Customer reviews and star ratings are a crucial early customer contact point.
In the old days it was word of mouth. If your business got a good reputation with customers, they told their friends, family and neighbours, and your customer base grew. While word of mouth is still a powerful marketing tool, online reviews have taken over to a large degree, particularly if your business has a strong online presence.
These days when a customer is looking for a product or service, and they find a potential business online to get it from, one of the first things they do (after checking the price) is to see what the star rating and customer reviews are like for that business. A low star rating and/or a bunch of negative reviews, and you’ll never know that person was considering you.
Customer reviews and star ratings are a crucial early contact point with potential customer/clients in your marketing process.
Where to get reviews?
The big two for most business these days are Google and Facebook. These are the places where most people are going to leave an unprompted review for you. We’re not saying that there aren’t other place that that your business should build reviews, but these are likely to be places specific to your products or services.
Keep in mind that having reviews in more places does let you reach more people but also makes it harder to leverage all those reviews in one place, say on your website.
To get reviews on Google you need to have a Google Business Listing. These are closely tied in with Google Maps and having your business profile up-to-date and not missing any key information is essential to showing up when people search on Maps.
On Facebook you just need to make sure that you have reviews turned on. Don’t panic if you don’t get a star rating on your business page as soon as you start getting reviews. FB requires you to have a minimum of five reviews, before you get a star rating.
How to get reviews?
Any business that is doing well and has happy customers, should slowly accumulate positive reviews. The most important word here is “slowly”. Positive reviews are gold when it comes to your marketing. Are you happy to accumulate that gold slowly?
Positive reviews are gold when it comes to your marketing.
You can’t force people to give you positive reviews. The positive part comes down to a wide range of factors that your marketing strategy and plan should have covered, including pricing, product quality, customer service and support to name a few.
The getting reviews bit is a different matter. If you are ticking all the boxes that mean you have satisfied customers, then many of those people will be happy to give you good reviews. What you can do is help those people remember to give you a review and make it as easy as possible for them to do it to maximise the chances of it actually happening.
Make it easy for satisfied customers to give you positive reviews.
Both Google and Facebook have a web address for the page where people can leave you a review. Once you have this address, you can turn it into a short URL or a QR code to then use in your marketing.
If you sell a product or service, then you just need to choose a point in the sales process to ask for a review. It could be a small note that you include when you ship the product or it could be part of a follow up email you send (check these don’t fall foul of unsolicited email regulations). For some businesses it might be part of a personal follow up that you do with the customer or client.
Perfect is the enemy of good?
Most people think that the aim of the whole process is to get hundreds of five-star reviews that shout to the sky that your product or service is the best thing since sliced bread. Simple huh?
No, not so much. There is growing evidence that people believe reviews more when there is a mix of ratings, even if they are heavily weighted towards the 5-star end of the scale.
Nothing but perfect reviews and people start to get suspicious.
Lots of reviews that say your product/service is really good but there is the odd thing that means it isn’t perfect is a lot more believable.
What about negative reviews?
On most platforms, unless the reviews are fake, or highly malicious, there isn’t much you can do about negative reviews. In some cases, your best option is to swamp them with good reviews. Even if you get fake or malicious reviews (some people seem to leave lots for fun) Google and Facebook don’t make it easy to get them removed.
Negative reviews are, in their own way, also gold.
For many businesses, getting feedback on what you have done wrong, or what customers don’t like about your product or service, isn’t easy. People giving you detailed feedback is really valuable and should be fed straight into a review process to work out how to make improvements and do better next time.
The very best thing you can do with negative reviews is apologise, listen, act, and respond.
When people are checking out the reviews on your product or service, quite a few will jump straight the worst reviews to “get the real dirt”. If you have responded to bad review, listened, told the reviewer what you are doing to address their issues, and if you can, put things right, you’ve gone most of the way to turning that review around.
Leverage your reviews
Now you have started getting lots of reviews it’s time to use them to maximum effect.
We often talk about businesses using their website as the hub of their digital marketing, with other online marketing efforts being the spokes that lead to the hub.
If people are coming to your website from somewhere where they have seen some of your reviews, it’s all good, but you need to assume that they have got to your site without seeing any reviews yet.
Get your reviews on your website, in a way that looks good, and is easy to read. How you do this will depend on the platform your website runs on, and there are probably plenty of options for how to do it. We use TrustIndex a lot. It works on many different platforms, and you get pretty good functionality for free.
Keep up with the times
While not exactly reviews – it’s actually more like old fashioned word of mouth – the other place that has been growing recently as a place for people to get recommendations on businesses, products or services is Reddit.
Google has been changing how its search works in the last year or two, and they now tend to favour user generated content more, a space where Reddit is king.
You’ve got two options on Reddit, you can wade in yourself (is there is a relevant subreddit) and try and grow a reputation as an expert in your field who gives good, unbiased advice. This is an approach that can work well on any product or service-related online forums too.
The other option is to work on the usual things, price, quality, service, support etc, and build a following so that your raving fans do your marketing for you on Reddit.
Don’t forget testimonials
Testimonials are a useful addition to reviews for most businesses and allow you to use your best customers or clients to focus on and showcase specific products or services, or elements of your business offering.
It takes a bit more work on your part to get good testimonials, but you can build this into your wider marketing plan. There is nothing wrong with writing a suggested testimonial for a customer or client, as long as they can edit it as they like and have the final sign-off before you use it.
Well written testimonials can form a key part of your website.
Testimonials can work especially well when they are from key customers or clients and are used on the home page or specific product or service pages, as long as they are well integrated into the overall site design.
Get some help
If all of this seems a bit much, or its straightforward but you just don’t have the time to work on your reviews and testimonials, reach out to us here at Synthesis for a chat. We’re more than happy to talk to you about anything we have covered in this blog and can help with any aspect of customer reviews and testimonials that you are struggling with.
Synthesis Marketing – Helping you mine the gold of customer reviews and testimonials.
