93 percent of consumers file through online reviews before they decide to spend their money anywhere—and 88 percent of those consumers insist that there be enough authentic reviews to make reliable judgement call as to whether or not they can trust your business and get a good value for their money. (They report reading an average of about 10 reviews before making the jump to purchase.)
If you run a small business or are just starting up a new business, you must put the marketing power of customer reviews to work for you—but you can’t do it alone. You need a system in place that can help you:
- Gather a lot of great reviews to build your business reputation among consumers, and…
- Intercept bad reviews so you can resolve them before they go live
Here’s why:
1. Online Reviews are Free Marketing
Consumers report that they trust online reviews nearly as much as they trust their own friends and family, and that’s no surprise. More often than not, online reviews are becoming more personal; they’re linked to the reviewer’s social media channels and seen by all of their friends and family. They can immediately share whether (or not) they enjoyed doing business with you with everyone they know on Facebook, Twitter, Yelp! etc.
2. It can be Difficult to Get Happy Customers to Post Reviews
A review collection and filtering system can help encourage those happy customers to go beyond their happiness and establish more of a relationship with your business by posting a review about their experience. This makes it easy for them to share good experiences while making it easier for you to build up that important cache of positive reviews that consumers are relying on to make their purchasing decisions.
3. You Can Use Review Data to Improve Your Business
As you collect more reviews from your customers, make sure you’re taking their feedback and their time seriously. Reputation Builder helps you gather important data from your reviews. You’ll get a better idea of who your customers are; their demographics, their concerns, their desires, etc. This will give you an edge in future to target marketing campaigns and help you fine tune your products and services as your business develops.
4 Engage With Customers and Build Relationships
The meteoric rise of social media has erased boundaries between companies and their customers in a big way. Companies need to build relationships with their customers to cement their loyalty and keep them coming back again and again. Online reviews give you an opportunity to further engage with consumers and develop those relationships. When your customers see that you are concerned about their opinions and respond to their needs, their trust in you grows. Engage with your review-writing customers and don’t ignore them!
5. Funnel Bad Reviews Away from Public Eyes until They Become Positive
The Reputation Builder system funnels the poor reviews directly to you first instead of unleashing them on the public. This is good because just one bad review can discourage 30 potential customers from doing business with you—especially if you don’t already have a hefty collection of positive reviews to back them up. It takes about 12 good reviews to counter just one bad one. And unfortunately, unhappy customers are far more likely to post a review than happy customers. This, again, is why it’s so important to get help actively collecting positive customer reviews!
6. Turning the Bad into Good
Because Reputation Builder can funnel bad reviews to you first, this gives you a valuable chance to do several critical things:
- Go the extra mile to make things right with that customer
- Evaluate ways to improve your products and services to avoid future problems
- Win new fans: unhappy customers who feel like your company truly cares and that you went above and beyond to resolve their concerns are more likely than average happy customers to post glowing reviews!
Reputation Builder can help you collect those coveted positive reviews, gather and analyze customer data from those reviews and turn negative reviews into positive experiences for you and the customers you’re building relationships with. Small and new businesses particularly need to gather speed with reviews right away!
Sign up for Reputation Builder today and make the most of the marketing opportunities your own customers can bring you!