How to choose goods and services if you have a huge list of options in front of you? How do you know which of the many offers is what you need? Most likely, you read the reviews of those people who have already used the service or bought the product. This is called reputation – an important and necessary thing. If you have your own business, then be sure that your future customers also choose you based on reviews. How to work with reputation and use reviews? Let’s talk about it in this article.
Why are reviews useful?
A good review is always pleasant and warms the soul. Positive feedback gives confidence and inspires new successes. But that’s not all: reviews have a few more properties that you can use to benefit your business.
This is a demonstration of your reliability and transparency. If a person from your target audience sees not only your catalog of goods and services, but also the opinion of those who have already become your customers, he understands that you can be trusted. Sometimes reviews work better than any advertisement.
Thanks to reviews, audience loyalty increases. Your customers stay with you because they understand that you are really doing well because others also confirm this.
The target audience is expanding. People tend to trust the same people more: a company can write anything about itself, and consumers will not deceive. And the more positive feedback you get, the more loyal people will be to you and the more interest you will get.
Direct feedback. You do not need to spend resources on testing and quality control (although this should sometimes be done) – your customers themselves write to you about what they liked and what should be corrected. You can use this information and get better.
Reviews are useful for promotion in search engines. SEO mechanisms work according to many complex algorithms, and one of the main ones is reputation promotion. Search robots are more likely to raise in the search results the sites of those companies that have more positive reviews on different sites.
A recent study by Invesp showed that if a product or service has a good rating, consumers are willing to pay more for it by an average of 30%. Almost 90% of consumers, before buying a product or using a service, read reviews and choose those offers where there are more good reviews. This suggests that a good reputation is not only feedback and expansion of a loyal audience, but also an opportunity to earn more.
What are the business risks?
Reputation is a fragile but very powerful tool for business. As they say, first, you work for your reputation, and then it works for you. And this should not be underestimated: with a competent approach, you will achieve great success, and if neglected, you may encounter difficulties.
If you do not work with reviews and do not develop a reputation, then there is a risk of being in this situation:
- There will be no dialogue with consumers because you do not know and understand your audience enough, and people, in turn, do not understand why they should go to you.
- The loyalty of the target audience will decrease, and you will have to invest more time and money in promotion through paid advertising.
Search engines will downgrade your site. Search bots need a good reputation because people are looking for something they can trust. Working with reviews is something that requires attention. Don’t be afraid to spend a little time doing it – it’s better to do it little by little regularly than to face the unpleasant results of inaction later.
Where to request and post reviews
Places where a customer can leave a review, should be accessible to him. You need this first of all, so make sure that the client has no difficulty in trying to leave you a review.
Where can you do it:
- on your website. It will be a good move if you place a testimonial block directly on the main page of the site, this will allow new visitors to create a good impression about you, and it will be easy for customers to click on the block and leave a recent review. You can even embed business reviews from Google to your site using a widget.
- on marketplaces, if you sell your products. Product cards on marketplaces always include a reviews section and a product rating, which is based on the ratings of those who have already bought it. For successful trading on marketplaces, reviews are very important – among a sea of similar products, a person tends to choose the one with a higher rating, and detailed reviews will help to complement the idea of the product.
- on special sites for posting feedback. If you, in addition to online, work, and offline, reviews are provided in the cards of organizations that are located on maps – Google Maps, Apple Maps. Often people with a desire to order or buy something go to special sites with reviews about different companies and study what others write.
How to deal with negative reviews?
Many are used to thinking that bad reviews are very, very dangerous, and in no case should you be allowed to be publicly criticized. In fact, it is impossible to be safe against negative reviews, and what is more important here is not the absence of criticism but the ratio of good and bad reviews. It turned out that companies that received about 15-20% of bad reviews per year (80-85% good) received 13% more profit per year than those that had proportionally less bad reviews – 5-10% out of 100.
Why did it happen? It turns out that this is not at all strange, but very simple: if a company has only positive feedback, future customers tend to think that this is a fake, the reviews are not real, you simply delete the negative ones which are not honest towards your audience. And if there are still bad reviews, but less than good ones, this means that the company is real, lively, open to its consumers, and honest with them. This is highly valued by the consumer audience.
In our experience, the best way to deal with negative reviews is through a personal connection with the client. Claims should not go unanswered, but for the sake of reputation, it is better to do this in direct contact with the client – write or call the person, specify the details of what exactly you did not like, and work on the bugs.
