If you’re a busy small business owner, you are laser focused on putting out your best product and service with the hope of boosting your bottom line. You may have your own great little website, you may have happy regulars that come in, but are you really doing all you can to build your business? If you’re not actively collecting online reviews, there’s probably a huge, sneaky chunk missing from your marketing strategy. Here’s why:
1. Consumers Are Drawn to the Stars
For just a minute, put yourselves in your potential customers’ shoes. It shouldn’t be too hard—you’ve probably been there more often than you realize. Case in point:
Let’s say you want to buy an awesome veggie peeler. What’s the first thing you do? Google it, of course (or Bing or Yahoo). You’re in good company—over 90% of consumers start their product or service search on a search engine.
Then, just like everyone else shopping for something, you’ll probably look only at the first page of search results (and probably just the first few on the first page—this is very typical consumer behavior also).
You notice that one company has veggie peelers for sale, but there are no stars next to the listing. But right next to it, there’s another company with veggie peelers that has five shiny stars next to it! “Hmm. People must really like these veggie peelers,” you say to yourself.
Be honest: from which company are you more likely to buy the veggie peeler? The veggie peeler company with no stars, or the veggie peeler company with five stars?
The one with five stars, right? So how does your business show up on search engines? The sneaky thing here is that it’s hard to quantify how many customers you may be losing to this sort of thinking, particularly if your competition is ranked higher and has more stars. Your bottom line is feeling that loss, but you may never know exactly how big that loss really is. One way or another, however, you need to stop that bleeding.
2. Trolls, Competition and Bad Days
Unhappy customers are two times more likely to post about a negative experience over social media than happy customers are likely to post about a positive experience. It’s not fair, but that’s how the stats break down. You have one bad day and BLAM! Negative review! Not only that, but you may also have friends of your competition posting fake negative reviews just to put themselves in a better light. And then there are trolls who post imaginative negative reviews just for giggles. And statistics show that for every negative review, you can lose about 30 potential customers. If you’re not proactive, you could be losing sales to these problems now!
3. One Negative Review Needs 12 Positive Reviews to Cancel It Out
So you might be asking, “But if happy customers are less likely to post happy reviews, than angry customers or trolls, then what can I do?” Reputation Builder can help you with a smart, automated system to collect those happy reviews and increase your sales.
Reputation Builder to the Rescue
It’s a simple, in-store and out-of-store app that boost your ability to collect happy reviews from genuine customers. Not only will this help you build a strong base of positive reviews, but it will also improve your standing in searches on Google, Bing, etc.
Instead of the unimpressive no stars or the alarming one-star ranking, you can build up that great-looking five-star tag that people will see when they do a search for your particular product or service! And then, as sweet as pie, new customers are going to start shopping with you.
Reputation Builder can:
- Boost your search engine rankings (SEO)
- Help you build a great reputation with genuine positive reviews
- Help you filter and deal with negative reviews proactively—which often results in more positive reviews and even more loyal customers
- And best of all, it can help you boost your sales between 10-30 percent, depending on your industry
Take control of your online reputation, stop losing potential customers and start boosting your sales! Try Reputation Builder today and see how easy it is to fix those sneaky revenue loss problems now.