Why Are Customer Reviews So Important?
There are numerous ways to optimize your online marketing efforts to boost website traffic. Most digital marketing optimization efforts—such as search engine optimization (SEO)—are tailored specifically to increase website traffic. This, of course, is designed to capture more potential customers and lead to more sales. But there is also a tool you should be using that helps broaden the reach of your website while also encouraging an organic boost in sales.
That is customer reviews. If your website is not collecting, curating, and sharing customer reviews and testimonials, you’re missing out. They are a valuable marketing tool that also serves as an SEO optimizer. In fact, the lack of customer feedback makes many customers look elsewhere. Various surveys and studies conducted over the past few years suggest that customer reviews are fast becoming more valuable as a marketing tool than sales messaging. Most of this research indicates that the percentage of online consumers who review customer feedback as a distinct part of their sales process is at least 55% and as high as 90%, depending upon the business.
How Customer Reviews Help Your Brand
Customer feedback has emerged as an integral component of online marketing. Most businesses now include customer reviews on their websites. Search engines, online directories, and some social media sites make it easy for customers to review, rate, and rank products and services. Reviews help establish a business’s reputation, and customers seeking a product or service online tend to favor companies with reviews over those lacking any feedback.
The accumulation of positive reviews boosts your brand’s image and makes it more likely that potential customers will choose your products or services over the competition’s. This, in turn, can lead to more positive reviews and continuing enhancement of your brand’s image. Meanwhile, any competing business lacking reviews may be wondering why their sales are down.
Such businesses can recover quickly, though, as newly reviewed companies that start garnering and sharing positive reviews and ratings capture the attention of online customers. A company showcasing several new five-star reviews and praiseful commentary can start taking sales from a competitor with dozens of older three- and four-star reviews.
This dynamic highlights two important customer feedback points. First, customers tend to look for recent feedback. The first point highlights the importance of proactively encouraging customer feedback as part of your regular digital marketing practices. Second, and even more critical, you need to cultivate positive reviews. The latter point means that your business needs to provide outstanding service and/or quality products. And, guess what? Customer feedback also happens to be an excellent tool for assessing the quality of your business’s services and products.
Reviews Boost SEO, Website Traffic
In addition to enhancing your business’s brand, customer reviews provide a natural boost to your SEO and can help your website rank higher on search engines. In short, positive reviews capture the attention of search engine algorithms just as much as they do potential customers. Every favorable review you receive adds an incentive for the search engines to rank your website higher. This factor is especially evident with Google My Business (GMB). With customer reviews being a key driver of optimizing business placement profiles on Google Search.
How to Encourage, Curate, and Share Your Customer Feedback
You’re not going to get any customer reviews unless you provide your customers with options for submitting feedback and/or rating service and products. You can start by making sure customers can review your business and/or products on your website. Also create business pages on social media sites. Any directory sites that provide customers with options for leaving reviews, ratings, or other input. You can curate all incoming reviews and highlight them on a dedicated page on your website, use them on sales pages, and as testimonials.
Once you’ve established the means for getting reviews, you need to encourage people to generate them. This means that you should always ask customers who’ve bought a product or service to leave a review. Your website should include an app or software that generates a pop-up request, asks for a review or generates requests for feedback. For in-store transactions, your sales staff should be trained to ask customers to leave a review.
To keep the reviews coming, respond to your customers by thanking them or engaging with the commentary. Such engagement shows that you care about your customers, which can encourage others to leave reviews. If you receive a negative review, acknowledge the shortfall, and show that your company is dedicated to fixing the problem. A horrible review may necessitate offering a refund or other compensation. Such recompense can help alleviate the negative impacts of that review.
Manage Your Customer Reviews with Moxxi Marketing
Managing your customer reviews adds another layer to your digital marketing efforts. To make it easier on yourself, you can turn the job over to professional online marketing experts like those at Moxxi Marketing. To learn more, consult with Moxxi Marketing by contacting us today at 239.330.6236.