review campaign, you need to know if it’s working. Review management services aren’t complete without the ability to track, measure, and report on review progress.

Automated review tracking shows how your review efforts are progressing—if they’re driving new reviews and ratings and improving review performance across all relevant review sites. You can set up reports to be generated daily, weekly, or monthly. Reports can capture the specific information you want to see, so you know what’s working and what might need adjustment.

Consider White-label Review Management

To truly leverage automated review management services, you need to be able to sell and market the software as your own.

Having an automated, one-stop platform enables you to easily white-label and resell the service to your clients. You can customize it to match the look and feel of your agency’s brand, using your logo and agency domain. What your clients see is a seamless, sophisticated platform that looks like yours in every way. Or you can further customize it to an individual client or campaign. You then set your own pricing, terms, and contracts to maximize profit. Your clients get comprehensive review management and support in one place and on one system, and don’t need to look or buy elsewhere.