Plain and simple, online reviews are one of the easiest, most effective ways to drive more customers to your business.
According to a 2014 study from BrightLocal, 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. That’s powerful. Having a nice stockpile of current, positive reviews can really pump up the bottom line for local businesses.
So you want more, right? Great! You’ve come to the right place. Let’s take a look at three things you can start doing today to get people talking about your business online.
Put Yourself Out There
This is pretty simple, but ultimately important. If you don’t have a presence on review sites, it can be pretty tough for people to leave you one.
Make sure you have set up your account at all of the big review sites. At the very least, you should have a presence on:
- Yelp
- Yahoo! Local
- Bing Places
For more review sites, check out this list of the top 20 from VerticalResponse.com.
Once you are on these sites, make sure your profile is optimized. Fill out every field possible and upload pictures everywhere you can.
For Local SEO purposes, make sure your address appears EXACTLY the same in every review site. For instance, 123 Main St. is NOT the same as 123 Main Street.
If you’re scratching your head wondering what the heck Local SEO is, here’s some great info from Entrepreneur.com.
Just Suggest It
You’ll be surprised at how many people will give you a review if you suggest it, especially when you’re providing excellent products and/or services.
It’s worth pointing out that I purposefully used the word “suggest” rather than “ask.” When you ask someone to do something, no matter how nicely, there’s the stigma of a burden.
Consider what happens when you say to someone, “Would you please leave me a review online?” That’s a question to answer. Not everyone is going to leave a review, but almost no one is going to tell you that to your face. So those that probably won’t are basically forced to tell you a white lie, “Sure, no problem,” and that’s not a good feeling to leave a place of business with.
Instead, suggest by saying something like, “Hey, hope you had a great experience. If you did, I’d love it if you could find the time to leave a review on [insert your preferred review site here] or anywhere you typically review businesses.”
But simply asking in person and hoping they remember to go leave a review later is leaving a lot up to chance. I think we can do better!
Chances are you’re collecting email addresses from your customers (and if you’re not, you probably definitely should be).
Send your customers a follow-up email the day after their visit to check in and make sure they had a great experience, and include a link or links to review sites.
You may choose to include one link because that’s really where you want to concentrate your reviews. Maybe in your industry a review on a particular site is much more valuable than others. Otherwise, include links to several review sites.
Often times, people have a preferred site they already leave reviews on. If you have a link to that site, chances are that much better they’re going to leave you a review.
Right about now, you may be thinking to yourself, “Dang, an email to every customer from the day, I’ll be at the computer all night.” Don’t panic; there’s an easy solution.
You can set up something called an “autoresponder” series of emails that are totally automated, but can be personalized as well. Basically, it can be as easy as entering their email address and name into a mobile app, and that’s it.
I’ve tried many email software programs. In my experience, AWeber is the easiest to set up, has great support, and provides excellent reporting and analytics. You can check out a short video of the process here: AWeber Autoresponders.
Plant the seed that you’d like a review in person, and then make it easy by providing the links right in an email. You’ll almost certainly see a significant increase in reviews for your business.
Solicit Reviews on Social Media
Talk about how they should make posts on social asking for reviews. Unlike in person, here you do want to come out and specifically ask for the review, but still in a nice, gentle way.
Make it a part of your social media strategy to include a couple of posts requesting reviews each month. On Facebook, it might look something like this:
Bonus Advanced Strategy: Target Your Email List with a Facebook Ad Campaign
For those of you looking to get a little fancier, did you know you can upload your email list to create a Custom Audience and target people who used that same address to sign up to Facebook with an ad campaign.
This can be an inexpensive option (depending on the size of your list) that can have incredible ROI because of the laser focused targeting. Think about it; you’ll be able to target people on Facebook who you know have patronized your business, and only those people.
This also has the added benefit of including your customers that aren’t yet fans of your business page on Facebook. Running one of these campaigns will get some of those people to like your page in addition to reviewing your business.
For detailed instructions on how to set up one of these campaigns, see Facebook’s Help Center.
What Not To Do
Don’t Set up a Review Station
In the past, it has been a fairly effective technique to set up a laptop in a business with easy access to a review site and request people leave one right then and there.
Alas, that jig is up. Most review sites will now recognize when an unusual amount of reviews are coming in from the same IP address. These reviews will be hidden at best, and your account could be penalized or deleted at worst.
Don’t Incentivize Reviews
Incentivizing reviews is almost always against the terms of service of review sites.
It’s a fairly common view that it’s acceptable to offer something of value in exchange for a review as long as you don’t specify and require that it be a positive review. We don’t believe that to be true.
Google’s review policy puts this in plain language (this also addresses the previously mentioned review stations).
“Conflict of interest: Reviews are most valuable when they are honest and unbiased. If you own or work at a place, please don’t review your own business or employer. Don’t offer or accept money, products, or services to write reviews for a business or to write negative reviews about a competitor. If you’re a business owner, don’t set up review stations or kiosks at your place of business just to ask for reviews written at your place of business.”
Yelp will even go a step further if they catch you in the act. They, apparently, have no qualms about airing your dirty laundry for everyone to see:
Considering the value of online reviews, and the potentially devastating consequences of taking shortcuts, it just makes sense to play by the rules here.
Wrapping Up
If you’ve made it this far, surely you see the value putting in some effort to get more people to openly and honestly review your business online. Now that you’re armed with some effective techniques, all that’s left is to get out and do it.
Just remember not to overdo it. There’s a fine line between requesting a review from your customers and pestering them. Make sure not to cross it.
But, keeping that in mind, you should be well on your way to having a better represented business online and gaining new customers because of it!
