Reviews — An Important Sales Tool

Let's touch upon a fairly common problem encountered by entrepreneurs in both B2C and B2B sectors — "Lack of Reviews." This is a widespread phenomenon, and very often, when starting to develop a website, it turns out that the company doesn't have a single review, and if there are any, their content leaves much to be desired. This is quite a serious issue that urgently needs to be addressed.

Rest assured, your potential buyers and clients will think twice before making a purchase on your site or submitting an inquiry to you. They will conduct a thorough "investigation" to understand how reputable your company is.

Reviews about purchases, products, or services play a significant role in forming an overall impression of a company and making a purchasing decision. Despite the internet being cluttered with fake reviews and recommendations written in a cookie-cutter fashion by copywriters, people continue to trust them to a large extent. You need to remember that your potential clients will examine dozens of websites searching for mentions of your company and the products being purchased, and only after this will they place an order. Reviews, in this case, will play a significant role.

Typically, customers only leave reviews when they encounter problems or disagreements with a company. Getting positive reviews is not so simple, as people are often too lazy to write them and spend time on it (which everyone seems to lack). For this reason, you must make every effort to ensure that most of your clients contribute positively to your company's image. Here is a list of common methods for collecting reviews:

• Ask in person;
• Email campaigns following product delivery or service provision;
• Incentivize leaving a review with a discount or gift;
• Include reviews in a loyalty program.

Do not limit yourself to this list, as each industry can come up with interesting solutions that will have a good effect. If you've found a more intriguing option — share it in the comments section of this article.

Given the high trust index associated with reviews, it's important to carefully work on their content. In most cases, clients are ordinary people without copywriting skills or free time, so the success in this endeavor depends solely on you. I appreciate the recommendations given by John Carlton, a professional copywriter with 20 years of experience and successful projects for global brands.

Reviews should be sincere, substantive, yet concise, engaging, and interesting—they should be readable in one breath! Adhere to the "4 S's" principle: Specific, Short, Sizzling, and Signed. Avoid the "4 L's" principle: Long, Lame, Lazy-written, and Lacking a point.

Reviews, like other types of content on the Internet, can be presented in any available format: regular text, photos, videos, and audio recordings. It is advisable to accompany a review with a link confirming its authenticity (for example, a link to the client's social media account, or to the original review left on a specialized portal).

After a sale, always ask for a review. If the person does not want to write one themselves, offer to make an audio or video recording. This can be done using a regular phone. Multimedia reviews inspire significantly more trust. If necessary, you can always convert them into text.
When recording a multimedia review, you can ask questions in an interview format, thereby covering all the important information to form an impression of the company, product, or service.

Reviews and recommendations written by well-known and respected individuals have a significant impact. If among your clients there are such people, get a review by any means and take a photo.

Do not overlook negative reviews where people complain and criticize your company. Treat them calmly and view them as an opportunity to improve. Take measures to prevent or reduce such situations in the future and be sure to write a response to the author, apologize, and inform them of the measures taken.

In search engine algorithms, hundreds of factors are used to help determine the sites most relevant to a user's query. Among these factors are those related to reviews. Therefore, having reviews on a site positively affects its rankings. Moreover, reviews on a site retain the visitor's attention, improving another group of factors — behavioral ones. And they, in turn, also significantly influence the rankings.

From our side, we definitely recommend to Clients to place reviews on their websites (on all pages or on a separate page), both in the form of texts and as scanned documents, which evoke greater trust. There are also various catalogs where you can also collect reviews. For example, Goodfirms or Clutch.

The most traditional places for posting reviews are websites and corporate accounts on social networks. Social networks have become deeply integrated into our lives, making their interface the most familiar and user-friendly for the majority of your clients. Ask a satisfied customer to leave a review, for example, on Instagram — a user is more likely to agree if they are an active user of that network, and they are likely to follow your community.

Multimedia reviews can be placed on audio or video hosting platforms (such as YouTube). Popular multimedia platforms offer ready-made solutions for embedding content on your website pages, plus you can attract additional traffic to your site from the platform's audience.
The internet hosts quite a few specialized portals for posting and viewing reviews about companies, services, products, tours, and much more, but this topic is quite extensive and deserves a separate article.

With this, I conclude the introductory article, leaving the most intriguing topics for future publications. In the next articles, we will thoroughly analyze the content of reviews and internet portals for publishing reviews. Please write in the comments which topic interests you the most.

To conclude, I'll highlight the main points that you can keep and use as a cheat sheet:

• Reviews play a significant role in forming opinions about a company and making purchasing decisions.
• Always ask a client to leave a review. By any means possible.
• Motivate clients to leave reviews.
• Video and audio reviews generate more trust.
• Suggest topics for the client to mention in the review.
• Work with negative reviews.
• When placing reviews on website, ensure the authenticity of the reviews is verifiable.