You just got a stellar customer review and you’re feeling on top of the world. The feeling doesn’t have to end there — you can use that five-star review to boost your brand.
It’s important to learn how to use your customer reviews to your advantage, whether they’re positive or negative feedback. Your customers’ opinions about your products or your brand can help you improve your sales and marketing efforts, as well as any product improvements that you need to make.
Customer reviews also impact your brand credibility and future sales. According to Bazzarvoice’s research, 88% of the 30,000 global shoppers they surveyed use reviews to discover and evaluate products they wish to purchase. Their report also found that customer reviews are the number one feature that shoppers rely on when making informed, confident purchasing decisions — more so than product page descriptions or the website’s search tool.
This doesn’t mean that only positive reviews are useful to your or your customers. Negative reviews can help you identify areas of improvement for the product or even the buying process. Customers will also seek out negative reviews because that gives them an authentic overview of the product, and actually increases a brand’s credibility as opposed to businesses that generate a lot of fake five-star reviews.
Paying attention to your customer reviews is one component of social listening. It means that you are actively tracking relevant discussions about your products as well as the customer’s buying process. By practising social listening, you can identify ways to improve your customer experience and elevate your marketing strategies with customer reviews.
This article will take you through the ways to accomplish that.
5 ways to leverage customer reviews in your marketing strategies
You can maximise your customer reviews by incorporating them into your marketing strategy. We’ve shortlisted five tips to leverage your customer reviews and boost your brand.
1. Simplify the review process
No customer wants to be led down a series of screens before they can leave a review. The process of creating and posting a review should be simplified so that your customers are encouraged to share their feedback.
Customers are likely to be scared off by a lengthy lead-capture form. You don’t need to include 20 questions in a feedback form, even if you’re offering a discount in exchange for completing a review.
Simplifying the review process includes being thoughtful and specific with the questions you ask customers when requesting their feedback. If the questions are too vague, the customers might give an equally vague answer, or worse, exit the form altogether. You need to reduce the friction in the review process as much as possible. Use actionable language and make your form easy to understand so that your customers instantly know how to answer each question.
2. Improve the customer journey
Before your target audience is converted, they interact with your business through different channels such as social media, advertising or even brick-and-mortar stores.
These various channels refer to touchpoints in the customer journey, which contribute to their decision to purchase. Understanding and evaluating the customer journey can help you improve the customer experience and increase conversion.
Customer feedback is a major component of verifying whether or not the journey map holds. Reviews act as a litmus test of whether your experience with your business is comparable to your customers’ experience. You might have a clear picture of what the customer journey looks like, but reviews are the best way to confirm if your mental map aligns with reality. By assessing your customer reviews and identifying weak points in the customer journey, you can make improvements and elevate the overall customer experience.
3. Drive organic traffic with customer reviews
Showcasing customer reviews on your website can make your pages dynamic, and they can potentially spark a connection with your viewers.
In a way, customer reviews are a form of user-generated content (UGC) that demonstrates how real people interact with your business. Encouraging user-generated content is known to increase brand visibility and credibility as more people upload photos, videos or posts about your products and services. UGC is a vital aspect of building your brand presence and community online.
Customer reviews can also drive organic traffic to your website because search engines value customer feedback as a way to measure a website’s ranking. By showcasing relevant, authentic user-generated content on your website, you can increase the number of viewers that are receptive to purchasing your products and services.
4. Feature reviews on high-exit pages
The ideal exit page will be the order confirmation, but between that point and the initial landing page, there could be areas you could lose potential customers due to different issues — either with the page’s copy or layout. Using Google Analytics can help you identify high-exit pages and understand how to improve them.
A lack of customer reviews is one cause for high exits, so featuring them on these pages can help address this, as long as it’s in context. It won’t do if you just slap on customer reviews to a landing page that’s completely unrelated. You can highlight positive customer feedback about shipping and handling if your FAQs page has a high exit rate.
There are different challenges that could prevent conversions on your pages. It could be a dead end on your website or it might lack a call-to-action to keep people on the page. Well-placed customer ratings and reviews can remedy this and increase the viewer’s engagement with your website.
5. Engage your brand community
Your brand community is an invaluable source of customer feedback and insight.
When you introduce your business to social networking groups and show how you’re linked to a community with a shared interest or common goal, you introduce your business as an entity that does more than provide a product or service such as copywriting services. Having a strong brand community behind your business shows that you’re actively engaging with your customers and fostering good relationships with them.
You can create a brand community on different platforms like:
- Social media pages or groups
- Social media hashtags
- Online forums
- Email newsletters
- Podcast listenership
What your brand community shares on social media (i.e. social proof) can be considered as an extension of your customer reviews. The wide range of social networking platforms available has opened up more opportunities for individuals to share their experiences with products and businesses.
You can take it to the next level by selecting loyal advocates to share a customer testimonial. Aside from discussing their end-to-end purchase journey, a loyal advocate’s extended review can give potential customers a good idea of the buying process and how the product was able to uniquely support this individual.
Leveraging your customer reviews can expand your audience reach and engage your existing followers, increasing the likelihood of converting them to customers. By implementing the right strategies, you can incorporate your customer reviews into your marketing strategy seamlessly.
Want to get more out of your business’ five-star review? Contact us and let’s create that story together.
