As Valuable as Gold: Why Consumer Reviews Should Be Treated Like Currency

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How good reviews can take your business to the top.

By Aaron Boggs, RevLocal

You will never beat word-of-mouth marketing. A personal recommendation from a trusted source is the single most effective form of marketing that exists. It’s organic and can’t be manufactured or optimized.

It can be leveraged though — in the form of online reviews. Online reviews are a digital form of word-of-mouth marketing. In fact, nearly 90 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family. Reviews are a commodity that provide your brand with residual value in the form of consumer trust.

Online Impact Shapes the Entire Path to Purchase

The customer journey is a deeply personal and unique experience. It’s compiled of hundreds of micro-moments that, working together, impact decision making. Reviews are an incredibly valuable marketing tool because they aren’t confined to a single stage of the customer journey — they influence from start to finish.

Reviews help increase top-level awareness by positively influencing your brand’s local search rankings and expanding your digital footprint. Some industry leaders estimate that review signals contribute as much as 15 percent of Google’s local search ranking algorithm. This is significant to note, as some studies have found that nearly 90 percent of consumers use mobile devices to search for local businesses, and over half of all mobile search queries have local intent.

Reviews also carry substantial influence in the customer consideration stage. As I previously mentioned, the customer path to purchase may have recognizable patterns and similarities, but it’s a collection of unique journeys. Consumers read online reviews because they want to feel the emotions of previous customer experiences — positive, negative or indifferent.

It doesn’t matter what products you sell or services you provide — we’re all in the business of customer experiences. The brands that can make customer experiences positive, repeatable and memorable are the ones that will stick around.

Get in the habit of assuming each one of your customers is going to post about their experience. Are you doing enough to manufacture positive experiences consistently?

Review Generation Strategies That Actually Work

How often do you (or your franchisees) personally ask your customers to leave a review on Facebook or Google? Would you be more encouraged to ask if you knew that 70 percent of consumers would leave an online review if requested?

Online reviews need to become a part of your brand’s culture and operational fabric. Their importance must be communicated from franchisor to franchisee to employee to customer. As a franchisor, it’s your responsibility to find ways to inspire and incentivize franchisees to create positive experiences and generate online reviews.

You know you need to ask (and ask often), but how you ask is also important. Let me give you an example. I own a vacation rental and use Airbnb and VRBO to market it. The listing results algorithm on these platforms is heavily reliant on positive customer reviews, which is why I always tell my guests that I appreciate them taking the time to share their experience with me and others.

We’re all in the business of customer experiences.”

Now, if I sent an uninspired email that read, “Please let us know how your stay was by leaving a review,” I would probably get equally uninspired responses that don’t offer other potential guests much of an emotional connection.

Instead, I’ve learned that substance is created when you ask in a specific or personalized way. After a guest checks out, I may send a message that reads, “We hope you and your family had a great stay at our cabin. We take pride in helping to create lasting memories. To help us create more positive experiences for families like yours, please leave us a review and share what you liked most.”

By leveraging customer personas, you can modify how you ask customers for reviews in a way that helps shape their response by having them think about their experience in a different way. This subtle change in the ask can help elicit a response with more substance, emotion and influence.

How Reviews Improve the Lifetime Value of Customers

At the end of the day, revenue matters. Building a successful franchise brand is tough, which is why it’s so important to treat each positive customer experience as an opportunity to create an asset that yields residual value.

Consider these statistics from the American Express 2017 Customer Service Barometer:

Seven out of 10 U.S. consumers say they’ve spent more money to do business with a company that delivers great service.
U.S. consumers are willing to spend 17 percent more to do business with companies that deliver excellent service.
Americans tell an average of 15 people about a poor service experience — versus the 11 people they’ll tell about a good experience.

Consumers are willing to spend more on products and services if there’s an assurance that they will have a rewarding experience in exchange. However, you must be willing to support and invest in the entirety of the customer journey to maximize the value of positive customer experiences. Remind yourself that the journey doesn’t end with the purchase. Feedback in the form of online reviews is also a great way to improve future customer experiences, which in turn will help drive increased revenue.

Here’s the thing — online reviews are going to impact your brand, whether you have a strategy in place or not. The brands that embrace the power of reviews are the ones that will reap the rewards.

Aaron Boggs is President of RevLocal, where he is focused on continuing to evolve RevLocal’s personalized approach to digital marketing to help more local and franchise businesses maximize their online presence. Find out more about RevLocal here.