Top tips for utilizing your online reviews
Online reviews have the potential to be extremely useful to any business. They are, after all, a way for you to directly tap into the opinions of your customers. It is a shame, then, that lots of businesses actually tend to ignore them completely. They do not value them as much as digital marketing efforts or product development in spite of the fact that reviews can actually be extremely useful for both. That’s not even the limit of what online reviews can be used for. But the question you want to ask yourself is can you maximize the use you get out of reviews? In his article, we seek out an answer to this question by having compiled a list of top tips for utilizing your online reviews.
Use them to increase your brand recognition
One of the best ways of utilizing your online reviews is to use them to build brand recognition. If people leave good reviews for your products or services, then it is only natural that others will seek you out, too. In fact, it is very common nowadays that customers to give up or settle on a business based entirely on Google reviews. This does, however, mean you must do your best to offer services which your customers will not complain about. A single one-start review can do a lot of damage to your marketing efforts.
If you encourage your customers to leave reviews, it will actually boost your chances of popping up in Google searches, too. This will make it easier to find new customers without actively working towards that as well as make it easier to monitor your online reputation. And that type of progress is something every business should aspire to.
Use the reviews to improve your products or services
Of course, one of the most basic ways of utilizing your online reviews is to rely on them for feedback. Customers tend to lay out exactly what they are happy or unsatisfied with within the reviews they write. This provides you with a perfect venue through which to look for things to improve.
Pay special attention here to what people write about your customer service. If lots of reviews are complaining about the way they were interacting with your employees, then you have a serious problem on your hands. The quality of services or products can be impeccable, but no one likes it when people they are paying are rude to them. Similarly, this may help you find critical flaws with your product. Just take video games as an example. More bugs are found by active users than by the debugging teams desperately working to catch and prevent them all.
Make use of the reviews in your marketing and PR
As any good digital marketing agency in New York will tell you, positive reviews are a dream come true for PR. You can leverage the reviews by featuring them prominently on your site. This immediately leaves a good impression on future customers since instead of praising you are singing to yourself, they can see what their fellows have written themselves. Such opinions are taken much more seriously, especially if you do not just choose the rose-tinted reviews.
There is a fine balance to be struck there. You need to pick positive reviews, obviously, but if they only seem to praise you then they may seem fake instead. Pick, instead, a review that is overwhelmingly positive but has a few minor complaints in it, too. This makes it a lot more believable and makes it easier for potential customers to relate to, thereby making it more likely for them to hire you!
Identify keywords of interest to your customers
Good SEO services in NYC are both precious and take a lot of work. Why not make use of online reviews, then, to make the job a lot easier? By going through the reviews, you can see what your customers pay special attention to. You can then work their concerns into your keywords, making it more likely for your site to pop up when someone does a random internet search. Similarly, if you know what keywords to focus on, you can better run a blog, if you have one.
By picking up on interesting topics that are relevant to your customers, you can generate great content. If you are running a moving company, for example, then you may write texts like ‘best places to retire in 2022’ if you see lots of your customers are actually pensioners who hire you for the sake of moving to their brand new retirement homes.
Use reviews as a means of customer engagement
The final way of utilizing your online reviews is to leverage them as means of interacting directly with customers. This is particularly relevant for social media advertising NYC tactics, since this venue makes it particularly easy to manage the reviews and the responses you get. If a customer leaves a bad review with only a brief complaint, you can ask them to elaborate on what the problem was. This shows that you care about customers and that you are trying to work through any issues. Even if a review is stellar, you can encourage the customer to share something that can be worked on.
The main goal of this kind of engagement is improving your image in the eyes of your customers while securing more resources for the other ways of utilizing your online reviews. Not to mention that contacting customers generates even more customer feedback!
Final word
With our top tips for utilizing your online reviews under your belt, you should be ready to tackle the task of making the best of all your resources. One thing worth noting, of course, is that reviews can be discouraging. If you have tried your best yet earned nothing but bad reviews, it can be easy to choose to ignore them. However, even if the temptation is there, do not fall for it! Treat the reviews instead as your ticket to improving your situation and overturning the negativity your brand has accrued.
