When you’re researching a service (let’s say termite exterminator), what do you think when you see Bugs Be Gone has gotten an average of 2.6 stars by 8,439 Google users? What if the reviews are pretty bad — and the company has not responded to any of the negative reviews?  What do you think when you see Termite Terminator has a 5 star rating but only by four Google users? You’re going to skip right over them and look for a 4.5 star rating or better with a lot of good reviews. Just like your potential customers will.

Unless you have excellent ratings and reviews, you are wasting your marketing dollars.

Why spend a ton of money getting potential customers to check you out online if they are going to see that your top six competitors all have much better ratings?  You’re literally paying to drive customers to your competitors.  

Want to improve your ratings and reviews?

Grab your favorite caffeinated drink and read how to do it.

1. Find out where you rank right now.  You can’t improve if you don’t know where you are.  Google your company name and check that first. How many stars do you have? How many reviewers? What are they saying? (check out our upcoming post about improving your Google My Business Page for more info on that). Once you’ve done Google (by far the most important) do the same for Facebook, Yelp, and any other review site popular in your industry.
   
   
2. Read the reviews, especially the bad ones. Is there a trend to the complaints in the reviews? Example, technicians are usually late– and never text to say so? Do they walk through the house with their muddy boots? The silver lining to all those bad reviews–it’s giving you insight to what you need to address internally.
   
   
3. Reply ASAP to all the bad reviews. Bad reviews happen to everyone. Your customers understand that. What they are looking to see is how it gets resolved. When you, or your staff (or monitoring company– more on this below) see a bad review, respond as soon as possible. Thank the person for taking the time to respond, say you want to fix it and then take it offline. Contact them and see how you can resolve it.  If you respond to it quickly and to their satisfaction, the majority of reviewers are willing to change their review. The worst thing you can do is ignore them.
   
   
4. Reply to the majority of the good reviews. If someone came into your office and gushed about the stellar service she got, would you just sit there and ignore her? If someone is taking the time to give a good review, you should acknowledge that effort.  Remember, you want to encourage this. Of course, it’s hard to do this all manually. Which leads to…
   
   
5. Get software to help you manage your ratings and reviews– and get a lot more of them. There’s no getting around it. You are going to need some reputation management software to help you automate most (not all)  of this. This software will do three main things: One- get more people to review your service/product by automatically nudging them to give a review and providing them with convenient links to post it. Two-alert you to when there’s a bad review and it needs to be responded to immediately. Three – with prewritten responses (for both good and bad reviews) help semi-automate responses to the reviews. If you’re looking for reputation management software, here are some examples (note– these are not affiliate links, simply examples of the main players out there). https://www.reputation.com/ , https://birdeye.com/. Some people worry that more reviews will mean more bad ones. That’s true in absolute numbers. However, you will also be getting a lot more good reviews. And with the feedback you’re getting, you should be working to fix what people are complaining about. An additional way to prevent bad reviews from popping up, make sure it’s a good experience for your customers by…
   
   
6. Making sure to have a 5 star rating before the technician leaves the customer’s home (or the customer leaves the store). The best time to get a review is while it can still be fixed. Before a technician leaves, have them say, “Our aim is to give you 5 star service.  If you don’t feel it was 5 star, what can I do now to fix that?”

 

You may be thinking, who has the time or money to do this. When it comes to money, this should be at the very top of your marketing must haves. Reallocate whatever budget you have on your other marketing. Because, at best, your marketing will be grossly inefficient if it is digitally kneecapped with poor reviews.   As for time, if you don’t make the time, you’ll have plenty of it when you’re no longer working as the marketing director or owner.

Got more questions? Contact me here.