Take advantage of online reviews to boost your sales, improve your conversations and get in front of more potential clients. The FSB’s development manager James Anderson discusses how.
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Published in association with
ONLINE reviews are a powerful tool you can leverage to prove the quality of your small business to potential customers who are thinking about buying a product or service that you offer.
Online reviews are beneficial for different stages of a sales journey. For the customer, they help them to find a business, to trust that business enough to visit the website, to have confidence that business will deliver and provide transparent customer service.
For the business owner, online reviews can help you to understand how to make your business better and help you to build relationships and keep more existing customers.
Happy customers buy more, are advocates for that business and, importantly, cost seven times less to sell to than acquiring a new prospect. Customer testimonials can therefore deliver more sales by increasing reach, improving conversion and helping your small business to gather insights.
To make a sale, potential customers need to know that your business exists in the first place. Many people will use search engines to find and compare products from new businesses so it is important to increase your online visibility.
As part of your search engine optimisation strategy, online reviews can make your search listings more eye-catching and can prove the quality of your offering to the search engines.
When Google sees a website in any given position of the search results getting more than its fair share of clicks and users do not immediately leave after clicking, those websites tend to rise in the search rankings.
What this indicates to the search engines is that the website appears better able to satisfy the searcher’s question than others and, if the searcher stays on that website, it is also providing an answer to their question.
Search engines want to answer people’s questions. In turn, they reward websites that do this with higher search rankings.
The primary objective of any customer review website is to help to build trust between a potential customer and a business.
Because of the necessity for the review sites to be objective and trustworthy, the search engines are using the credibility of those review sites to apply credibility to the businesses’ websites.
Online customer reviews allow potential customers to consider how other people with a similar need or problem have experienced the business, product or service that they are considering buying. You can incorporate glowing reviews into your social media posts or marketing materials to build trust.
By identifying these key moments of indecision – for example, when reviewing product details or at the checkout stage – and by supporting those moments of indecision with strong social proof, it is possible to start turning the dial on sales conversion rates and get more prospects converting to customers.
Inevitably, when embarking on a customer feedback journey, negative feedback is likely. Negative online reviews are not to be feared. Any negative reviews will likely be the minority and provide incredibly valuable insight for you as they highlight opportunities for you to improve.
Unhappy customers are influential. On average, they tell twice as many people about their experience as a happy customer and the different ways they can distribute that experience via social media can have significant repercussions.
But if you can start using this extra data to identify the most common potential problems customers face and engage with any unsatisfied customers, you are able to temper their dissatisfaction and improve your business in the process.
James Anderson is development manager for the FSB’s Thames Valley region covering Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire.
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