Timestamps of interest:

• Why reviews matter! (1:31)
• A four step process (6:45)
• Pulse (7:52)
• Plan (10:20)
• Populate (13:05)
• Protect (16:00)
• Looking ahead – Taking action (18:18)

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Scott:
Hi, everyone. I’m joined today with Chris Redshaw, Reef’s co founder, and we’re going to be talking about reviews in this video. So I guess to kick us off Chris, maybe explain to people why this is an important topic for us to be covering today.

Chris:
A hundred percent mate. Well, thank you very much for that. In preparation of this question, I prepared a little bit of a deck. So let me do a little screen share and we will address that together right now. Okay, can you see my screen?

Scott:
Just loading. Give it a minute please. Yep. And we’re in.

Chris:
All right, I’ll go to slideshow mode for the full experience. All right. Why reviews matter. As you just asked, I think it’s really important for us to orient, by starting there because they do. They do so, so much. Even more now than I think in the past. We’re going to cover a four step process. Nice and simple, easy to remember, how you can cultivate a positive Brand reputation that’s legitimate online. And then to put this into action, what are the next steps you might like to take if you’d like to apply it. So if that sounds good, let’s get to your question.

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Why reviews matter

Scott:
Yeah. Just to clarify as well, what we mean by reviews. We’re talking about Google reviews, people reviewing products and services and brands on basically any destination online.

Chris:
A hundred percent, mate. A hundred percent. And so, just to dive into that a bit more. Okay. If you were setting out to make an important decision, a professional decision, or even a personal one, you are going to go through a period of due diligence, right? And in doing that, you’re probably going to search for, what other people have said about a particular vendor or product or service that you are looking into. And so, that exactly, the idea of five star reviews or voice of other people like you, is what we’re talking about today. And the reason why that matters so much is fundamentally, there are things that a brand can say about itself, and there are things that other people need to say about that brand. And how that audience interprets those two sources of information is going to differ.

And I would argue that it’s the people who are customers who are going to have the most influential stake in how that brand is perceived. I hope that all makes sense. Great.

So fundamentally why, again, this is important in a bit of a different way is that as marketers, especially digital, online, we always want to bring the numbers. And I feel like it’s so easy for us to find ourselves getting stuck into things like copy or making a new landing pages or adjusting an ad platform or publishing a new piece of content for SEO. And all of that work is good, right? All of that is good. But if we forget how important reviews are, that work essentially is at risk of being either less effective, or almost ineffective. Because if the brand has an online reputation problem, what we’re going to be doing is we’re going to be bringing people into a conversion journey, but then eventually when they get into due diligence, it’s going to stop because they’re going to find things that don’t represent the brand well. And that essentially is going to kill their conversion rate to enquiry or potentially to sale, as well.

And so a couple of quotes to keep in mind from some great minds, first one from our, our friend, Jeffrey Bezos, or Bezos, depending on your preferred pronunciation. “Your brand is what other people say about you when you are not in the room.” I think online, all of those conversations in the room are actually happening in public. And they’re indexable, they’re searchable for people who are doing their due diligence on you. So, very important.

Second, there’s that old copywriting maxim that we talked about before, where there are things that you can say about yourself, but there are also some things that other people need to say about you and reviews present a wonderful opportunity for that. And then finally the world has changed very significantly to how business was done a couple of years ago. A couple of years ago, we had typically the benefit of in person connection, right? And that would be a wonderful conveyor of trust, with the shift to remote, some of that in person connection just doesn’t exist anymore. So we need to really raise the ability that our clients or customers have to develop trust in us. And online reviews is going to be a valuable way to do that. Cool.

Scott:
Yeah. Just on the quote with Jeff Bezos “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.” Not sure how true this is, but I’ve heard they always have an extra seat in the room at meetings to represent the customer and the voice of the customer. And what would the customer think about X or Y? So yeah, that kind of ties into that statement there.

Chris:
What a great idea. Very clever. So based on all of this, today we’re going to talk about a four step process for building your brand’s reputation online, using reviews. The great news about this process is that it’s relatively easy, straightforward to put in place. And I would argue that this is the highest return on investment activity that a brand can really do, if they’re running online campaigns. And the reason for that is if you cultivate a stellar reputation online, then that is going to be influencing all the people who are considering you, who see it, as well as the future people who might work for you on your team. It is going to be a lasting asset that is essentially written in pen. Maybe even chiseled into stone. It could be there 10 years from today and it’s either going to be working for or against you. So I’m a big believer that in order to do things like improve customer acquisition costs or influence conversion rates, we need to be thinking about the brand reputation and how that plays a part in the customer’s conversion journey.

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A Four Step Process

Chris:
So let’s jump into the four step process. A bit of an overview here. First, pulse. We need to understand who is happy and who is not, and have a quick discussion about some effective tools to do this. Second, once we know who’s happy and who’s not, we need a plan. Okay? Outreach, for example, to the people who are happy to request a review, they can share their experience with others. But what about those people who aren’t happy? What are we going to do with them? I would put to you that the best course of action is to identify whether it’s a fixable situation and then act accordingly.

After that, it’s populate. Populate is where do we want to build our reputation online? For a brick and mortar business, with a local presence, we might like to do Google My Business, which will often rank for the brand name. But if you’re in a specialist space, like perhaps you’re a software provider, SaaS, you might like to choose G2Crowd, for example, because a lot of your audience will be comparing there. And then finally, protect. How do we monitor and respond and why is it so important to be timely in our responses? How does that help? Cool? So, yep.

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1. Pulse

I’ll just jump in here. Pulsing. Pretty simple this one, fundamentally it’s about data collection and segmentation. Reviews are a result, they’re a result of experiences with your brand. We have to have our finger on the pulse of those experiences so that we can understand who’s happy, who’s not and why. Potentially configure our marketing to better adjust for that. But specifically today to be able to cultivate our brand’s reputation. So how do we figure out who’s happy and who’s not? Well at the simplest level, you could do a manual approach. And this is just about asking anybody who’s customer facing, “Hey, if a client is particularly happy or a customer’s particularly happy, please, put it in Slack, let’s build a list and we’ll talk about how we’re going to outreach to them later.” Let’s identify it that way.

However, if you’re a larger business, potentially even enterprise, you may want to be collecting this information on autopilot. At Reef, we’re not enterprise, but we want to use automation cleverly as often as possible. So one tool that we use is called Simplesat. Simplesat is fantastic in its simplicity. It will send an email to all of the customers or clients that you have. And the email will be as simple as, “Please tell us how we’re doing.” It’ll have a happy face, a neutral face and a sad face, much like when you go to an airport or to IKEA, when you’re walking out the door. “How was your visit today?” And based on whether or not somebody selects the happy face or the neutral or sad, you can then choose follow up messaging. And so the great thing about Simplesat is when a person fills out their happiness, that’s automatically ported into Slack. So our whole team can see it and then we can choose the best way to take action from there.

Scott:
And what do you think about timing when it comes to requesting the review?

Chris:
Super big point. There are going to be moments in each client or customer’s journey through your business where they’re going to be over the moon and delighted. I think it’s critical to understand what those moments are and to optimize your request accordingly.

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2. Plan

Chris:
And so let’s jump in to the plan bit, which sort of touches on that. So for the people who are happy, this is your opportunity to ask them to share their experience working with you. So for example, at Reef, we might say something like “It’s an absolute pleasure serving clients like you, we’d like to do that more often. If you could please share your experience, working with us, for others to benefit from, I’m sure that the market would really appreciate it and it certainly would mean a lot to us.” And typically that has helped us to generate positive reviews.

Chris:
In the event somebody’s unhappy though, Scott, in line with your point earlier, certainly don’t want to ask an unhappy person to share their experience online at that current time. They need to be treated with special care. I think you could look at, are they unhappy for legitimate or illegitimate reasons? If the reason is legitimate, “Hey, sorry the ball was dropped. A fix is required.” Corrective action may make sense to take of course absolutely does make sense to take for the long term, but fundamentally because these people have trusted your business and something hasn’t gone right and so there’s an opportunity to turn that around and potentially you can get a good review out of them later with a more compelling story itself. However, if the reason things didn’t go so well is due to illegitimate reasons, then it might make sense just to leave it be. Or just plan what the response will be if it ever does pipe up. That being said, there also could be a course of action to open up conversations again and get that person back on board. But that’s a case by case instance, I think.

Scott:
For a lot of the illegitimate reasons, quite often it could be in a communications or a perception problem that is quite easily resolved, something’s just happened on the wrong day, at the wrong time for someone and communicating about it and addressing it as and when it comes up, can quite often in my experience resolve those things pretty quickly.

Chris:
A hundred percent. And sometimes conflict, as uncomfortable as it is, both parties know that it’s necessary if you’re ever going to get to that happy place and you can actually build a stronger relationship by going through the fire a bit and both, in good faith, doing your best to get to where you originally wanted to go. And so I hope that, while it is a bit difficult to go through it at the time, it’s certainly worth it. And that can be motivation to do it more often.

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3. Populate

Chris:
Okay. Next one. Populate. This is where you get to choose where you want your reviews to live online. Now, sometimes your audience has already chosen this for you. And those places will be ranking quite well for people to see. And it might make sense just to go there straight away. However, if you’ve got a blank slate, you could choose, for example, Google My Business, which will often rank for brand searches and is great. If you’re a brick and mortar local business, or if you’re in a specialist category like SaaS, you might like to do G2Crowd. Essentially you are looking for a site that’s fantastic with SEO because they’re going to be good at showing up in search results for branded queries.

In particular let’s say, G2Crowd for example. If somebody is researching your industry and the total number of solutions out there, they might be on G2Crowd checking out one of your competitors’ reviews. If you have built a great reputation, that person who’s checking out their competitors is likely to discover you, which would take that person out of their decision making journey for your competitor, and essentially put them into your marketing pipeline, which would be wonderful. So I think there’s a really good case if you’re in a specialist category to explore the sites that are doing the best with SEO, that specialise in comparison, providing that, it makes sense financially to have a presence on those sites. I know sometimes there can be some management related charges there. Yeah. Scott, that make sense?

Scott:
Yeah. A hundred percent. It’s becoming more and more apparent that cumulative industry specific review sites, comparison sites, such as G2Crowd, Google tends to favour these sites quite strongly because they are quite a large trusted authority site in the eyes of the search engines. They do tend to have a presence for relevant keywords that the market will be searching for. So to have a presence on sites such as this, if it’s relevant to your industry, is a hundred million percent something to definitely at least consider as part of your digital marketing strategy.

Chris:
And you know what mate, just to pick on that word trust. How off putting is it when you’re doing due diligence on a brand and you see lots of five star reviews from people who don’t really mention their name, or it sounds like a made up name and they have one review. People can sense bullshit a mile away, right? And so having the person’s name and job title and all of those indicators of legitimacy that is mission critical and unbelievably overlooked in many cases, especially by smaller businesses.

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4. Protect

Chris:
Okay. Number four, protect. This is about making sure you’ve got your finger on the pulse of your priority review locations. Monitoring and responding to both good and bad reviews. One of the points about bad reviews is in the event somehow something popped up that’s bad, please think about that review as being like wet clay. If a review has just been published, that means that the person who’s published it is in that mindset. Like they’ve just gone to the site, they’ve written out their review and they’ve posted it. It’s all very top of mind, which means that there’s a higher chance of being able to turn it around quickly by responding and seeing if you can get them back on track. If that review sits for two days or two weeks or six months, that wet clay turns to very hard clay and the perceived effort to get that person to go back and amend it, I think will just decrease the chances of that ever realistically happening.

So once you’ve got some great reviews happening, please protect them by ongoing review monitoring. And before, we talked about some tools. There are plenty of tools out there. Automated software solutions that will help you keep a pulse or just something like a Google alert, which you can set up in search results and that’ll report to you if something’s changed.

So quick recap, pulse, plan, populate, protect, certainly not too complicated. It is one of those effortful activities, but it’s also a wonderful way to connect with your customers on a deeper level. Those happy clients and customers actually really enjoy sharing their experience with you. And again, one of the highest value activities in the marketing mix, because a positive brand reputation is going to help and influence every future prospect who sees it as well as your future team members too. And that’s going to have second order consequences on things like your conversion rates in campaigns.

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Looking ahead – Taking action

Chris:
So taking action, what could you do right now? If you felt, all right, I’m going to seize the day, I would encourage a great place to start to be, to go to Google and search for your brand plus the word review. When was the last time you did that? You might like to see what’s out there right now, where it is. To get a bit of a lay of the land and identify as well, what some of the sites that are ranking are. Then you could put these four steps into practice, pulse, plan, populate, protect. And I would suggest too, making a little annotation, perhaps in Google analytics or in your project management tool. Marking the start of these initiatives, because as you build a positive brand reputation over time, you’re probably going to see improvements to lots of different metrics in those analytics suites. So why not help the cause and effect become clearer for later? And so that brings me to the end. Yeah.

Scott:
Yeah, cool. And of course the brand reviews as well are tied quite intrinsically to the experience, the customer experience that somebody’s going to have with the product or service. So assuming everything is, as it should be, and the products or service is the quality that it needs to be, then don’t leave reviews as an afterthought to try to manage later or something separate to the overall marketing strategy. If your marketing strategy is user centric, as it should be and covers the whole customer conversion journey, then make sure reviews are built into that sort of downstream section of the marketing plan.

Chris:
You are so, so right on that, and we can’t speak too much about how our clients do things this publicly, but we can talk about how we do things at Reef and looking at all the reviews that we’ve generated 95% have been the result of proactively asking. Right? They certainly didn’t just appear because people are busy. And so reviews are absolutely something that a little bit of effort needs to go into, but with a very high return on investment for that effort.

Scott:
Cool. All right, Chris, I think that pretty much wraps up today’s topic. It’s been nice chatting to you, and any questions that anybody might have about this or about anything else, feel free to send them in. And we’re always open to helping people out with any further information that they might require. But other than that have a great day everyone, look forward to catching up next time and catch you all later.

Chris:
Thanks, mate. Bye everybody. Cheers.

The post Online Reviews: They Matter! How To Get More of Them appeared first on Reef Digital Agency.