How To Turn Customer Reviews Into Valuable Business Assets

Customer reviews provide a level of trust and assurance for potential customers.

Online reviews are the closest customers can get to touching/seeing your product live.

Reviews are one of the most important factors customers consider before deciding to buy.

Using social proof should be one of the first strategies used in growing your small business because people are more likely to pay for goods when someone else endorses them first.

Both negative and positive reviews can be turned into a valuable business asset. Here’show:

1. Positive customer reviews act as free traffic

Marketing is not just what you say about your company, it’s also what other people say about you.

Customers expressing their positive feedback and recommending your product to others will help to market your products or services, influencing millions of other potential customers to do the same.

It’s basically free and very poweful marketing/advertising/lead generation/sales tactic.

Read more about the benefit of customer reviews and what can you do to incentives your customers to leave positve reviews.

2. Use user-generated content in your marketing

You can also use user-generated content from 3rd parties for your own marketing materials (social media, website testimonials, ads, blog, ebooks, landing pages, emails, presentations, etc).

For example, you can use customer photos and testimonials under your product pages to show the product in use. Or use images in your social media ads.

Potential buyers want “social proof” that your product or service is reputable and loved by others like them.

Also, you can monitor social media accounts for relevant hashtags to find customers mentioning your brand in their posts.

Take advantage of user-generated content and repost it to show some love and appreciation to your existing fans and attract potential customers at the same time.

Customer reviews and testimonials help you build up your reputation, which is a long-term strategic asset of a company.

Positive reputation opens doors and increases opportunities.

Reputation marketing is the process of using your company’s reputation to market your business to new leads.

Reputation marketing is about acquiring and amplifying positive brand content to use your reputation as a promotional asset in marketing campaigns.

3. Customer reviews help to highlight your blindspots

In addition to providing valuable insights about a product, reviews can also be a great source of learning. By reading both good and bad reviews, you can learn where you might need to improve.

Reviews can help resolving issues or blindspots so you can protect your brand in the long run.

So think of customer reviews as free unflitered business advice.

NB! Not all customer reviews are accurate or objective. There are people making money writing fake reviews, so take negative reviews with a pinch of salt.

4. Customer reviews improve local SEO rankings

Inbound links from sites like Google My Business, Trustpilot and other online reviews sites boost your search ranking, which means your businesses appears higher on Google when people are searching for relevant keywords.

The more positive reviews you have in your local area, the more relevant Google sees your business when it’s delivering search results.

Think about this way:

It’s in Google’s interest to serve people with the best results, so when someone types ‘best indian restaurants in London’ in Google search, it only wants to show restuarnats with the best rating (usually 4.8 and above) first.

What is SEO and why it is importat?

SEO (search engine optimisation) is a digita marketing practise that helps you improve your ranking position in search engine results. This can massively increase the amount of traffic to your website, allowing your business to grow quickly.

Essentially, if you are a local business, then improving your Google review score can help you move up the rankings quickly.

Furthermore – integrating a star rating into your search result snippet can further help you stand out amongst lesser competitors.

5. Customer reviews help with business decision-making

Use customer reviews as one tool in your decision-making process.

Use it as part of your market research to plan further. Reviews and testimonials can lead to improvements and refocusing of your whole business.

Customer reviews have a lot of critical information such as ratings, keywords, images, significant features, comparison across brands, and general sentiment.

There are ways to collect all this data via advanced text analytics platform to learn about:

• Product features: What is the feedback on a particular product feature for your brand and your competitor
• Bestseller analysis
• Drivers/triggers of purchase: What attribute of your brand is driving purchase
• Key emotional drivers: Track the emotions consumer undergo after purchasing a product