Dealers know that satisfied customers are walking advertisements. And in today’s digital world, online reviews have real impact on sales and service operations.

This week, eReputationBuilder launched Dealer Influence, a product which aims to encourage an increase in reviews that represent the overall sentiment of the customer, and proactively build dealers’ online presence.

Dealer Influence serves as an all-in-one automotive reputation, SEO and social media management product, company officials said.

“Our goal is to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts when it comes to a dealership’s digital presence,” said JD Rucker, founder of Dealer Authority.

“Many services today are offering little social media with their reputation management product, or perhaps some reputation monitoring with their social media product. But Dealer Influence will make search, social and reputation work together to improve each.”

The new product comes as a result of Internet marketing agency Dealer Authority’s acquisition of an equity stake in eReputationBuilder earlier this year.

eReputationBuilder is an email marketing system that encourages dealership customers to leave reviews on websites such as Yelp, Google Local and DealerRater.

The firms combined their software solutions and digital marketing strategies to create Dealer Influence, which directs consumers who say they are “not satisfied” with a dealership to contact the dealership and give staff the opportunity to remedy the situation before publishing a negative review to the Internet.

“When I first launched eReputationBuilder back in 2012, it was solely focused on leveraging our email marketing expertise to generate reviews so not to compete with other companies that were dabbling in the ORM arena,” said Peter Martin, president and founder of eReputationBuilder.

“As more and more clients signed on, we realized how big a need there is in the automotive industry for a fully integrated and automated reputation management service.

“The only components this product lacked were SEO and social media. Our partnership with Dealer Authority has closed that gap and now we are now able to offer a complete product designed specifically for the automotive industry,” he said.