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Consider this scenario—a potential customer needs a product or service you offer. Unless they have a favorite place to go already and aren’t open to change, most will either ask their personal network of friends and family for a recommendation or they’ll search for a solution themselves. This is a process that happens millions of times each day.
Now what if they saw one of their friends had left your business a review? They would trust that business more than one that didn’t have this review. Why? Because they trust their friend. Even if they don’t know you, that friend’s review is a public declaration of trust.
This is at the heart of what is reputation marketing: as you get online reviews for Google or Facebook and share them across your website and social media, you make a positive influence on potential customers by gaining their trust.
"Reputation marketing is using social proof signals like reviews and referrals in order to make positive aspects of your reputation transparent and visible to anyone who might want to use your product or service."
Simply put, reputation marketing is about establishing a great business reputation among your customers and then promoting that reputation in your marketing to grow your business.h
It's essential for any small business, whether you're trying to use your reputation for window cleaning marketing or research landscaping marketing ideas.
Let's dig into what online reputation marketing is a bit more, how a reputation marketing software like NiceJob helps local businesses automate their reputation marketing and how you can use reputation marketing to grow your business.
90% of consumers think reviews and referrals are more important than any information provided by a salesperson. So if you can use reputation marketing effectively, you can use your own customers to do the selling for you. That’s more powerful than any marketing content or creative ad copy you could ever hope to write.
Online reviews impact local search and SEO (search-engine optimization), improving rankings on average by about 12%. Given the hundreds, if not thousands, of different factors search engines use to rank websites like yours, online reviews have a huge impact on your SEO.
Whenever you make those searches you’ll notice the Google Maps widget that shows up. If your business is listed on Google My Business (here's how to set up Google My Business), it’s ranked by multiple factors.
But more reviews don’t just increase the amount of traffic to your website—they also increase the quality of that traffic. That’s because the person searching has already been convinced you’re a reputable provider before they even talk to you—all because of online-reputation marketing.
A lack of online reviews from customers across Google and Facebook can have a negative effect. Many consumers believe that not having any reviews is almost as damaging as having several bad ones. To them, it represents a risk if they decide to use a service with no reviews. People want to know you’re reliable.
Additionally, if any of your competitors have reviews and you don’t, it can also mean people searching for your product/service are finding them, not you. That’s business you could have been getting that is now funding your competition.
By implementing an action plan and a reputation management strategy—we recommend using a reputation marketing software to automate this for you—you can start building your reputation and acquire online reviews from past customers.
If you don't have any reviews, getting reviews on Facebook and Google isn't something to put off. Google reviews help with SEO and local search results while Facebook reviews promote your business to customers' personal network, and all online reviews influence consumer decisions. The longer you wait to implement a review-marketing strategy with a reputation marketing software, the more time you’re giving potential customers (and their friends) to become loyal to competitors.
59% of consumers look at 2-3 review sites before they make a decision about a business.
87% of people say that a business needs a rating of 3-5 stars before they will use them.
NiceJob can be used to automate the process of collecting customer reviews for any site you'd need. There are lots of industry-specific review sites that can benefit your business, and then a few that every business should use. For home-service professionals, for example, having reviews on a site like HomeAdvisor or Yelp may be beneficial. For a doctor, however, it would not be. A doctor would probably want to use a site like Healthgrades, while a tourist attraction or restaurant may wish to use Tripadvisor.
But no matter what business you have there are two review sites that rule them all: Google and Facebook.
Facebook reviews (now called recommendations in some areas as they roll out this change to some users) are an incredibly powerful and targeted way to get new business.
When someone leaves a review on your Facebook Business Page, depending on the review itself, some of that person’s friends may get a notification (or see it in their News Feed) saying that they recommend your business. It’s like word-of-mouth, only a thousand times more powerful because they’re not just telling one friend, they’re telling all of their friends that your business comes highly recommended.
This is a more targeted approach because if you serve very high-end clients, for example, then those clients’ friends are often likely to be of a similar demographic and income level as they are.
It’s also incredibly valuable when people make testimonials about your business in Facebook Groups. At NiceJob, we’ve acquired tons of our own customers this way.
How would it affect your business if your most lucrative customers recommended you to all their friends?
Since Facebook is the world's largest social-media network, getting more reviews on your Facebook Business Page is essential to grow your small business.
How would being the best-reviewed and top-ranked business in your area affect your web traffic and sales?
It would probably make a large impact, since getting reviews to your Google My Business can greatly improve your reach across SERPs (search-engine results pages), Google Maps and the Google "local snack-pack."
Google reviews are a bit different than Facebook reviews. Google reviews are less targeted than Facebook reviews but will earn you more visibility. A review on Google will help your "discoverability" on the search engine, which will increase the amount of website traffic you get. This means you'll get a higher volume of customers through Google reviews than Facebook reviews.
Another interesting note is that if you’re a service provider, then you’ll only show up on Google for anyone within your defined service area in your Google My Business account. But if you get a review from someone outside your service area, Google will automatically expand your service area to include where that review was left. This means you’ll start being seen by people in that area more frequently and potentially earning new customers in a new area.
Do you often leave reviews for businesses? I certainly don’t. But that’s because many businesses don't normally ask for reviews. And even if they did ask, it would be a lot of work for me to figure it out.
Collecting online reviews for your small business is tough because about 75% of customers are willing to provide reviews but are only likely to do so if it’s easy for them. That’s why you need to make it easy.
The challenge is that most people need to be asked and reminded more than once to leave a review. People are busy, and while they mean well, they aren’t always available when you ask for a review and often forget.
More review invites (and reminders) equal more completed reviews. With more reviews, your visibility improves and you start to see more reviews and sales. While 75% of people say they are willing to provide a review, only about a third eventually do. If you only ask once, that probably drops to less than 10%. This is why it’s so important to not only follow up with your customers for reviews, but to make it incredibly easy for them to leave one.
Using tools like NiceJob, you can provide a quick and simple interface for your customers to leave reviews on all of the important review sites for your business—including Google and Facebook.
It’s a lot of work to send out tons of review invitations manually. Imagine this scenario:
You send three requests to review your business per day, between Monday to Friday. The next week you do the same. But you also need to send reminders, so for all the people whom you invited or requested to provide a review, they'll need a follow-up reminder.
That first week, with a minimal three requests a day, that equates to you having to send out 15 reminders. Unless someone provided a review, which can happen, most will need a reminder or two. So, if you send 15 requests in a week (which is on the low side) and you’re three weeks into the process, you now need to send reminders for the past requests. Without getting too deep into the math, that quickly becomes 50 emails to send per week.
Let’s be realistic here. Do you really have the time, energy and data to not only send 50 emails (minimum) a week, but to also send them each out at the best possible time for them to be received? With reputation marketing automation software like NiceJob, this process becomes easy.
You only send the initial review requests and invites. That's it. The software does the rest, including automating follow-ups for you; and if you integrate it with any one of our integration partners (over 1000 CRMs, invoicing tools, field-management softwares and more), it will even automatically send the initial requests for you as well.
Timing is extremely important when asking for reviews. When a customer doesn't leave a review, it doesn't necessarily mean they didn't love your product or service. They may be absolutely thrilled. It may be the best purchase they've made in months. But you just contacted them at the wrong time. Maybe they were busy, or just didn't feel like typing a review at that moment.
Happily, timing is a battle we can win. Here's how:
If your customer loves your product or service, they're most likely excited about it right after receiving it. Presenting a review invitation as soon as possible after the transaction is completed increases your response rates significantly.
Want a fully automated system to collect and market reviews for you? Try NiceJob for yourself! Sign up for our 14-day free trial here.
