How many of you, before you have stayed at a hotel, have read the reviews online? How many of you, before you have went into a restaurant to eat dinner, have read the online reviews?
What about buying shoes? What about ordering pizza? What about before having a landscaper come and work at your house? What about the painter? What about the kitchen remodeler? What about going to a chiropractor or seeing an attorney?
Do you read the reviews first?
Of course you do, and if there are no reviews online, have you ever wondered why? Maybe you wondered if they are even a real business?
Reviews are the new word of mouth, and it’s very important that you, as a local small business, begin now.
Your reputation is your most valuable asset and it is imperative that you begin building your online reputation as a foundation for all of your other digital marketing efforts. It is very important and I can’t stress it enough. So, I want to give you some insight on how this works.
Some Astounding Facts
More than 92% of adult buyers regularly check reviews online before making a purchase. That’s the day and age in which we live. We check online reviews before we make a purchase.
90% of online consumers trust the recommendations of people that they know. That is huge. We trust the people we know, don’t we, and that’s why reputation marketing and referral marketing is so powerful. Some people say, “I don’t do advertising, I only do word of mouth”. Well, guess what? That word of mouth is now online, and people are looking at your reviews. Therefore it is imperative that you have reviews online and that you’re building your online reputation.
70% of online consumers trust the opinions of those that they don’t know. That means that if I go online, and I “Google” your company, but I don’t know anybody that left a review, I’m still going to trust what they say in those reviews. If you are the top provider in my city, and there’s 20 reviews all saying something good about you, I’m probably going to believe it. But if there’s 20 reviews and they all have something terrible to say about you, I’m probably going to believe that too, and so the point is, 70% of us trust the reviews that we read online, even if we don’t know the person that left the review.
Here’s a good question…
Would You Do Business With You?
Here’s a negative review about a moving company that I found online.
“Worst company in the world. Stay away.”
Now what if this was your company? What if your business was this moving company and you “Googled” your name? Would you do business with you? I mean, that’s a question we have to ask ourselves. Would you do business with you if you had these negative reviews online?
It’s very important that you consider this. You need to know what the reviews are like online, and what your reputation is online. Do you even know? Have you checked it out? If your reputation looks like this, then you need to do something about it. This is what people are reading when they Google this company’s name, and they should do something about it to fix it. And so it’s very important that you find out what your reputation is like, and what people are saying about you online, and you do what you can to deal with it.
A Good Example
All right, now I want to show you an example of a good quality reputation. If you Google “hotels in Seattle” Alexis Hotel is one of the first that comes up.
So Google “Alexis Hotel” and look at the reviews that are posted for this company. Look at the reputation they have. Clear at the bottom, we see Trip Advisor has almost a thousand reviews with a five-star rating. Yelp.com has 168 reviews with a five-star rating. Hotels.com, 174 reviews with five-star rating, and then Google has nearly 200 Google reviews with a five-star rating.
What I like about this is that they are not all five stars. They’re 4.5 stars. That means people are leaving honest reviews. It’s not like they paid somebody to come in and make bogus reviews. These are real people leaving real, honest reviews. It just happens to be a really good place to stay, and that is what you want your business to look like.
Let me ask you this. Is your business based on integrity? Do you have a good quality service to provide? If you do, then your reputation is good, right? And offline, people probably know that you are good. But what about online? People don’t know what your reputation is like, when they are researching your company online, and so you need to make it look like Alexis Hotel’s. You need to take control of your online reputation and use it to help your marketing.
How To Get Reviews Online
There are a couple of ways you can help people leave reviews and begin getting more business.
Here are a few:
- Links To Review Sites.
You can post little buttons on your website which link to the review engines, or to the review sites like Yelp, Yellow Pages, Google and so on. You can post little icons or little buttons where people can click and go to a popular site and leave a review. That’s a good way to do it. That method works fine, but I want to show you another way. - Create A Branded Review Engine.
Perhaps this is a better way. This is what we do for our clients. We create a review engine that is branded to match our clients brand. Then we install it on their website and people can be taken to one address where they can enter their name and the number of stars they want to rate the service. They can leave a description or a testimony and it gets posted on the website. They also have an opportunity to leave reviews on the other review sites as well.It is a very smart way to get more reviews online. And it’s a simple, straightforward approach. It’s a simple way, because it’s one website that works for many, many websites, and it’s branded to match the client’s branding.
Summary
So, in summary, I want to stress the fact that the number one asset that you have in business is your reputation. What you decide to do about that, is going to determine the future of how your online marketing or your digital marketing works. One of the greatest secrets to getting a head start in digital marketing is building a good online reputation.
Do you need help with your online reputation? We would be happy to help! Contact Us.