Impact of customer reviews in digital marketing
Review marketing is a term that has become increasingly important in digital marketing. Here, the creation of online visibility plays a major role. After all, the more people call your brand online, the more impact this has on your visibility. In addition, it also convinces new customers in making a choice to purchase your service or product from you, it creates an extra stimulus. But how does it work exactly and how can you encourage your customers to write a positive assessment?
The meaning of review marketing
‘Everyone does it, so it will be good’ or ‘everyone says it’s true, so I’m going for it. Social pressure is a powerful tool to convince visitors. Many visitors attach a strong value to the opinion of others when it comes to previous experiences. How often do you view online reviews before you book a hotel for a holiday, for example? It gives a reassurance and a form of trust to eventually persuade you to buy something. This form of social pressure and thus persuasiveness is therefore a strong concept within online marketing. Due to the many technological possibilities and the fact that it is now widely used, has resulted in its own marketing term: Review marketing. Review marketing can also be called word-of-mouth advertising, but in a modern (online) jacket.
Review marketing in practice
It is necessary in the current online market to stay ahead of your competitors and win the trust of your future customers. When you decide to do review marketing, it is therefore also important that this is done properly.
How? The first steps in a row:
1. Customer cases
Make sure you get comments, stories or testimonials from existing customers on your website. Ask satisfied customers if they like to participate in an interview and do this with the help of a video or an extensive case. The best part is when they describe their ‘problem’ and where you have offered a solution to this problem. The advantage for the customer is that they also receive extra attention for their brand or company, a win-win situation.
2. Google My Business
With GMB you can make sure that assessments are immediately seen in the google search results in an easy and quick way.
It is important that you immediately show a good and mainly reliable image and make sure that the contact details are complete and accurate. Ask customers with whom you work to put an assessment on this, the GMB system is designed in such a way that it is a small effort for people who leave a review.
GMB not only works for review marketing, it also promotes your organic search results. For Google this is again an extra incentive to show your brand in organic search traffic, or SEO. Finally, it is also possible to immediately view the general assessment from Facebook, which is directly integrated into GMB.
3. Facebook
Through Facebook, users and customers can easily rate your product or service through a star system. In addition, it is possible to comment on the score. Therefore, try to be active on Facebook. It creates added value for your product or service and contributes to an active interaction with your customers.
4. Use review websites
There are several parties active that can ensure that your website is labeled as reliable. Think for example of Trustpilot, customer stories and web store. The reviews via these websites can be integrated on your website. Easy and fast a direct reliable impression.
Once you work out different assessments and cases on your website of satisfied customers, it also creates unique content. A nice extra advantage to be in a higher position within the organic search traffic. Uniquely written content of quality is extremely important and gives a lot of value to the quality of your website in general. Click here to learn more about content marketing.
Yet it is a challenge for many entrepreneurs to receive reviews, let alone how to deal with negative reactions. That is why we go deeper into this issue.
How do you receive positive reviews?
If you do not receive negative reviews, of course that is a nice bonus. But once it is completely silent, this is not desirable. It is good to have interaction with your customers. After all, your company revolves around the customers, so the basis here is that they have to be satisfied with your product.
When people are satisfied and even enthusiastic, you get the ‘gun’ factor. You need this factor to receive those nice and enthusiastic reviews.
Because you interact with the customers, you know what their wishes are and you can respond to them. Then you can refine or adjust your product or service. Approach the customer personally and build a good relationship for an investment. This investment ensures that your customers are ultimately satisfied and, because of their enthusiasm, want to ‘leave’ a review.
Finally, the last tip to keep the rating system as easy as possible. Nobody is waiting for endless questionnaires and dusty surveys. Keep it simple and short, so that you ultimately get your powerful assessment.
How do you deal with negative reviews?
When you do get reviews, but these are mostly negative, then this is pretty annoying and also confronting. Everyone can see them and you would prefer to remove them as quickly as possible. Do not do this. View these reactions from a positive side; apparently people are so involved in your company that they have taken the trouble to leave a comment. Often you can get a learning moment from these assessments, because there is still much to improve.
Prevention is always better than cure, so always ensure a good basis for your product or service; quality. When you deliver poor quality, it ultimately yields nothing, both on sales and on customer satisfaction. Bad services deliver bad reviews and dissatisfied customers. Therefore always put customer satisfaction on one and ensure that quality is at the top.
If you still get a bad evaluation, despite your commitment and performance, respond professionally and directly. Do not enter into online discussion, but try to keep the sensible ones in this. Indicate that you are sorry and make sure you are visibly doing something directly with this. As an example you can ask if he or she can give the contact details so that the person is called back as soon as possible to resolve the matter.
Even if you have negative news articles or complaints on the first page of Google, the application of online reputation management is a godsend. The purpose of this is to make the negative results on page one less relevant to new content through quality. In addition, you can always ask for negative messages to be removed by the webmaster of the website.
Do not be afraid of these messages or bad reviews and certainly do not let the courage drop. Try to learn from it and respond professionally, this requires a lot of time and energy; a scarce good that you never have as an entrepreneur. However, it will help your company in the long term and you will eventually get the reactions you deserve as an entrepreneur.
This post originally published on my Medium profile.
