Reviews

Reviews are an important part of your Online to Offline marketing tactics - even Google wrote about getting reviews. Reviews help for several reasons.

1. Good reviews help people make a decision to become your new customer.
2. A lot of rave reviews will offset the few bad ones you will receive. Yes, inevitably one or two people will have a bad experience with your business, be unable to accept everything you’re willing to do to make it right, and write about it online. It happenens. When prospective customers look at reviews, it will help when they see many good reviews and few bad ones.
3. Many reviews can help with search engine rankings.

How do you get reviews?

1. Include links to review sites, like Yelp, on your website
2. Ask happy customers in person to go to your site, click on the Yelp icon, and write a few words
3. Ask new customers to do the same
4. Reply to reviews, saying “Thanks” - which lets them know you appreciated the time they spent

It’s alright to ask your customers for reviews as long as you do not offer incentives. Getting reviews is a lot of work. Unless your business is a restaurant, people won’t easily leave reviews. You will need to ask and ask. It will pay off in seeing new customers walk through the door.

Look at what’s been accomplished - a website (which may or may not include a blog), optimizing for search engines to bring more traffic, expanding into social media and getting reviewed. Except for the price or building your business website, there has been no cost.