In this blog post, I would like to spend some time talking about reviews. Why they matter and how to acquire reviews.
If you were ever in need of a service, or have ever bought something online, you know how important reviews are. Your online reviews help your business build customer trust, increased visibility, helpful insights, and a competitive advantage,
Customer Trust
As consumers, we want to know how good a product or service is before we commit to purchasing that product or service. We want to know what our peers thought about that product or service. At the minimum, we will reach out to friends, family, or an online community to ask for recommendations. Online reviews help build trust between you and potential customers looking for the service or product that you offer. When potential customers see positive reviews from other customers, they are more likely to trust your business and hire you.
Increased Visibility
Google tends to favor businesses that have reviews over businesses that do not. Reviews will strengthen your Google Business Profile allowing your business to show up more often in what is known to marketers as the 3-pack. Not only is this true, but businesses with more reviews tend to get noticed and clicked on by those Googling your service.
Helpful Insights
By reading customer reviews, businesses can gain a better understanding of what their customers like and dislike about your products or services, and make necessary improvements. People in general find it hard to receive any sort of criticism, but as business owners, we need to be open to feedback. Feedback helps us give our customers a better product or service. Acquiring reviews is one way to get those helpful insights from our customers.
Competitive Advantage
Positive online reviews can give a business a competitive advantage over other businesses in the same industry. If a potential customer is comparing two businesses and sees that one has significantly more positive reviews, they are more likely to choose that business.
How Do I Acquire Reviews?
Ok, we have established that reviews are important, but how do I acquire reviews? The answer is simple, we ask our customers to leave reviews. The execution is the harder part for most people. You need a system that makes it easy for your customers to leave reviews. We’ll talk about that more later.
What About Negative Reviews?
Many business owners are afraid to seek out reviews because they are afraid that they will get a lot of negative reviews. The thing with reviews is, people are going to leave reviews whether you seek them out or not. People who are the most likely to give you a good review sometimes just don’t think about it, forget to leave a review, or they simply don’t know where to leave a review. On the other hand, those people who are most likely to leave a negative review, are going to make an effort to track down your Google, Facebook, or Yelp profile and let you know what they think.
This is why we need to make an effort to acquire reviews. We are in more control of our review profiles when we actively manage and acquire reviews.
Review Acquiring System
Hands down, the most important review to acquire is Google. Some very basic things that you can do to acquire reviews is to save your Google review link, you can even have this link posted on your website, email, or you can even manually text the link to customers. Can we automate this? We sure can. In the video below, I will show you how to grab your Google review link, show you how to post your review link in the various places mentioned above, plus I will show you how to tool that I use to automate it.