Marketing wizards are unanimous: intangible benefits may be virtually impossible to measure, but their existence cannot be denied. Customer reviews are a kind of intangible benefit. They indirectly contribute value and drive conversions. And this is not an exclusive property of positive reviews, since negative reviews can be good for your business too.
Online customer reviews are a new face of the age-old concept of the word-of-mouth. You don’t need us to convince you that you should harness the power of word-of-mouth in your marketing strategies. You know it intuitively and you know it from your own experience. But there are other benefits to having a growing pool of customer reviews.
Experts in SEO marketing in Phoenix know there’s more to effective marketing than rankings and backlinks. Check out what they have to say about how you can use customer reviews to your advantage.
Those who trust – convert
Trust is the X factor that brings together all the other business efforts together. You invest time and money in refining your offer, streamlining your procedures, making your website user-friendly and mobile-friendly, building your brand – but it is trust that will finally drive the customer to make the call or click the buy button.
Selling is a zero-sum game. If a visitor doesn’t convert into a customer for you, they will convert for your competitor. Basically, you and your competition are offering very similar products or services. The customer will decide who to go with based on who they trust more.
Almost 9 out of 10 customers will check out reviews online before making a decision. And they also trust online reviews the same way they trust personal recommendation.
There is a number of things you can do to improve the conversion rate for your unique and return visitors, but building trust is part and parcel of your conversion optimization strategy. Customer reviews are one of the essential ways of building that trust.
The trusted rank better
Google’s mission is to provide the most relevant and authoritative websites to searchers. It has been said that they use around 200 ranking factors to do that. Among a load of various data and indicators, it is thought they use reviews to determine the value a website offers to users.
Since the rollout of Penguin 4.0, local businesses have been strongly advised to brush up on their Google reviews and their Google profile. The number of reviews and their quality could determine the position you show up in search results.
How does using customer reviews in marketing work?
Online reviews are integral to any modern business. Genuine customer reviews can drive new business for your business and give it the competitive edge by helping it build reputation and gain credibility. A trustworthy service provider will likely have more reviews which means that the more you get, the better. Likewise, a higher number of reviews means a higher probability that a customer will choose you over your competitors.
There are multiple ways to use online reviews:
- highlight customer reviews on key pages.
- include or mention reviews in search ads.
- use reviews for social media posts.
- implement reviews in your e-mails.
- make testimonials part of your ads, promotional and marketing material.
Remember that even a negative review isn’t the end of the world if you know how to use and handle it right. You know what they say: there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
How to encourage customers to write reviews?
If you want your customers to write reviews and give you useful feedback, you can try employing the following strategies:
- keep track of your reviews so you can start to implement the necessary changes and promote key advantages.
- use customers’ feedback for marketing and service/product development efforts.
- respond to all the reviews, both positive and negative ones.
- do your best to resolve any situation concerning a disgruntled customer that left a negative review.
- make sure that access to the review page on your website is simple and easy and that the relevant button is prominent.
- design a mobile first review page.
- consider joining a specialized review platform and try to present your business in detail to past, current and prospective customers.
- flaunt those reviews on your website for all to see.
Find the future direction
Relying on professionals well-versed in sophisticated SEO marketing in Phoenix, home to Desert Botanical Garden and land of business opportunities, is a step in the right direction if you’re looking to unleash the full potential of your website. But let’s not forget the power and importance of a good review strategy. Genuine customer reviews allow you to feel the pulse of your business. Business is a living thing and customer reviews are a sort of screen indicating the state of its vitals. If you are always in the know about how customers feel about your business, you know your strengths and weaknesses.
What you can glean from customer reviews is what people love most about your product and what they appreciate most about your service. By the same token, you can find out where there is room for improvement. It could happen that a negative review makes a valuable point that you wouldn’t otherwise have thought of. Fundamentally, you are working for your customers, so it pays to know what it is they want. If you don’t provide the service they want, then you know where you should be taking your business in the future.
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