If you’re wondering how important customer reviews are for your building company, the short answer is: very important. If you already know how important this is for your business, you can skip right past the “why” section of this article and delve into ways to generative more positive reviews for your company.
Why are these online reviews important?
A little more than half of customers are more likely to use local businesses more as a result of positive reviews and to trust these reviews as much as, if not more than, personal recommendations. As a building company owner, if you take an active role in your online review generation, you have a lot of control in the process.
While many people look at 2-3 reviews to determine which business to use, many people have more confidence in businesses when the review sample size is large. If you already have a few good reviews online, keep growing your sample size to increase validity.
How do you generate online reviews?
- Have a strong review presence on the major search engines. The vast majority of reviews online are on major search engines and social media. Ask customers to give you reviews on Google Places, Yelp!, Insider Pages, and your social media accounts.
- Designate a review space on your web site. If you already have steady traffic for your own web site, make it easy for your potential customers by putting the reviews right there with a dedicated reviews section and a landing page with a simple form for it.
- Create an e-mail campaign for generating reviews. Send a follow up e-mail to customers with a review form. Include review opportunities in your regular weekly or monthly e-mail newsletters as well.
- Have an e-mail signature with review links. All company employees who interact regularly with customers should have this signature.
- Maximize blog leverage. If you already have a strong blog going, encourage customers to leave reviews of products and services in comments. Create blog posts around these testimonials.
- Base it around your point of sale. Customers are most likely to leave detailed, positive feedback shortly after completing a sale or service. The sooner you can get that feedback, the better.
- Create case studies. Make this process simple by creating thirty second-one minute interviews with regular customers that highlight your building company’s products and services that they love.
- Maximize lead generation content. Add review links to existing lead generation content such as call-to-actions.
Where are you trying to get reviews?
Blog Post Written by Spencer Powell
Spencer is the Inbound Marketing Director at TMR Direct. Spencer specializes in helping clients create and execute effective inbound marketing campaigns.