Online reviews aren’t just for hotels and restaurants, nor are they only an outlet for disgruntled customers to unleash their keyboard warrior. They’re an important part of every business’ digital marketing and client attraction strategy.
Even the strongest and most trusted word of mouth recommendation will usually result in the person doing a Google search of the business someone suggested to them to find out more and see what others have had to say. People doing their own research will use online reviews as word of mouth.
And for your current or previous clients, knowing you care what they think and stand by your service enough for them to leave a review helps strengthen relationships which in turn, ensures repeat business.
Our friends from Greenfish Marketing explain the importance of reviews in our latest blog – we’ve republished it with their permission.
Getting Started With Online Reviews
One of the biggest areas people make mistakes with online reviews is that they don’t have a review strategy until they are trying to organically boost their search engine rankings or get that rogue bad review from a problematic former client and want it gone.
Let’s address the elephant in the room first: what if you get bad reviews? And the simple answer there is “you probably won’t”. The more complicated answer is “even if you do, they can still help you”.
Bad reviews usually aren’t surprising and can actually boost your credibility. We’ve seen studies that show that consumers are wary of businesses that only have 5 star reviews because it doesn’t seem authentic. Most star systems work off averages, so if you had 9 glowing reviews and 1 that was less than terrific, you often still have a 4 or 5 star ranking.
The trick is to get those glowing reviews, and that means you need to have a review strategy.
Start With Google
There are a lot of places you can have reviews online, from apps and plug ins on your website to third party websites dedicated to providing information for people looking to purchase.
But think about it. What do you do when you need information online? You Google it, right? So do your potential customers and clients.
Your Google Business Listing can be one of your most valuable pieces of digital real estate. Not only can a properly set up and optimised Google listing boost your search engine rankings, but it can provide a way for people to leave and read reviews of your products and services.
It’s also a platform nearly everyone is comfortable using and they don’t need to create separate or special logins to access. Remember the golden rule of making it simple to do business with you – this goes for reviewing doing business with you too.
Ask Your Current And Previous Clients For Reviews
The best way to get that balance you need to make your online reviews helpful to your business is to ask for it. Follow up with your clients after their touchpoints with them, ask them what you did well and what you could improve on, and tell them where they can publicly review your business.
This has a few key benefits. Firstly, it shows you care about your customer experience. That’s always going to go a long way towards strengthening your relationships and reputation. It also helps you direct where you want the reviews to go which makes monitoring and optimising them much easier for you and your team.
You’ve probably been on the receiving end of some follow up emails from brands you’ve interacted with yourself – those communication pieces are usually automated as part of a robust digital marketing and communications strategy.
Have A Process To Review Your Reviews
Monitoring your reviews is essential. Not only does it help you understand what your clients love about working with you and give you insight into their experience, it also enables you to manage your reputation.
Don’t just check the places you tell people to review you. Some industries have niche review sites (think TripAdvisor for the travel industry), and there are also a number of consumer websites like Product Review, Consumer Reports and more.
Make it part of your business workflow to monitor your reviews, and action them accordingly, both by responding and considering how you can use the feedback in your business operations.
When you’re reviewing your reviews, look for what people are actually saying. Don’t take positive or negative feedback too personally.
Remember what people say isn’t always what they mean so a comment like “parking was difficult” could easily be written off as “I can’t help that it’s the council’s fault” where it may actually be a sign that you need to revisit how you communicate your location with clients and customers.
At the same time, remember if it isn’t broken don’t fix it. If you have the odd one or two people complaining about or criticising something others usually praise, there probably isn’t an issue that needs addressing; they just weren’t for you and not everyone will be.
Have a Reply Strategy
A good ratio we work off in the marketing industry is that people should be addressing 100% of the negative reviews and at least 25% of the positive reviews, in a unique and sincere way. Don’t just copy and paste the same response to everyone.
And if you do get a bad review, breathe first and then respond. If you can identify who the client or customer was and want to try and resolve things with them, consider reaching out privately to resolve their issue not their review. Then you can reply something like “while we’re sorry this client originally had this experience, we’re glad we were able to resolve the matter with them”.
People aren’t going to mind if one or two people don’t like you. They will mind if they see a scathing, passive aggressive or canned response to criticism.
Know Your Net Promoter Score (NPS)
We’ve talked about this before – your clients and others you’ve interacted with (including staff!) can be classed as either a Promoter, Passive or Detractor for your business and the NPS measures the customer experience based on how likely someone is to recommend your business to someone else.
This is an important metric to measure and can be a little sobering at times. Greenfish Marketing once had a client whose NPS was 1.8 – though we’re happy to report with some strategic work on reviews and understanding their customer journey and experience, we got that to 4.9 and climbing. You can see that case study here.
Should you want any help to make sure your companies reputation management is what you want, please hesitate to reach out to our team or the team at Greenfish Marketing.
