A larger part of what businesses do today revolves around web scraping as it has several applications, including helping to monitor brands, their competition, prices, and the entire market.
Brand reputation monitoring and protection often includes review monitoring which entails everything from observing what the customers are saying to compile their comments, reviews, and discussions across several platforms.
Review monitoring results are often used to respond appropriately to customers’ concerns, properly manage the brand’s reputation, and ensure a better relationship with customers. By itself, however, the process can be time-consuming and with several bottlenecks, including geo-restrictions.
Briefly, we will consider what this review monitoring is, why it is crucial for businesses, and the challenges and possible solutions.
What is Review Monitoring?
Review monitoring is a strategy for brand and reputation management and involves the processes used for monitoring reviews about a brand on different platforms, servers, websites, and search engines. The process is best automated to eliminate the stress that comes with gathering a large amount of data regularly.
Review monitoring is essential because it covers platforms worldwide so that you can stay on the same page with your customers wherever your brand is being discussed. It helps by delivering a first-grasp on all negative and positive reviews, thereby giving you the chance to address them early enough.
Amongst the several benefits of review, monitoring is how it allows you to forestall irreversible damage to your brand name or product precisely and in a less strenuous approach.
Why Is Review Monitoring Crucial?
We explained some reasons why review monitoring is so crucial for businesses today below:
1. Management Of Brand Reputation
You can’t always get positive reviews, and there are many times when people will leave very terrible comments about your products or services. But the goal is always to ensure that these negative reviews get noticed and addressed in time before damaging your brand reputation online. Such an approach to brand reputation management is only effectively achievable using review monitoring.
2. Better Customer Relationships
Review monitoring goes beyond simply addressing comments; it also stretches into the realm of answering any concerns customers may have. And since customers often tend to be positively influenced when their concerns are addressed, this helps strengthen the relationship between them and your brand.
3. Increased Sales And Revenue
Every business owner knows that better relations with customers automatically translate into more sales. The customers whose concerns you address become more loyal and buy more from your brand.
Secondly, new customers often always check reviews before making a decision. Seeing how well you address your old customers’ concerns is enough to attract new customers to you.
All these will lead to better sales and increased revenue for your company.
4. Competitive Advantage
Having all the above advantages puts you at the top of the market and way ahead of your competition. It is also clear that a great brand reputation, a good customer relationship, and improved sales and revenue will help any brand compete better in the global market.
Main Challenges of Review Monitoring
As beneficial as review monitoring is, it is not an easy task and comes with several challenges, including the following:
1. IP Blocking
The first and very common challenge that most companies encounter when monitoring reviews is that their IPs get blocked. This usually occurs after consecutive operations with the same IP, and since review monitoring is repetitive and continuous, it is always likely that this blocking will occur.
2. Geo-Restriction
Geo-restriction occurs when a brand from a certain region is denied access to content like reviews on certain servers because of their physical location. It is easy to tell a brand’s actual location by reading their IP address information. And when this restriction occurs, it always deprives the affected brand of the chance to look out for themselves in certain quarters.
3. Speed
Review monitoring doesn’t only need to cover several platforms, but it also needs to do it quickly. This is because the longer negative reviews linger unaddressed, the more damage it does to the brand.
Hence this requires a very fast internet connection at all times, which can easily become a problem, especially for businesses that reside in areas with poor internet connections.
Proxy as a Possible Solution For These Challenges
Proxies are the perfect solution for handling the challenges of review monitoring as they can very easily eliminate all the above challenges in a single sweep.
Proper proxies are designed with multiple IPs, which they can switch and rotate randomly to prevent IP blocking. Also, proxies usually come with multiple locations, and a user can pick another location to evade geo-restriction regardless of where they stay. For instance, using a Russian proxy, one could pick Russia as their location and collect the reviews they need even if they live in some forbidden location. If this is your case and you would like to collect customer reviews in reo-restricted locations effortlessly, read more about Russia proxy.
Lastly, proxies are very fast, taking requests forth and returning results faster than you could achieve with a regular network.
Conclusion
Review monitoring can bring you a fortune and grow your business more quickly but ignoring it can cause damages significant enough to lead to the closure of any business.
Some challenges are associated with this exercise, however, but none that the use of a proper proxy cannot help mitigate.
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