By Maria Elena Duron
It is midday and time for lunch. Thousands upon thousands of workers start filing out of their several stories tall office buildings in pursuit of one thing—lunch. Starting at their desks and continuing until they exit their buildings, they begin their hunt, searching for the latest, greatest name in food since McDonald’s declared the 24-hour breakfast to be a reality.
As a top search result they spot your name and tap it. The reviews are amazing, the prices fair, and, best of all, no one else at the office has tried you yet, giving this hungry coworker bragging rights so long as you live up to your reputation.
He loads the map and follows the directions like a mouse sniffing out the cheese in an industrialized maze. Finally, his locater says he’s standing right in front of your building. He looks up only to be greeted with the disappointing storefront of the city’s fifth Starbucks to open this year.
Thinking better of trying harder than he has to, he defaults back to his tried-and-true restaurant, never to come across your name again.
A Case of Misinformation
It’s an easy mistake to make. With so much typing in everyday life, it’s impossible to go a full day without a few errors making their way into documents and tasks. Though the weekly sales meeting notes aren’t really a big deal as far as punctuation is concerned, your online information is, more specifically, your review website information is.
If you’ve ever worked in a building that once housed a completely different business altogether, but your company retained that company’s phone number, you understand fully just how annoying it is to receive no less than three calls per day from people who just can’t quite grasp that when you answered the phone with your company’s name, you weren’t lying.
In truth, you really don’t know anything about a lot of these review sites until they actually become important enough to generate good traffic. This means total strangers obsessed with updating every possible database in existence wind up adding your company’s information, whether you want them to or not.
With your information free for anyone on the Internet to find, why wouldn’t you want the increased exposure? The problem arises when the seemingly good Samaritans mess up your information. It could be as unassuming as a missed digit in a street address, but the damage is already done. Suddenly, this other outlet of potential business ends up turning people off of your brand rather than growing it.
Well-Meaning Team Members and Enthusiastic Customers
As a company striving to make its mark on the world, you cannot let this happen. Nothing is more detrimental to a company’s image than mistakes that appear in important information, not trivial releases. Any kind of contact error serves as a one-two punch that winds up costing you untold business.
The first hit, of course, is that customers simply can’t find you and resort to the more convenient option of going to a competitor. The second is in regards to your search engine ranking. As it stands, the more information a search engine has on you, the friendlier it is toward pushing your name to the top.
The more times incorrect information is listed about you, the less aggregate information the search engine collectively has, resulting in a lower ranking. In a world where front page guarantees increased business, you cannot allow yourself to slip.
Correct Quickly
Fixing a problem is as easy as sending one person on a mission to find and change all errors they can find. It’s a task that should technically take no more than one day (unless, of course, you’ve been allowing this problem to get out of hand). They’ll search through the various popular and unpopular sites, sniffing out incorrect phone numbers or misspelled addresses.
On top of this, the corrector can also be given another task that would serve as a great means of expansion. While it’s assumed you already have a few business pages on the more popular review sites, make company profiles on the other, less popular choices. This will give you a leg up on your opponents and save you future hassle should those sites take off in popularity.
Though the lesson today is that perfection is what you should strive for, understand that mistakes will happen. The important thing is how quickly and effectively you correct them when they do.
Maria Elena Duron is Marketing Coach with Know, Like + Ignite. She works with restaurants, realtors, rejuvenators, and renegades to get more positive reviews, recommendations, referrals, and revenue. She received the Texas Governor’s Award for Excellence in Business and leads one of the top six Twitter chats in the world: #brandchat. Take the uncertainty out of how your personal and business brand delivers business–Get Your Checklist.
The post Are You Losing Customers Because of Business Misinformation? appeared first on AllBusiness.com
The post Are You Losing Customers Because of Business Misinformation? appeared first on AllBusiness.com.