Marcus RichardsSocial proof, whether it be through word-of-mouth recommendations or reviews posted on the internet, is the leading way that companies can demonstrate that they offer a high-quality product or service. A company that has no reviews doesn’t look particularly established, with a large number of 4- and 5-star reviews often being enough to persuade a new customer into hitting the check-out button.
Customer reviews are so essential that 90% of clients won’t use a business if it has under 4-stars on a rating platform. With the ease of leaving a review online, every business is now expected to display their general rating as well as other information about how past customers enjoyed their service.
Although it can be nice to collect reviews and display them on Google Business, customer reviews can actually go much further than just looking pretty. In this article, we’ll turn to four distinct ways that you can put customer reviews to work. Each of these will help further bring in more reviews, incentivize customers to engage with your product or service, and increase the number of successful conversions you experience.
Let’s get right into it.
Product Pages
One of the most obvious ways that customer reviews can be put to good use is by displaying them on product pages. Connecting reviews of products to those actual products will ensure that whenever a customer lands on that product page, they have additional information that could persuade them into making a sale.
In fact, 92% of online consumers will actively look for a product review before making up their minds about whether or not they’ll buy a product. If you create a reviews section for each product, you’ll be able to create a space where users can automatically go for more information.
This is an incredibly successful eCommerce marketing tactic, most commonly used by huge companies like Amazon. By having a site where you can display reviews and allow customers to get a better idea of what’s great about a specific product, you’re much more likely to convert them into paying customers.
What’s more, having this section also inspires others to write a review once they receive their product, generating even more social proof that you can use in other ways.
Advertisements
If your business requires a particularly shining review, you can actually make that the focus of a media campaign. People love social proof, with an advertisement that focuses not directly on your product, but on the reviews your product is getting for how good it is, helping to bring in new customers.
Creating advertisements that revolve around positive reviews is a great way of getting your name out there, focusing on the great work you’re doing a way of piquing the interest of others.
A fantastic use of customer reviews in subtle advertisements is to incorporate them into your email signature. Screenshotting a particularly great review and using email signature software to embed it in your sign-off is a seamless way of showing everyone that you contact just how great your business is.
Make sure you take advantage of every opportunity to include product reviews and promotions.
As a driving force of progress
Alongside positive reviews that simply state how fantastic your service or products are, some reviews will also contain useful feedback that you can incorporate into future developments. In many ways, a 4-star review that contains a useful piece of information on how you could improve your product is more beneficial to your company than a 5-star review that simply offers praise.
By combing through your reviews, you’ll be able to build up an idea of what your product does very well and what you could still improve. By focusing on these areas of improvement, you’re able to rapidly find areas that you can focus on in the future. Whether that be adapting a product model to further help clients or tailing your company’s offering to better structure support, there are many ways to improve.
More than just blind praise, product reviews can become a catalyst for improvement, helping you to create a better company in the long run. With this in mind, negative reviews aren’t always a terrible thing to occur, as they can provide valuable insight to make your business better over time.
Perfection is an illusion; you can always improve your offerings.
Case Studies
Especially if your business is B2B, case studies are a must-have as they actively demonstrate the skills you offer and exemplify the impact you’ve made. Case studies are a fantastic form of social proof as they not only contain real-life information, but they expand it into a whole story.
While a product review might give a star rating from 1-5 and include a short paragraph of praise, a case study offers the opportunity to explore the whole customer journey. Case studies for B2B companies allow any new prospective clients to put themselves in the shoes of a past client.
By moving through the case study, they’ll be able to find key information about how you structure your business processes, how you offer value to your clients, and quantitative facts that demonstrate the positive impact you provide. Case studies are taking the core concept of social proof and pushing it to the limit, expanding upon every detail and painting the very best possible picture of your company.
While product reviews sell B2C products as a great thing to buy, case studies demonstrate exactly why your company should be the service that any new client turns to. Nothing beats experience, with demonstrable past client work through case studies being a leading way to secure customers.
Final Thoughts
The success of a company can be directly tied to its customer reviews, with public perception making a big difference in how trusting customers will be with a business. But, going beyond an arbitrary number generated for your company, customer reviews can actually be incredibly useful tools in a number of ways.
Alongside generating trust in your business, positive reviews can be used everywhere, from promoting specific products to within marketing campaigns for your next big launch. Even when brainstorming new products or ideas for innovation, customer reviews can provide a fantastic launchpad, helping you to understand what your audience is looking for.
By putting customer reviews to work and incorporating them into the above areas, you’ll be well on your way to making the most of this vital social metric and improving your business strategy.
