When someone asks you, “What do your customers think of you?” what is your response? Do you share with them how much they love your product or service? Do you share with them how they happily refer their friends and family?
As a business owner it’s likely that you have 100’s and maybe even thousands of customers who LOVE your service. When you are looking to target NEW prospects how do you share the passion of others? How do you get the word out beyond “word of mouth” to let new potential customers that what you are offering is great?
Now more than ever, to provide a balance to your online marketing efforts takes a focus on gathering reviews (i.e. testimonials). Regardless of your industry this is becoming a key portion to increasing local rankings and converting that prospect from “I think this is good” to “I HAVE to buy”. As many people are quick to complain and slow to compliment it is important to gather positive feedback from those who truly support your business.
To start putting the power of “word of mouth” reviews to work for your business in the online world, I invite you to consider the following.
- Yelp – Once this site only dominated for reviews of restaurants and now it has expanded far beyond that. Yelp has a powerful set of features (including integration with Facebook) that encourages your customer to share their experience. As a business owner you have the power to announce special offers, send messages to your customers (reply to reviews either publicly or privately) and more. Creating a profile here is a powerful first step to letting customers support your business.
- Facebook Reviews Tab – While new to the game of “reviews” this is quickly becoming a standard for businesses on Facebook. The Facebook reviews tab is FREE and is used as part of your business page. One of the best parts about this particular tab is it is exposed to Google. This means that if someone types “Your Business Reviews” it could very well show up in the top 10 results.
- Google Places – Google has further leveraged their powerful search platform into the local market. In addition to gathering reviews from 3rd party sites, you can also rate businesses through their Places platform. As a business owner you can define everything from business hours, specialties, to even photos of your office. Having a profile here provides the added benefit of being able to be displayed on local searches!
We can’t stop people from complaining about a bad experience (even when you bend over backwards for someone they still might complain) but we can let people see that 99% of people have a great experience with your business.
Opening a profile on each service won’t get you a flood of testimonials, it is only the start. Make gathering testimonials and reviews part of your total online marketing strategy. Discover how to make testimonials a marketing system with my FREE power-packed Marketing Manifesto.
