4 Minute Read
Myth: Online reviews aren’t vital.
Fact: Receiving positive reviews should be an integral part of your digital marketing. Some businesses think that their business is doing fine so reviews can’t be that important. Others don’t know how to ask or are too busy to do so.
The fact of the matter is, if you’re ignoring online reviews, you’re burning money.
We find that businesses tend to focus more on current clients than prospective customers. While we understand why, you’re still missing out on attracting new buyers and growing your business.
Customers Need Trust to Make Purchasing Decisions
The journey that buyers take, also known as your inbound marketing funnel, is composed of different stages your customers are in. If done well, it should have three stages.
- Attraction. Customers just discovered your business. They are drawn to you via a lead, offer, tool or incentive.
- Conversion. You give customers a compelling reason to subscribe, buy or use your product or service. Customers are still uneasy at this stage, but they have enough information to trust you.
- Consumption/ascension. Those in this stage are using your product or service. This is when customers are more likely to promote your business to others and write reviews.
The key to getting a prospect to gain interest and convert is trust. If as a business, you’re only able to show a customer that they can trust you after a purchase, you’re missing out on a lot of prospective customers.
Because customers won’t trust you, at least not at first. Customers are skeptical. They are afraid of making a mistake, losing money, looking stupid, or worse. These fears come from past experiences or inexperience. If you fail to give customers a compelling reason to buy—at all points in the funnel—they won’t.
How Reviews Can and Should Be Used
Reviews should integrate every aspect of the sales funnel.
This means you:
- Attract new customers with a convincing review using ads, content, images or videos to deliver.
- Introduce yourself with credible reviews to establish trust.
- Share the problems you’ve solved for customers, in their words, not yours.
- Provide proof of your success, whether that’s with sharing testimonials or a non-stop drip of happy customer feedback on your website.
- Reduce objections by showing customers fears. What were the risks they took and how did things improve?
- Add reviews to your offer, giving customers a persuasive reason to join, buy, sign-up or use.
- Use reviews to upsell; leading them to the next step to take once they have already purchased your product or service.
Do this and you provide 3rd party answers to their questions at every turn. They want to know others took the risk and reaped the reward. They know you’ll say whatever it takes to get them to buy, so they aren’t looking for this from you. They want it from other customers.
Online Reviews Are a Must-Have
They are vital because they dramatically reduce the risk and fear that comes with a new purchase. They give prospects the persuasive evidence they need in order to trust you. We know because 88 percent of customers trust online reviews just as much as a personal recommendation.
So, how do we remind customers to leave reviews and make it simple for them to do so?
Use our review building services. You acquire authentic customer reviews to the platforms you’d like to use, by having us put in the elbow work. We set you up with a landing page, like this one, that gets sent to customer’s emails. They can easily click, choose where to leave a review, write and post. Easy as that!
Don’t just take our word for it. Our client, Houston Remodeling Services, had received 4 reviews over a span of 6 months before using our services.
Since July when he began with our review building, he has received an average of 5 reviews per month—all of which are 5 stars!
His ratings have more to do with how great his services are than the work we’re doing, but the sheer increase in reviews since starting is simply because we’re asking. Webster Digital Marketing makes leaving a review easy, accessible, and fast for customers.
And if you gain more authentic, positive reviews about your company, you can start applying them to every stage in your sales funnel. More reviews = more trust, and more trust = more business.