Joining a Review Site

There are so many options out there when it comes to review sites that it can be difficult to decide which one to choose or what to do with the reviews once you start collecting them. So we thought we would give you some ideas and help you make the most of joining a review site.

The first obvious step is deciding where to begin collecting reviews. There are hundreds of options out there, it’s no wonder people become overwhelmed. One of the best places to start is looking at your competitors.  Are they collecting review? If so where? How often are they receiving them? This allows you to benchmark against what they’re doing and gives you a great starting point. Hopefully doing this will narrow down the amount of options you are considering and you can begin exploring the sites in a bit more detail.  At this stage, it is important to consider the logistics of your business and how you would fit would request the reviews. Do you have a CRM system that will allow you to email requests to customers or do you own a shop where it would be easier for them to give a quick review on Facebook. Everyone business is different and will find things work for others that don’t work for them and vice versa so make sure you spend a bit of time deciding what you think is going to work best for you and your business. Some examples of where you can collect reviews to get you started are;

• Trust Pilot
• Yelp
• Google Reviews
• Facebook
• Glass Door
• Trust a Trader

Here at Energy Advice Line, we use Trust Pilot and have found this works very well for us. This is because many of our competitors are there making it one of the first places our customers tend to check, as well as having some great features such as the ability to integrate the review feed directly onto our website. We have found this to work perfectly for us but of course this won’t be the case for everyone so we would recommend exploring the options first.

Some people will recommend joining as many sites as possible gathering reviews across them all, but we would actually say to do the opposite, or if you do want to try more than one then narrow it down to just a couple. The reason for this is, whilst you may gain a bit more exposure from joining multiple sites, it will be hard to monitor and track all sites. As well as this, your reviews will all be in different places making it difficult to build an array of great reviews in one central place. If once you have built up one review site, you decide you would like to join another, then ensure you are pushing an equal amount of customers to each site and always checking both sites for any positive reviews you can use in your marketing efforts, or bad reviews that you can try and resolve.

On most review sites, they require you to fill out a section normally titled ‘about you’. This is a really great place to sell your business to potential customers so it’s really important not to neglect this part. Make sure to make it clear exactly what your business is and what you are all about. Treat it like any other piece of marketing and make the most of the space you get. Similarly, if you choose to collect reviews via Facebook or Google, make sure you make the most of your page. Update things regularly making the most of the following you have.

We understand that for any business, the reason to join a review site is to start gaining lots of positive reviews. However, it is important to consider negative reviews and create an action plan of what you will do if this happens. According to Inc over 90 percent of consumers say an online review has convinced them to avoid a business. 80 percent say they don’t trust any business with a rating of less than four out of five stars. This shows that people are always checking review sites so it’s important to make sure when you do have a great interaction with a customer you encourage them to leave you a great review. Most people who are happy with the service or product will be more than happy to take five minutes out of their day to leave you a review so don’t be afraid to ask… the worst that can happen is say no but the more you ask the more chance you have of being left a really good review!

Once you begin receiving some reviews from customers, make the most of them by using them in your marketing efforts. Whether that is uploading them to your socials or quoting a few on any leaflets you may have, you should take advantage of the things people has to say, remember; people buy people! Seeing what others have to say will always instil a bit of confidence in any of your potential customers. A customer of Trust Pilot said  ‘It’s always been important for us to demonstrate to new customers that they can trust us; and the most impactful way to do that is to show honest and independent feedback from the people who we have already carried out a high-quality repair for’. This shows how beneficial it can be to have great reviews behind you when approaching or being approached by new customers.

We hope you find these tips helpful but if you want to find out more about how we gain reviews and the way we use them then please get in touch and we’ll be happy to give you some guidance.