Not sure what to do or how to feel about online reviews? You’re not alone.
Online reviews have the potential to crush your business or allow you to crush the market. That’s why being proactive about reputation management is such an important aspect of your marketing strategy.
Don’t let online reviews get you down or negatively affect your business. In our experience, contractors that build, promote, and manage their online presence and reputation crush it consistently in their local market.
Online reviews are here to stay. Most of us use them to make purchasing decisions. Whether we’re buying a physical product, making a rental car reservation, figuring out where to eat, where to get health care, or who to hire, online reviews matter more than ever. And yes, even for hardscape contractors.
Did you know?
79% of consumers ages 35-54 trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation (91% for ages 18-34)
~ Brightlocal
Get Your Team On Board
Since online reviews matter so much, what are you doing to train your team about their importance?
Do they understand how much reviews can affect your business and, subsequently, their jobs? If not, I’d recommend having a team meeting right away to make sure they understand.
Consumers Control Conversations
The fact is, in today’s marketplace, consumers control conversations. It can happen at work, play, around the dinner table, and it most definitely happens online. Your prospects are reading and sharing reviews on sites like Google, Facebook, Houzz, Yelp, Home Advisor, Angie’s List, and more.
Consumers trust this peer-generated content far more than they trust ads and traditional media. Now, I’m not saying that ads and traditional media can’t be effective, but both traditional and digital ads work much better when you also have a strong online reputation.
There are a number of key trends about online reviews that are important for your reputation management efforts:
27% of consumers looked online daily for a local business (67% monthly)
86% of consumers read reviews for local businesses
57% of consumers won’t use a business that has fewer than 4 stars
Consumers read an average of 10 reviews and like to see 30-40 reviews before they trust the overall rating
85% of consumers think that online reviews older than 3 months aren’t relevant
89% of consumers read local businesses’ responses to reviews
66% of consumers have been asked to leave a review
Next Steps
Building a strong online presence and reputation drives more revenue to your business. But how do you get started? We’ve got a list of action steps below that you can get started with today.
Do:
Train your team on the importance of reviews (staff meeting next week?).
Ask for reviews from your customers—make it drop-dead simple to write reviews on multiple sites that matter most to you.
Implement an ongoing strategy as part of your project workflow. Getting reviews is not a one-time thing.
Follow Google guidelines and other best practices.
Monitor your brand online to see what people are saying about you.
Use online reviews as a management tool; giving kudos and correcting when necessary can be absolute gold for your business. All feedback is good feedback when you look at it this way.
Respond to reviews, both good and bad.
Make sure your online listings (NAP+W) are consistent and accurate.
Don’t
Pay for reviews!
Ask employees or family members to write reviews for you.
Write negative or false reviews about your competitors.
Make it complicated.
Offer incentives or bribes for writing a review.
Have a pizza party and ask people to write a review all at once.
Don’t let online reviews get you down or negatively affect your business. In our experience, contractors that build, promote, and manage their online presence and reputation crush it consistently in their local market.
Take control of your online reputation today.
As a business owner or manager, you have developed a set of skills and knowledge around your industry, the products or services you provide, and what it takes to run your business. This is your expertise.
In the busyness of running our business, we often forget that we have this expertise. Instead of forgetting about it, we should be sharing it in the form of great content.
Creating content is Step 1 of our simple action plan.
Content can include things like a social media post, a video, a blog post, an article in a local magazine or industry journal, and more.
Content serves a number of purposes in your marketing efforts:
Builds ‘authority’ in your industry
Establishes your reputation
Creates inbound marketing opportunities
Forms the basis online as the new ‘SEO’ (search engine optimization
Tells our personal or business story
Publishing content online on a regular basis has never been easier in terms of the tools available to do so. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. We still have to consciously make the commitment to be a publisher.
Take some time to figure your expertise, and the best ways to share it. What will your prospects and customers find useful? What are the best ways to share it? How often should you share content?
Bonus Content: Editorial Planning Calendar
Passion is contagious. It also makes a huge difference in your business and your reputation.
Marketing is really just about sharing your passion.
~ Michael Hyatt, business mentor
They say that if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. If you’re passionate about your business, it will rub off on your customers, your partners, your team, and the neighborhood.
Word will get around.
“Oh ya, you should talk to so-and-so, they LOVE what they do”.
This forms a strong basis for your reputation and the referrals that we all strive for.
The flip-side, unfortunately, is not so great. When you don’t have a passion for what your business, the word will get around as well.
“I used to go to so-and-so, but it doesn’t seem like they’re really engaged any more in their business. I wouldn’t recommend them.”
Ouch. Sometimes things aren’t going well, and we might need to rest. But, don’t let your passion die. If it does, it’s probably time to do something else.
One of the foundations of building a strong reputation and growing your local business is that you do good work.
It seems like it shouldn’t need to be said. However, we have all seen the opposite. We do business with a company and are left wondering how they are still in business.
When you truly care about your customers and the products or services that you provide, your customers will do your marketing for you.
“The best marketing strategy ever: CARE.”
~ Gary Vaynerchuk, entrepreneur, speaker & marketing expert
Doing good work and caring about your customers does not mean you are going to please everybody. You can’t. And, while the customer does pay the bills, the customer is NOT always right.
It doesn’t matter.
Showing that you care about your customers and your business by doing good work won’t always win over every customer. It won’t always prevent somebody from writing a bad online review. However, it will win over the vast majority of your customers and turn them into raving fans.
Just do it [good work] and watch your business grow.
We’ve all probably seen runway lights at night at the airport, either in person or in pictures. The airport is providing a clear path for the pilot to make a safe landing as they make their approach.
As a local business, you want to give your prospects a clear path of how to do business with you. Light the way.
This includes having a clear “call-to-action” (CTA) that guides them into your business runway. When I’m sitting down with a local business to talk about their marketing, one of the most important things I can ask them is, “What do you want your prospects to do” when they come to your website or a landing page.
So many businesses don’t guide their prospects into their sales funnel. The prospect is left in confusion and may simply leave because the CTA is not clear.
Spend some time and figure out exactly what you want your prospect to do. Give them a clear call-to-action. This will help guide your prospects into become customers and increase your sales conversions.
