In the digital landscape, online reviews play a critical role in brand awareness and overall perception. Increasing and protecting your agency’s reputation on the web is essential to your long-term success. We even wrote a blog post about how to generate and manage your online reviews to help you reach your growth goals.
Online reviews can be a great way to increase traffic to your website and boost your company’s visibility. But they can also provide a wealth of valuable information. The feedback you receive — whether positive or negative — can help you to determine whether you’re striking a chord with customers or you’re missing the mark entirely.
At Semify, we pay close attention to every online review we receive and make sure to engage with the people who took the time to share their thoughts on what we do well (and how we can improve). If you want to grow your agency, you’ll want to keep a close eye on your reviews and assess how you can start using them to your advantage. Whether you determine you need to focus more on customer service or you discover that your prices aren’t competitive enough, it might all start with delving into your online reviews.
We recently decided to examine what our customers were saying in their Semify reviews on the Google My Business platform. From there, we created a word cloud that we think really sums up what our agency is all about. Let’s take a closer look at the process we used, why you might want to follow it yourself, and what you can glean from your online reviews.
What is a Word Cloud?
Word clouds are a relatively simple concept, but they’re often overlooked in favor of data-heavy charts. But it’s important to remember that word clouds capture data, too. Instead of using numbers, however, word clouds essentially use reported feelings or written experiences to create a visual representation of data.
Word clouds may look appealing, but they serve an even greater purpose. Word clouds “pull” text-based information into an aesthetically pleasing image that contains different sizes of words. While all of the pictured words are important, those big and bold phrases are among the most significant. The bigger a word is within the word cloud visual, the more frequently it appears in the data. This can provide you with critical feedback into how customers (or even employees) feel about something — whether it’s a new product or the overall manner in which you operate your business.
How and Why Should You Use Word Clouds For Growing Your Business?
Word clouds can be a fantastic way to visually display data you’ve gathered. In some situations, customer feedback might go in one ear and out the other. But by creating a word cloud of your feedback, you can really assess whether you’re on the road to success.
For one thing, word clouds can be utilized to determine where you’ve gone wrong. If you’re getting a lot of feedback from customers that doesn’t align with your business goals or your values, a word cloud can drive home those issues in a manner that isn’t so easy to explain away. While you can easily dismiss the importance of a single review every now and then, it’s harder to argue that point when you see a repetitive piece of data staring at you in the face. Word clouds derived from online reviews can help you “turn over rocks and look at the squiggly things,” to borrow a concept outlined in Good to Great. By confronting the brutal facts about your business, you can start to make the changes you need to improve the customer experience.
Creating a word cloud from online reviews can also provide you with more opportunities to connect directly with your customers. Whether or not you actually replied to those reviews in the past, you’ll have a chance to touch base with current and former clients about their feedback. If you can show that you’ve implemented necessary changes and are excited to share that with the people closest to your business, you can show how much you care about what they have to say. That, in turn, can go a long way in improving your brand perception and building customer trust or loyalty.
In many ways, word clouds can be a highly effective tool for business owners to address underlying issues. But in some cases, they might actually provide confirmation that you’re on the right path. In pulling data from your online reviews, word clouds can illustrate whether your customers are seeing your values in action. If the words you see in this visual representation largely align with the experience you’re trying to create for your customers, that feedback can let you know that you’re achieving your goals. Having this information at your fingertips can tell you that your corporate values are coming through loud and clear — and that they’re resonating with your customers. Ultimately, that means you’re doing business with the right people.
There are many different ways you can use word clouds in the pursuit of business growth. In addition to pulling data from your online reviews, you can create word clouds from employee or customer surveys, utilize popular web search or blog post data to develop a word cloud for SEO, or turn your brand identity and mission statement into a word cloud that can guide your team.
While word clouds aren’t ideal for more complex, number-driven data sets or for data with little context, they can be an impressively effective way to facilitate an emotional connection to your customers, your employees, and your overall business goals.
How Did We Create Our GMB Word Cloud?
The way in which we created our word cloud here was relatively simple. We first combed through 61 Semify reviews on the Google My Business platform for adjectives that customers used to describe our agency or their experience with us. We then plugged these adjectives into an Excel spreadsheet and organized them in alphabetical order. For phrases that contained two or three words, we used dashes in between.
Then, we put that data into a word cloud generator, which basically scans the text and develops a visual representation of the data for you. Depending on how frequently a word is repeated, the word will appear larger or smaller in the final product. Many word cloud generators will allow you to have control over how the graphic is displayed, with different layouts, color schemes, and font to choose from.
After our word cloud was created, we shared it with our team at our weekly Operational Excellence meeting so that we could reflect on what our customers are saying. Since one of our main objectives is to “get the customer in the room,” this was a great way to delve into their feedback and assess their overall experience with us.
Which Values Stand Out in Our Review Word Cloud?
In creating our word cloud through our GMB Semify reviews, we discovered that our brand personality is really coming through to our customers. The main takeaway was that the word cloud aligned very well with our values and our overall brand identity, as outlined below:
While there’s always more work to do here, it’s crucial to know that the things we care about are resonating with our customers and shaping their experience with us. In our analysis of Semify reviews, several words and phrases were repeated by different customers, including:
- Professional
- Helpful
- Great Communication
- Teamwork
- Dedicated
- Above and Beyond
- Support
- Prompt
- Growth
These words, among many others that were included in GMB Semify reviews from our customers, are exactly the values we want to live by. Not only do we want to provide stellar results for our clients, but we want to build relationships with them and help them grow their businesses. We’re thrilled to know that our customers see and respond to what we’re all about — and we want all of our partners to feel the same way about their experience with us.
How Can You Generate Reviews That Highlight Your Business Values?
You might already have gotten some reviews for your business, especially if you’ve implemented some of the tips we shared on how to generate online reviews for your agency. But just because you’re getting some customer reviews doesn’t necessarily mean that this feedback will speak to your corporate values.
Some customers will care only about their results — and if your business personality aligns with that, maybe that’s to your benefit. But if you really want to facilitate meaningful solutions for (and create long-term partnerships with) your clients, it might be worth exploring something a bit deeper.
Establishing your brand values is a critical part of building your business. These values will guide and shape your organization; they should be at the heart of every decision you make and they tell you (and others) who you are. If you want to compete in a crowded marketplace, you’ll need to solidify your brand values and make them an enduring part of the conversation.
It’s clear to us that our customers who left reviews have a clear understanding of our brand, whether or not they consciously realize it. We’ve made a point to highlight our culture and our dedication to the growth of our partners while taking a hands-on approach to customer service. We aim to respond quickly to concerns and prioritize communication, both internally and externally. A professional-yet-approachable team, we want to be down-to-earth while delivering beyond expectations.
Ultimately, we believe that ensuring our values are ever-present in our customer interactions is key. Not only does this effectively communicate who we are, but it also helps us attract the kinds of clients we want to work with.
As Simon Sinek says in Start With Why, “The goal of business should not be to do business with anyone who simply wants what you have. It should be to focus on the people who believe what you believe… When we are selective about doing business only with those who believe in our WHY, trust emerges.”
Judging from the Semify reviews we analyzed via our Google My Business platform, it’s clear that we have a number of partners who believe in our values and our “why.” When you lead with those values and use them as your guide, you’re going to attract others who believe in them, too. That lays the foundation for reviews like these that really encapsulate the experience you provide and what makes you different from your competitors.
If these values resonate with you, let’s talk about how we can grow together. For more information on joining our white label SEO program, get in touch with our team today.
