Review management is a crucial part of brand marketing efforts to maintain brand reputation & build trust among your prospects.
However, managing reviews for businesses with multiple locations, such as franchise models, is challenging, time-consuming, as well as requires minute observation & swift action. Besides, the increasing trend of trolls & spam comments makes the process even more arduous.
Fortunately, a well-designed & well-executed strategy carried out with the help of the right tools can aid in streamlining multi location review management. That's exactly what we will learn in this article!
Multi-location Google Review Management Concepts
Multi-location denotes a corporate office with different franchise locations or a business with stores in multiple locations. Following are two approaches for the multi-location Google review management concepts. To get the third approach, you can blend both of these approaches:
Corporate Management Of Google Reviews
The first approach to the Google review management concepts for multiple locations is to build the corporate office managing all the reviews. Usually, corporate offices of a franchise or multi-location business consist of a customer service team who efficiently manages reviews.
Specialized workforces such as marketing or a customer service team can have impactful communication with customers, control brand image & send swift responses. Analyzing Google business reviews becomes easy as all are managed by one department.
However, a corporate team managing reviews for multi-location has specific cons. Sometimes since the corporate group is unaware of the ground scenarios for each location, there may be errors of judgment.
To get to the root of the incident, the team has to research in-depth & prepare a plan accordingly to handle the situation, which is time-consuming. A location manager can solve this problem immediately without leading to any communication crisis.
Individual Management Of Google Reviews
The next approach of the Google review management concepts is to have a location manager.
Though the corporate office sends certain strategies to manage Google reviews for business, the location manager is the initial point of contact to monitor & respond to reviews.
The pros of this approach are that location managers can respond to feedback instantly & quickly correct any mistakes or miscommunications, which otherwise would have hampered the brand's reputation.
For instance, suppose your company's franchise model has 100 stores in different locations and 90 have excellent online reviews, but 10 have poor reviews. The poorly reviewed ones may not be aligned with your online review management strategy, but they may continue to stand out & become the definition of your brand. Here, the risk of brand dilution arises.
Keeping a location manager is a good approach in such a scenario as you can get all filed data quickly, work on your strategy & respond to the negative reviews.
Suggested Read: 10 Ways To Build A Better Reputation Online With Reviews
How To Set Up Google My Business For Multiple Locations?
The best way to manage Google reviews for multiple locations is to create a business account with location management functionality.
To add a second location or multiple business locations, your business must verify a Google My Business listing claim & each of the locations must be individually edited & updated.
Let's move to the steps to set up Google My Business for multiple locations:
How To Add Up To 9 Locations In Your Google My Business Page?
Google allows users to manage reviews & create multiple locations accounts from one Google My Business listing using a location group.
Location groups are like shared folders that let you securely share the management of your location with your teammates. You also can run location-based Google Maps marketing campaigns or Google ad campaigns.
Before creating a location group, ensure that you are using less than 10 locations only. Let's learn to check out the steps on how to create a location group:
Step 1: Sign in to Google My Business & click on Manage now.
Step 2: Click the “Add business” drop-down menu from the top right corner of the dashboard.
Step 3: Click “Add single business” from the drop-down menu. Add the location information & click Done.
Step 4: Verify each GMB listing either by mail/postcard, email or phone.
How To Add More Than 9 Locations In Your Google My Business Page?
If you are a franchise or a business with more than nine business locations, adding the business manually will be a time-consuming process. Google aids users with the bulk location uploading tool using the following steps:
Step 1: Sign in to Google My Business & click on Manage now.
Step 2: Click the “Add business” drop-down menu from the top right corner of the dashboard.
Step 3: Click “Import Businesses” from the drop-down menu. A pop-up window will appear with instructions for multiple resources managing & importing.
Step 4: Click on “Download the templates.”
Step 5: Enter the required information for all your locations. Upload the file to your account by clicking on “Select File.”
Note: If any data is missing, you'll receive an alert, 'Your File Is Empty.'
Step 6: Click on the verification menu from the left menu of your GMB dashboard. Click “Chain” and add details in the verification form.
The entire verification process can take up to one week. If you want to change location details, download the table, do the modification & upload it again.
Congrats !! Now, you are all set for Google business review management for multiple locations!!
How To Manage Multiple Business Location Reviews Manually On Google My Business?
Here’s how you can manage Google reviews for multiple locations from your GMB dashboard after your Business Profile is verified:
Step 1: Go to Google My Business and sign in.
Step 2: Click Manage reviews from the left menu.
Step 3: Choose a location group.
Step 4: When you find a review you would like to reply to, click Reply.
Step 5: Write your response and click Post to reply.
Every time you want to respond to a review from a different location group, you will have to repeat the same process from Step 3 onwards.
It’s doable, but it has some consequences. Here’s why.
What Are The Cons Of Managing Multi-location Google Reviews Manually?
- Logging into each location group separately for responding to a review is time-consuming.
- If different team members manage each location group, it can be a pain in the neck to find the login details when the responsible person for the particular location group is out of reach.
- If the team member responsible for one location is not available, then responding to reviews of that location group will be delayed, hampering your brand reputation.
- Suppose you spread the login information throughout your organization. Whenever a person leaves your organization, you will have to reset the password due to security concerns. This will cause chaos in your organization about the new login information.
- You need to manually login into each location group to see if a new review has arrived in your inbox.
- There is no provision to save response when replying to reviews of similar categories. Every time a reply has to be typed manually, even if it's templated. This can also create inconsistency in your brand’s communication.
So, what’s the solution here? You can and should automate your GMB review management with Google review management software.
How To Manage Google Reviews For Multiple Locations Automatically?
Online reputation management tools like Statusbrew are your best companion here. They help you not just automate review management but also the review generation process and do a lot more from the same dashboard.
Whether you have a single-location business or a franchisee chain with 1000+ stores in different locations, Statusbrew will help you to manage reviews for all your locations & of different language from a single dashboard.
When managing Google reviews with multiple teams, you can eliminate the need to share passwords and preserve the security of your GMB profiles with Statusbrew's SSO sign-in process.
Statusbrew allows you to add multiple GMB profiles in one unified dashboard.
Managing Multi-location Google Reviews
It even lets you keep track of reviews received across different GMB locations to quickly reply to them and nurture feelings of trust and loyalty among your customers.
You can even strategize how to respond to reviews. You can save the most common type of responses (with placeholders for customer names) and quickly respond to your customers by selecting the most appropriate one and changing it as per the situation.
Statusbrew’s Engage Inbox allows you to create an inbox with a filter of Google Reviews based on their star ratings.
You can then share specific View access with specific team members to mitigate compliance issues.
You will get real-time notifications on mobile and desktop for every review received. You can then respond with brand-verified answers directly from your Engage Inbox.
Statusbrew further supports Google My Business questions for all your multiple locations Google business listings.
Statusbrew’s advanced comment moderation rule assists you in closing or snoozing a conversation based on priority or marking it as spam.
Analyzing Audience With GMB Report
Statusbrew's in-depth reporting feature allows organizations to track their GMB performance & assess the local consumer's behavior with flexibility. It allows you to visualize your data in a way that makes the most sense to you.
Here are the key features of Statusbrew reporting:
- With several ready-made reporting templates, you can save time and prepare instant reports with a few clicks.
- Using widgets, you can build your own reports with endless customization options.
- Every widget and report can be exported in a CSV or PDF format.
- Schedule reports to arrive in emails as per your preferred time.
- Create shareable dynamic report links to share reports with people without sharing access to your dashboard.
Understanding Customer Behavior
Do you want to understand how your customers feel about your business without asking them directly?
Statusbrew’s AI sentiment analysis feature helps you understand customer opinions and emotions around specific products, topics, competitors, and more. It automatically adds a positive, negative, or neutral sentiment to every review received, which you can also change manually.
In fact, with the sentiment analysis report, you can gauge the overall customer satisfaction rate for your business.
This way, you can identify issues with your business and create tailored strategies to meet and exceed customer expectations.
Onboarding Team Members
Statusbrew allows you to onboard your team members & design efficient permissions-based approval workflows matching your unique business needs. You can assign the conversation to your team members to actively respond to high-intent customers.
Why Are Google Reviews Important For Business?
Improve Authenticity
Consumers are increasingly demanding transparency from businesses due to the easy access to information about any business online. Today, consumers often research a business before buying products or services.
Positive Google reviews can also help businesses improve their search engine ranking, which can lead to more traffic and sales. Conversely, it creates a sense of urgency to respond to negative reviews, which can further build customer trust.
Boost Local SEO
Reviews have become increasingly important for rankings since 2015. If we look at the specific factors that affect rankings, we see that review-related factors are very important in the top 20 local search ranking factors.
While reviews are not the only factor that affects your rankings, getting more Google reviews will definitely help you rank higher in the results. And, if you are already the top result in your area, these reviews can help you stay ahead of your competitors.
Tools like Statusbrew helps you manage your listings across multiple directories, including Google Business Profile. You can easily edit your profile title, descriptions, and keywords, as well as track your performance and respond to reviews.
Gain New Customers
Once customers have visited your website, you are almost at the finish line. Customers who visit your website need to be convinced to buy something from you. While having a user-friendly website and a well-designed webpage is very important, Google reviews are powerful enough to convince most customers to buy your products or services on their own.
Therefore, any business with a high rating on Google should promote that rating on its website. This rating will boost customer trust even if they haven't read your online reviews yet.
Google Review Management Strategy (Franchise + Multi-location)
Managing Workload
Suppose you are a franchise cafe chain, bakery chain, or clothing merchandise & have stores in multiple locations.
In that case, corporate taking responsibility for review management is the best option. A centralized team of the parent company can effectively manage reviews for all locations.
If store locations drastically vary from each other, it’s better to assign an individual location manager to each store for multi-location review management.
The parent company can provide a strategy & can take note of the current trend in that location, but it is the location manager’s responsibility to execute the strategy.
Deciding The Level Of Control
It is crucial to decide the level of corporate control in the multi-location review management process. Engaging more people can lead to brand dilution. When the parent brand manager is responsible for managing reviews for all locations, responses become similar.
But when the franchise locations are responsible for review management, the location representative is trained well to deliver your brand identity correctly in that location.
Also, since the location representative is often from the native place, they can connect to the customers well by analyzing the ongoing trend in the location or assessing the cultural trends.
Besides, having a location manager makes responding to the reviews swift as it stays away from corporate red tape, such as the corporate office reading the review and then talking to the location head about it or having a meeting to discuss options.
With a tool like Statusbrew, you can define a granular level of access for each team member or groups of team members.
Tips To Manage Google Reviews For Multiple Locations
Develop A Review Management Strategy
Developing a review management strategy for multi-location marketing is essential to ensure everyone is on the same platform. Craft a strategy to analyze & manage reviews in a way that best suits your brands.
Analyze Your Review Management Strategy
By regularly analyzing the performance of your review management strategy, you can analyze if a strategy is working or not. Accordingly, you can make informed decisions to improve your strategy to manage multi-location reviews effectively.
Review management reports can assist you in taking note of interaction & general friction points, trends & interests, and common queries. By assessing such reports, you can uplift your strategy to maintain your brand's reputation.
Build Templates & Voice Guide
By assessing your customer reviews, you can get to know the general queries and common complaints for which your customers reach out to you. You can then craft templates for common types of customer queries to respond quickly. Having corporate templates helps to adhere to a consistent brand tone.
Suggested Read: 30 Social Media Customer Service Scripts For Businesses [Quick Reply Templates]
Develop a brand voice guide to help the location managers to adhere to the constant brand tone. Having a brand tone impacts your brand visibility & identity. If all your stores hold on to the same brand voice, irrespective of location, it will contribute to enriching your brand's personality.
Need Help With Managing Google My Business Reviews For Multiple Locations?
By managing Google reviews for business, you can propel business growth & sales exponentially.
Using a review management tool like Statusbrew will make it easier for you to effectively manage multi-location GMB reviews. You can manage reviews and analyze them all from the same dashboard.
Book a free demo today for easy multi-location review management for any size of business!
Statusbrew is a unified Social Media Management tool that supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google My Business.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
Here are some commonly asked questions about how to manage Google reviews:
Can I manage Google reviews from mobile?
Yes, you can manage Google reviews from your Android or iOS device. To manage your Google reviews from a mobile device, Open the Google My Business app > Select Customers > Go to the Review tab > Reply to reviews.
How do I manage negative Google reviews?
To manage negative Google reviews, respond promptly, acknowledge the customer's concerns, offer to resolve the issue, and be professional and courteous.
How do I log into Google reviews for my business?
To find your Google reviews, search for your business name or "My Business" in Google. You will see your Business Profile Manager panel on the left-hand side of the page. From there, you can manage your Google
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