Grow your business with feedback from others
Discover what makes you, you
When others provide feedback, you might be surprised to learn you’re being recognized for things you hadn’t previous considered much. For example, maybe many of your customers have lots to say about your response time. Or professionalism. When evaluating your own product and service offerings, dig into customer testimonials to see things you’re already doing that you can draw attention to in your communications with prospective customers. This includes:
- Printed sales materials
- Website content & testimonials
- Email signatures
Turn your weakness into a competitive advantage
Let’s be realistic, you’re going to find people will publish negative feedback much more willingly than positive feedback. Use this to discover where you can improve. While your business certainly has plenty of strengths, you no doubt also have areas that require a bit of attention. By considering negative or even harsh feedback with an open mind, you can reveal where to spend your energy when implementing changes to products, services, or process. Reviews are a great tool for learning how to perfect your offerings. Find complaints that are repeated often. Fixing these areas of weakness may give you a competitive advantage if your competitors in your industry have similar experiences with their customers.
Bump up your website conversion rate
There is a strong correlation between how you’re perceived and how well you’re able to acquire new business (see https://neilpatel.com/blog/social-proof/).
If you’re not already, you should absolutely showcase your reviews on your website to build trust. Customers trust what their peers have to say, and you’ll find that this social proof yields tangible results.
Regarding placement consider including some on your homepage, since it will probably be your most visited entrance page. Also, consider adding them to your PPC landing pages, service/product pages, and places you want your users to take action! You will be eliminating any doubts the customer has and they will convert, no doubt, more often.
Pro Tip: Test the placement of your customer reviews and testimonials on your website by using Google Optimize or a similar conversion optimization tool.
Enhance your search engine visibility
Can your customer reviews increase your search engine visibility? You bet!
Ratings and reviews are especially important for ranking in Google Maps, as well as a variety of third-party business directories which use customer feedback in their ranking and sorting algorithms.
Be sure you respond to all reviews as well—good or bad. Responding to positive and negative feedback shows potential customers you are ready to help if they need you! This builds trust with customers and search engines. After all SEO is all about building trust with Google.
Ready to put those reviews to work?
The most important part here is that you establish a process to collect reviews in the first place. And by using some of the recommendations above along the way, you can be sure you’re getting the most out of your customer feedback.
