More and more buyers are going to review sites like Facebook, Apartments.com, Yelp, Amazon, Google, and more before they make a purchase. Everyone knows this, but not everyone fully understands the importance. Reviews are social proof that what you’re offering is a high quality product, and that past customers have been happy with their experience. Good reviews are a key way to draw more consumers to your business, and these strategies will help you not only get better reviews, but more of them as well.
1.) Own and Manage Your Business Page on Review Sites:
This is an easy way for you to advertise yourself before people even see reviews. These sites usually allow you to upload photos, which is not only an opportunity to show off, but can even help people find your business. Owning your own page also affords you the opportunity to reply to people’s reviews, either thanking them for good ones, or resolving bad ones. This shows every previous and potential customer that you truly care about your service. Customers want to do business with people rather than computers, and commenting makes your company more personable, which in turn creates better reviews.
2.) Make Personal Connections:
One of the best ways to have a great web presence and get high reviews involves going back to the basics. Make personal connections with your customers, and this will help you create lifelong fans. At The Black Sheep, we use student teams to market on their own campuses. This peer-to-peer interaction allows the brands we represent to make personal connections with students from this. Any time your brand is interacting with your target audience, it is an opportunity to create a fan, and fans will in turn write positive reviews for you. It’s a win-win!
3.) Influencer Advocates:
In every industry there are influencers - people who are more widely known often due to their level of expertise and social reach. If these influencers are advocating for you, then you have a broad and convincing force working in your favor. Finding influencers is often a Google search away. For example, “Top influencers in restaurant industry” yields a seemingly endless list of industry experts and even provides their social media accounts for easy contact. Start by following their social accounts, and reach out directly to them. If you can get these influencers to post about your business - or even just be a fan - that key information is relayed to all of their followers, promoting your business. The Black Sheep’s social media accounts directly reaches students who are already familiar with our content as well as their respective campuses, which makes us experts on all things college for our followers. We also take advantage of local influencers for each campus to spread our word further and faster.
4.) Great Customer Service:
There is no substitute for great customer service. If you leave a consumer happy, odds are they will write positive reviews. Great customer service can even turn a bad review into a positive one by candidly addressing what’s gone wrong, and showing your customers you care enough to fix the situation. Customer service is often the easiest thing to fix, and can make the biggest difference in the types of reviews people write about you online. Change those 1 star reviews to 3 stars and 3 stars to 5 stars just by providing top notch service.
5.) Ask and Reward Happy Customers:
By now, you’re doing everything right! You own your own page, check it daily, interact with customers and provide great customer service, and people still aren’t writing reviews. This can be frustrating, and especially difficult if you’re starting with no reviews. But don’t be afraid to ask for reviews, and you can do this without being pushy. Studies show that the more reviews you have, the more they help sway a purchasing decision in your favor. A great way to start is by creating a small incentive for happy customers to leave reviews is a great way to get the ball rolling. Providing them with a coupon, free item, or prize for leaving a review is an easy and non-invasive way to ask for reviews.
Online reviews aren’t going away - in fact, they’re becoming increasingly important every day as more people begin to turn to the internet to help them make their purchasing decisions. While you can’t always force customers to write reviews, these strategies get people to feel more inclined, and they’ll help your reviews become more positive. Having lots of reviews will cause a domino effect leading to more reviews, and prove that your company is awesome. This means a higher conversion rate and more sales for you! For more on how The Black Sheep can help you do this, visit our website.
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