What Is Your Customer Review Strategy?
Consumers typically use online reviews to read about others experiences with different businesses and to share their positive experiences with other people. If you want to know how can a bad review help your business, read this article and find out.
It’s A Myth That People Only Write Reviews If They’ve Had A Negative Experience
According to a study published in 2021 by the Boston University School of Business, consumer opinions are changing faster than ever before. The old consumer review strategies of issuing a reprimand to offending customers and promising to improve after you receive bad reviews are being replaced by more sophisticated and customized methods of monitoring customer service.
Businesses that make it easy for their customers to voice their opinions are likely to thrive. Companies that do not make it easy for their customers to voice their opinions are quickly losing customer loyalty and slowly fading away.
Bad Reviews Help You Improve Your Business
Consumer feedback provides the business owner with real insight into how to improve their service. A review can reveal many details that the average business owner might not notice. A review can reveal a lack of communication between staff and clients, ineffective marketing, and other business issues.
By paying attention to these smaller details through regular review processes, you can easily fine tune your overall business and ensure you are meeting your clients expectations and exceeding their needs.
So negative feedback isn’t always a bad thing. Any customer feedback, even a negative response or negative customer reviews, can be used to improve what you have to offer.
Improve Customer Experience By Engaging With Online Reviews
How can a negative review help your business? Through a review strategy you can develop a more proactive customer service strategy that takes full advantage of powerful consumer tools.
Through regular monitoring, you can find opportunities to drive business where they don’t previously exist. You can also develop your strategy to respond to emerging trends and concerns quickly and effectively. You can build a business that is well-prepared for changes in the market and industry.
As you implement this strategy you should always monitor and track your results. Using the power of negative reviews to shape your company’s reputation management plan can be a highly effective way to gain new business. You can measure the effectiveness of your reputation management plan in real time and adjust as needed.
Happy customers leave personal recommendations which spread the word of their 5-star experience. This is how online comments can be seen as forms of advertising. Customer satisfaction shows your business in a positive light.
Use Customer Reviews To Find Keywords For Your Product
How do you get more exposure for your business? Many companies find that reading online reviews can provide them with invaluable opportunities to increase their customers’ knowledge of their products and services.
If you regularly read reviews on the internet you can build trust and rapport with potential customers. When you understand what your target audience is looking for you can tailor your messaging to match their needs. This can help you create a more personalized and customer-friendly experience.
Using Reviews To Unlock Your Competitive Advantage
The best marketing for your business is word-of-mouth from happy clients. Reviews are powerful because they come directly from a customer, and people trust the reviews of family members more than anything else! It’s an easy way to spread the good news about you in this tough economy with limited resources.
It’s not always easy to find the good or bad in a negative review, but sometimes it’s there. Negative reviews can tell you what didn’t work for someone and help prevent customers from experiencing those same problems themselves.
Sure they’re frustrating at first glance – nobody likes having something go wrong with their experience after all – but if we want our business to grow, then these are perfect opportunities for us learn more about how we could be better!
Effective Ways To Leverage Online Reviews For Your Business
Your customers are happy to leave online reviews, and your potential customers will love to read them. Online reviews are now ubiquitous.
Online reviews are no longer limited to review sites such as Yelp, Tripadvisor or G2 Crowd. They are visible and available on Google search, as well as social media networks such Facebook.Online reviews can seem overwhelming and hard to manage if you are new to online business. It’s easy to dismiss online reviews as “nice to have” and “just there”.
A referral program can be used to encourage existing customers to share their positive experience on social channels.
Reviews Influence Buyers
The bad news is that customers are increasingly relying on online reviews to make purchasing decisions. It’s estimated that 90% of American consumers are influenced by online customer reviews.
Online reviews are here to stay. But the good news is, they give businesses plenty of opportunities for increasing exposure and influencing potential buyers, and that’s not all!
Keeping an eye on online reviews can also help you manage your reputation or even grow your business if used wisely. So don’t miss out—read on to learn how these powerful tools could be at work for you too!
Use Online Reviews To Increase Sales
You already know now that nine out of ten customers read reviews before buying. But did you know that customers are also willing to pay more if they see good reviews? It’s simple supply and demand, really.
The more people like you, the higher you can set your prices. So if you aren’t leveraging them to boost sales, you’re literally leaving money on the table.
Use Good Reviews As Social Proof
If you’ve got those hard-earned, five-star reviews, use them! Show the world! Include them in your sales emails. Put them on your website. Tell people they exist and where to find them.
KIA, a South Korean Car company, understands how customers’ research is moving online, and tried to harness that by actively encouraging customers to look at their reviews.
In one of their TV commercials, they focused almost exclusively on their positive reviews as the main selling point, and they’ve achieved remarkable results from this approach, reporting that users reading reviews are 300% more likely to request a test drive.
Use Customer Reviews To Find Keywords For Your Product
A more active way to increase your brand exposure is to fine-tune your keyword targeting by analyzing how customers describe your products in their reviews. This gives you a clearer picture of how customers perceive and search for your products.
For example, you may think you’re a social media tool, but your users may consider or use it more as an influencer marketing tool.
By tracking common keywords used by customers in reviews, you get a better idea of how to improve your product positioning, long-tail keyword targeting, tags, or content creation, and help your brand rank better in search, be it on Google, TripAdvisor, or Amazon.
Leverage Positive Reviews In Your PR & Influencer Outreach
If you’ve tried reaching out to influencers in the past, you know how much of a time drain it can be. The same goes for PR outreach to journalists.
Since these people get so many pitches a day, you need to give them good reasons to work with you instead of moving your email to trash (or worse, spam.) Influencers have a reputation to manage, and they want to be associated with well-liked brands.
Great reviews are an awesome way to show influencers and journalists how much people love your brand, and how they’ll benefit from collaborating with you.
We all want to be friends with people who’re popular and liked by others. So include those five-star reviews in your next pitch email.
This is not the time to be shy or humble.
How Reviews Can Influence Business
If you’re not sure how positive customer reviews can affect your online business, let me explain. In business, you will often hear that good news travels pretty quickly while bad news goes very slowly.
Word-of-mouth tends to travel like wildfire, and therefore it can either create or destroy a business very quickly. Positive reviews online have the potential to spread quickly. And any good review can go viral in a matter of hours, especially if it’s written by a trusted user with plenty of experience in your niche.
So, how does a good review from a customer with lots of experience in your niche go viral in just hours? Well, consider if you will that there are literally millions of blogs and review sites online. And all these are free to use.
So one person can write positive reviews about your service or product thousands of times, with as little effort as putting in five minutes. Imagine how this could spread throughout the Internet in such a short time? But it doesn’t stop there.
Anyone with enough experience in your niche can write positive testimonials and provide honest feedback, which makes it all the more likely that the next potential customer will see the testimony and be drawn to the positive words instead of the negative.
With enough testimonials, this form of word-of-mouth travels like wildfire across the Internet, thus bringing in more positive feedback for your company. The best part is, even if the customer doesn’t have much experience with your service or product, they will at least give you credit for being helpful. This is known as the law of reciprocity.
Reviews Help You Stand Out
The other great thing about customer reviews is that it can really help you stand out from the crowd. If your business profile is all over the place, with a lot of negative reviews and few positive comments, then you’re going to come off as a dishonest and unprofessional business owner. This could be very bad for your reputation, not to mention make you seem like a scammer. If you want to get the attention of new customers, but don’t want to draw the line too far away from your business contacts, then providing honest reviews, while maybe not completely accurate, is the best way to go. As well, this approach has been proven to work with most online businesses.
Conclusion
Traffic arriving from the search engines, that sees a 5-star review, is going to be in a much better frame of mind to make positive buying decisions. So create a strategy to encourage actual reviews and put yourself in the right place to take advantage of consumer reviews to help enhance your business.
