In Part 2, we talked about how to handle negative feedback on your Google reviews. Negative reviews can’t be avoided, but if you spend most of your time on them then you’re missing a trick. Your positive reviews are where the gold is at. When your customers sing your praises online, boost their voices!
Share Your Positive Reviews
A referral from an unconnected source is 8 times more likely to lead to a sale than an internal referral. This means that consumers are 8 times more likely to trust the word of your customers than they are to respond to your sales calls or ad campaigns. That’s not to say you shouldn’t be running advertising and sales campaigns, but if you’re not harnessing the power of the words of your happy customers then you’re leaving money on the table.
Read great reviews with your staff
Google reviews can be great learning opportunities for you and your staff. Send awesome reviews to your employees. Email them around. Talk about them in your meetings. Celebrate together that what you’re doing is working. Congratulate employees that get mentioned by name for their great service. Give them a bonus!
Use your positive reviews to identify the places where your team is excelling. If you can find out what’s working there, you can turn around and apply it to other areas of your business.
Pro Tip: Don’t just share the positive reviews – reading all of your customer feedback is an important part of getting a complete picture of where you’re doing great and where you need to improve. To read more about learning from critical feedback, see this previous post.
Share great reviews online
Sharing Google reviews online can be a little trickier. Here’s the best explanation as to why, straight from Google:
User reviews belong to the person who wrote them, even if they’re written on your business’s listing. You must obtain consent from the reviewer if you want to use customer reviews of your business for your own marketing purposes, such as on your website or in print or digital ads. You can reply to customer reviews to ask if you can use them in your marketing materials. Google cannot provide you with additional contact information.
In short – you can’t create and use a copy of a review without the reviewer’s consent. If you just got an amazing review from a happy customer and want to use it in your marketing material, it never hurts to reach out and ask!
One of the easiest ways to share your great reviews online is to share them on your company website. Remember – creating a new instance of the review with a copy/paste is a no-go, but sharing reviews with the use of a widget is completely above board. Widgets embed the reviews on your website without making a copy, linking back to the original review on Google.
Doing it this way might be a bit of a hassle to set up, but it’s worth it. Anyone can write a great fake review on their website. Real, actual Google reviews carry a weight and authenticity with your visitors that you just won’t get with a copied/pasted text blurb.
It’s Free Marketing
In short, when happy customers write great reviews, consider it the best kind of free marketing and boost their voices. But remember – those reviews aren’t technically free, you earned them by making your business the kind of place customers would want to write about. The best way to get great reviews is to be great.
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Positive reviews are a big deal for small businesses – but it’s often only the customers with a negative experience that take the time to log on and leave a review. If your business profile is short on reviews, check out How to Get More Google Reviews.
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If the thought of managing your Google reviews makes you want to delete the internet, take a look at the great things they’re doing at Lit Living. Their Google reviews service takes all of the guesswork and busy work out of maintaining your Google star rating, and I know because I’ve seen the results in my own showroom. With Lit Living’s Google reviews service, you can have your digital cake and eat it too.
