There are plenty of things you can do to boost your image, generate buzz, and drive new customers to your business. You can slap your logo (or your face) on a bunch of promotional goodies and hand them out to potential customers. You can drop so much money on advertising it brings your financial advisor to tears. You can build an awesome website (complete with bells and whistles, of course), start a Facebook group, become a content generating machine… seriously, the possibilities are endless.
But there’s one thing that will do more to boost your image, generate buzz, and drive tons of new customers than just about any other trick you have under your sleeve – and it’s something money can’t buy.
We’re talking about… Reviews!
Reviews are one of the most powerful marketing tools on the planet. According to a 2017 study, a whopping 97% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses – and 85% of them trust those reviews just as much as a personal recommendation from a friend.
Online reviews have become the digital generation’s word-of-mouth, and word of mouth is always going to be a more powerful marketing tool than advertising. Consumers today are much hipper to the advertising game than they used to be, and they tend to tune out – or at the very least, take with a grain of salt – messaging they know comes straight from a brand. But when they read a review that was written by someone just like them? A review that sings your business’ praises? That they’ll listen to.
Which is why, if you want to take your business to the next level in 2018 (and start making the kind of cold, hard cash that goes along with it), you need to hop on board the review train and start racking up as many 5-star reviews as humanly possible.
You can’t afford NOT to care about reviews
Like we said, reviews are straight up powerful. Think of your online reviews like a bus driver, and they’ve got a bus chock full of 
every potential customer you could ever want. And they can drive those customers in one of two directions – either towards your business or away from it. Positive reviews will steer that bus (and all the customers in it) straight into your business, while negative reviews will steer them so far in the other direction you couldn’t pay them to do business with you.
Because reviews are so powerful, it’s beyond important that you get a handle on your review situation. You’ve got one shot to make a positive impression on your potential customers, and if that one shot is ruined by a bad review, it can be nearly impossible to recover. 40% of consumers form an opinion about a business after reading just one to three reviews – and if those reviews are negative? Well, you can kiss that customer goodbye.
On the flip side, if what that customer reads is positive, it can be the nudge they need to get in touch and start doing business with you. 73% of people said positive reviews made them trust a local business more. So if you’ve got a backlog of positive reviews to greet your potential customers, not only is it going to make them trust you – it’s going to make them want to do business with you, too.
The tricky part of getting reviews
In a perfect world, getting a ton of reviews for your business would be simple. You offer an awesome service, people use that service, they write a stellar review. Easy peasy.
Unfortunately, that’s not usually the way things go down. Because even though people read online reviews like they’re going out of style, not everyone is actually writing them.
Now, just because people aren’t singing your praises on Yelp doesn’t mean they don’t have positive things to say about your business. It just means they need a push in the right direction in order to get those positive things out into the world. So if you want to get a review out of them, you’ve got to ask.
When asked, 68% of consumers have written a positive review for a local business when they were asked. That’s 68% of your customers that would say “Sure, why not?” if you asked them to write a review. Think about the impact that could have on your business!
Moral of the story: Ask and you shall receive.
The secret trick you can use to become a review-generating machine
So, clearly, the secret to taking your business to the next level is generating a lot of positive reviews. Well, what if we told you we could make the process of getting reviews fast, effective, and oh-so-easy?
Spoiler alert: we can.
We’ve got a system that takes the legwork out of gathering and writing reviews. With this system, you can:
- Make it a total snap for your customers to write reviews
- Send out automated messages to your customers reminding them to write a review (ask and you shall receive!), saving you time and energy – and getting you a ton of reviews in the process
- Manage your reviews on over 160 of the internet’s most popular review sites from a simple, easy-to-use platform (no switching back and forth from site-to-site necessary!)
- Keep your reputation intact by catching negative reviews before they go live
- Automatically publish your most glowing reviews to your social media profiles and website
This system will completely change the way you think about reviews – and it will completely change your business in the process.
Want to learn more? Get in touch today for your free reputation report and we’ll take it from there.