Using your positive feedback in your marketing strategy seems like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised as to how many businesses actually miss this little trick out.
Yes, having reviews is excellent and your customers having different sources available to them can never hurt, but why not make it easy for them and put all your reviews somewhere where they can be seen easily by both your existing and potential customers?
Why Reviews are so Important
Reviews represent businesses. Nowadays, consumers would be wary of a company that doesn’t have any reviews and would even be willing to pay a little more somewhere else because of the lack of feedback.
Ratings and reviews are an invaluable source of feedback, they not only have the power to influence consumer decisions and buying behaviour but can either make or break a business’ credibility. They also can encourage customers to contact the company, ultimately leading to improved sales.
Why you Should Implement them into your Marketing Strategy
By looking past the star rating itself and reading the text your customer/client has written, you’ll gain a far deeper insight into how your business, your products/services and customer service is being seen, understood, and received. We really want to encourage you to take the time to study your reviews in order to really understand just what’s going on in your business.
You can amplify the value of your feedback from anywhere around the web by using a customer reviews platform like Trustist. We aggregate your reviews from wherever they may be and then use this data to get stars in your organic Google search results.
Displaying your customer reviews in your organic Google search results also offers huge SEO benefits because your click-through rate will increase, you’ll drive more traffic to your website (and therefore sales!), and you’ll be continuously updating your website with new and relevant content which Google is a sucker for.
We all know that you can collect Google reviews on your Google My Business listing, but Google’s monopoly on search gives yet another opportunity to shout about your customer reviews from other platforms.
A high click-through rate from your Google My Business listing to your website is considered a ‘behavioural signal,’ that is one of the key local search ranking factors for Google. Hence, updating your Google posts with fresh content and review content to keep people coming to your website through your Google My Business listing
How to Campaign for More Reviews
- Set clear goals.If you have a very clear goal (what you’re wanting your online review campaign to achieve) you are far, far more likely to invest the time into ensuring it achieves that goal. For many of our clients it’s about attracting new customers whilst for others it’s about retaining existing clients. For some businesses, it’s about attracting the right staff to come and work for them So, step one is all about setting your online review campaign goals.
- What do you want to know from your customers?Once you know what you want to achieve from your campaign, you’ll be able to work out what you want to know from your customers when you ask them to leave you a review. This step is all about gathering the right content from your existing customers, and thereby making your online review campaign as effective as possible.
- How do you get your customers to leave you a review? If your customer is genuinely happy with their purchase or experience of buying from you, then our experience says they’ll be more than happy to share their thoughts with others by writing you an online review. Asking them for a review at the point of completing their purchase is by far the best time to ask for feedback, rather than following up with them days, or even weeks or months later, when the experience may have dulled. However, if for whatever reason you can’t ask them at the point of purchase, do still ask and ensure that you make it easy and convenient for them to respond positively.
How we can Help
One incredibly easy way to get even more out of your reviews is to have them displayed on your website, and quite a lot of businesses have caught onto this in recent years.
Some potential clients might not have the time, or maybe even be bothered to look around the internet for your reviews, so why not have them on your website ready for them to see? At Trustist, we offer a ‘Review list’ widget, where your new reviews, regardless of their source, will come through and display on your website. All it takes is a little piece of code on your website, easy right?!
Our regular widgets that all our clients have will also, when clicked, take consumers to their customer review page on our website where again, all reviews from every source will be! Both of these features eliminate the time consuming process of having to search for a business’ feedback because it’s all on one place!