Soliciting Reviews – Leverage Your Own Customers & Impact Your Search Results

We’ve all been there… you need a new service provider, you ask a friend or relative for a personal recommendation, and short of receiving one, you go to Google, Yelp, or Facebook to find the next best thing, a review.

When the internet was new and businesses created their first-generation websites, we only had biased company information to evaluate. However, in 2019 with the preponderance of review sites, there is no longer much value in hearing what a business has to say about itself, when we can hear directly from their customers.

Google recently stated that Reviews are valuable, only when they have been created without the promise of something in return. The search giant prides itself on being THE SOURCE for information in the internet age and reviews have become a huge part of that.

So how does your company harness this power for itself? How do you ensure that you are doing all you can to capture this valuable, business building content on behalf of your company?

The answer is a little different depending on the nature of your business and how you transact with your customers, clients, or patients. Determining the best approach for your business is the first step. While a real estate firm may close a handful of deals each month, a dry cleaner is cranking out their sales tickets in volume. The approach taken must be much more intimate for the realtor and more systematized for the dry cleaner to be effective and time efficient. Implementing a system, such as the Review Management program developed here at OMG National, will enable you to personalize your approach based on these business factors. Further, specific platforms which are important can be selected, and messaging can be customized for your company and customer type.

The next step is deciding when you should ask for feedback. While some companies elect to send a review request right at the point of sale, others prefer to wait a specific period of time to enable the customer to “feel” the service provided. That flexibility and personalization is imperative. Think about your sales process, and when the optimal time is for your company to request feedback from your customer.

Then, there’s the delivery of the request itself. As email approaches 25 years in age, and due to the massive amount of spam which is filtered out daily from your inbox, emails have much less impact than they once did. Over the past few years, SMS text messages have taken the lead in terms of personal communication. If crafted properly, and assuming you have done business with the customer recently, these feedback requests will get your customers attention and get your reviews trending in the right direction. 

Having positive Reviews has been important to business operators for many years, but recently released Google “signals” have added another important benefit to those 4 and 5-star customer reviews. 

With Google using 3 important ranking signals to determine local search position, these being: Distance, Relevance, and Prominence. Your positive reviews show Google that you are prominent and companies who stand out among the competition with their reviews are clearly rewarded with favorable positioning on the map and elsewhere. This search ranking benefit has a tangible, bottom line value to your company and should not be ignored.

Discussing your Review strategy with an Internet Marketing Specialist is a positive step towards securing a successful 2020 for your growing business!

For a quick an easy Review Management demo, schedule here.

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