One of the most powerful ways to increase your sales and grow your business is with online reviews. People read reviews, and they make purchase decisions bases upon them. Naturally, this is an important part of marketing for your business, especially if it is a local business. You want to get as many reviews as possible. You want good reviews because this will motivate people to buy your product or service, but you also want a lot of reviews. When you have a lot of reviews, your business name will rank high in results for all of the popular search engines. The problem is getting reviews. The following are a few tips on getting reviews for you company.
Ask for them It is amazing how often a local business will not ask for reviews, but this is one of the best ways to generate reviews. Most people do not write many reviews, and this is true even when they love your product or service. When they are asked to leave a review, often they will. Most of the time these reviews will be positive because people who are upset or simply do not like your product or service need no motivation to leave a bad review. In fact, this is one way to counteract the effect of bad reviews. Of course, now and then someone will leave a bad review after you ask them to leave a review, but this is a consequence of asking for reviews. You have to get used to it because it simply goes with the territory.
Have a link on your website You can link to a review site from your business’s website. This doesn’t take long to implement, and it could easily generate a few extra reviews. Of course, this will depend upon how much traffic you get to your website. You can also place this link on more than one page. Perhaps with a statement that serves as a reminder to those who have not yet reviewed your service or product. It may be only a request for a review of a new product that was just launched and many of your current customers have not had a chance to say how they feel about it and give their overall feedback.
Make sure you are listed on all of the review sites Some websites are more popular than others, but the main places you want to focus your initial presence on are Facebook, Google and Yelp. For this reason, you need to make sure your business has a profile set up on these sites, so people can leave reviews. When you ask customers to leave a review, you can point them to one of these sites. Of course, there may be other sites that are appropriate for your business as well, but the three listed above are, generally speaking, a good fit for most local businesses. You should also make sure everyone knows how to leave a review. Different sites have different procedures, so you want to make sure that when someone wants to leave a review, they will know how.
Use specialized software There are programs that have features to help you generate reviews. These programs analyze your customer data to determine who your most loyal customers are. This review generation software can also analyze which review sites have the most potential to benefit your business with reviews. Once both your loyal customers and the websites are identified, then your best customers can be contacted to help create more reviews for your products or services. This type of software can be very effective, and once you learn how to use it, you may experience a robust growth in the number of reviews for your business.
Building a broad base of reviews takes time, so you need to be patient. However, there is no substitute for a lot of reviews. Your business will become more visible on the internet, you will have more people talking about your products or services, and this will lead to greater revenue and the overall success of your business.