021: Getting More Positive Reviews For Your Business

Title: Getting More Positive Reviews For Your Business

Guest: Chris Goldman

Peter: Welcome to the Biz and Life Done Well podcast, where we explore what it means and what it takes to do business and life well. I’m your host, Peter Wilson. If you’re like me, you’re intrigued by stories of common people who have achieved uncommon success in business and life. Join me as I interview fascinating people about how they got started, their successes and failures, their habits and routines, and what inspires them.

Peter: I’m joined by Chris Goldman. So the thinking about today that we’re talking about really has to this keyword, that Pete’s gonna talk about is reputation, because your reputation is everything in business. You guys know that, but reviews play a big part of that. So Pete, kind of walk us through this. This is one of your areas of focus at biz marketing.

Chris: Yes, it is. A couple things that we see that businesses realize they may have a problem is when they see competitors that seem to be getting more business than they’re getting. You see somebody that’s getting more new business, you’re like, that just doesn’t make sense. Or your cost per lead is skyrocketing. Or overall the community is growing but your business is shrinking, there’s lost revenue and you’re lost, you you could know, potentially be losing sales opportunities and not even know it.

So reputation is just extremely important. So we’re gonna try to peel the onion a little bit on how to get a handle on reviews. And I think the most important thing most business owners wanna know is how do I get more positive reviews? So we’ll talk about that. And everybody is reading reviews and that’s the key for everyone to know and there’s data to back that up.

Look at

Peter: these stats. Pete, walk us through these.

Chris: Yeah, so this is data that we get from a company called BrightLocal. They do an annual survey. They’ve been doing it for the last seven years. 82% of consumers are reading online reviews for local businesses. 52% of 18 to 54 year olds say they always read reviews before they contact a business.

And the average consumer is reading 10 reviews before they have a feeling that they’re able to trust a business.

Peter: Yeah, I know that that’s the case. I’ve been watching in anticipation of today. When I’m going to Amazon furniture stores this last week looking for products, how many reviews am I reading before I’m satisfied? And I do something that a lot of your customers are doing. I will read the reviews and if they’re all positive in those first seven or eight, I will intentionally look for a bad review and find out why did they give the bad review because there there’s bad reviews and good reviews and we want to talk about the positive reviews first.

So talk about that Pete, what do we do with positive reviews, how do

Chris: we get them? Right, well so let’s talk about the benefit of a positive review. Everybody really, I mean, it should be obvious, but I think it’s worth repeating that when you have positive reviews, it’s showing potential customers that you are delivering on your promises and that you can be trusted. And when that happens, the consumer is gonna A, consider you because they may rule you out completely if you don’t have any reviews or just negative reviews. So they’re gonna consider you and contact you.

An interesting data point that I read recently was that they also spend more money. If a business has excellent reviews, they’re typically more likely to spend more money as well with the business. So I feel that’s super important for people to understand. It’s not just getting the business, it’s getting the business and getting more revenue associated with that. And we’re assuming that all the companies out there want more revenue, right?

Well, yeah. I mean, if you don’t want more revenue, just click out of this yeah. And And what you’re after. So Google your business is a pretty big deal where reviews show up. Right.

And

Peter: they show up, you’ve got it circled here. What are we

Chris: looking at? Well, so what I want everybody to do is I want them to go after this webinar. I want them to go, there’s a little bit of homework. I want you to go and Google the name of your business. And what do you see?

Now you should see on the right side, if you’re on a desktop computer or a laptop, on the right side of the screen, you should see this thing that I have shown here. This is called Google My Business, the Google My Business profile for your business. And it’s a free thing that every business can have. And this is where Google reviews live. And you can see Google obviously thinks they’re important because near the center of the, just right up front, they’ve got the reviews the Google reviews.

So if people are talking about Google reviews, I just wanted to be clear, these are the reviews we’re talking about. These are the reviews that show up in your Google My Business profile. We also call that GMB for short.

Peter: Google My Business, right?

Chris: Pardon me? Google My Business. Yes, Google My Business. So this is what it looks like. You see that the rating there is 4.6, kind of a story behind that.

Somebody gave me a negative review that was fake and I responded to it. But we’ve got 10 reviews. This is for our business here. This is a picture of our office. You can see our location and outside our office as well.

So this is extremely important. But I want you to do this. Google the name of your business and see what pops up. In addition to that, I want you to Google the name of your business plus the word reviews.

Peter: Okay.

Chris: So two things. In our case, when I did it, Glassdoor popped up. Glassdoor is a review site for employees to rate their experience with an employer. Have one, this was an intern that we hired a few years back, and he was a Glassdoor user and left a review for us. And then we have Yelp reviews here.

So again, this is two things you can do today just to get a gut check of where you’re at for your business online. Google your business name and then business name with the word reviews. Okay.

Peter: Now we we talk a lot in business about in marketing about creating a sales funnel. How are you capturing leads? All of that. But there’s also here what we might call a review funnel, and Pete’s gonna walk us through this really powerful stuff here. As we talk about getting customers into this funnel of reviews, guiding them through the review process and monitoring and responding.

And for all the business leaders, I want to tell you this, it’s not just something Pete’s good at teaching you about. It’s something that he’s really good at creating for you. So walk us through this, Pete.

Chris: Sure. So far we’ve covered the value of reviews, why they’re important, why it’s good to have, why you need a reputation, you want your business to grow. But the biggest question most people have is, well, how do I do that? And so this is what we recommend. We recommend a review funnel for your business.

Now, this is also the product that we are offering at a discount as well. But there are other vendors out there that you can get this from, and they will refer to it in a similar fashion. We like to believe that ours is the best you can get. It certainly provides a lot of value to our So what you’re doing is you’re trying to get more positive reviews. That’s why we’re here today, right?

Well, so what a review funnel does is it really allows you to figure out what people are doing on every step of the journey. So the first thing you have to do to get people to give you a review is you have to get them into the funnel. How do you do that? Well, you have to ask them. And then once you get them into the funnel and ask them for a review, you guide them through the review process.

So you ask them what was their experience like with your business? And then finally, if they leave you a review, you monitor the reviews that you receive and then you respond accordingly. So I’m gonna go through each of these steps now, which should be helpful for any business. And again, this is fundamentally the way most review funnel software works. And by

Peter: the way, I was with one of our clients yesterday as a customer and when I got home it said, you know, sent me a would you be willing to review our business? Yeah. And it guided me through this.

Chris: So I was living this process yesterday afternoon. So today I’m gonna talk about, I’m gonna use Kings Heating, that’s one of our clients as an example. Great company. Yep, we work with other HVAC vendors as well. Energy Works is one.

And this is just the one that I happen to have in front of me. So the first thing you wanna do is you wanna ask somebody for a review. Well, how do you do that? Well, first of all, a business has to ask all their clients for a review. You can’t cherry pick customers.

If you just cherry pick your customers and don’t ask everybody for a review, then you’re losing in two ways. One, you’re missing out on potential positive reviews that you may have received from other people that are your customers. And two, there might have been some negative feedback about your business that you didn’t get, and you need to get that to figure out what’s happening. So what I have on the screen here is an example of a card that we provide. It has nice rounded edges on it.

And it’s a business card size that has a specific URL for the funnel for King’s Heating. So this is how they get started. So this is, if you were talking to a client and you were done with a client or a customer and you were done with them, you could say, and they’re just raving about their experience with you, you could just say right then, how would you feel about giving us a review? Great. Boom, hand them one of these cards.

So we provide 500 of these cards initially when you sign up for the program. Give these to the customer. It’s got the URL on there. It’s got a QR code, which believe it or not, QR codes are actually kind of coming back because Apple decided to build in the QR code software into the iPhone camera.

Peter: Well, in Amazon, just for everybody to know, Amazon for returns now has moved almost exclusively to QR codes, and so more and more of your customers are getting used to using them on a regular basis and seeing them. Right.

Chris: So you ask for a review. You can email a request with a link. You can send a letter with this card or you can text. You probably received a text from the dental practice perhaps? Yeah, this is just the gateway to this beginning of the funnel, the review funnel.

Peter: So once you ask, go ahead. Well it’s important that once you ask you’re gonna send people somewhere and what they experience when they get there is also critical.

Chris: Yes. So this is the example that I am using today. This is our landing page, review funnel landing page. So this resides on a URL that we provide the business, so it’s a very unique URL. And it’s just the first step.

Please review your experience with us. Just click on the number of stars. Now, we have various options for this. We have a thumbs up, thumbs down one too. So you could say I had a good experience, had a bad experience.

That doesn’t always capture the nuance. So we can experiment with your business and see which one you prefer, but we’ve got different versions. This is the most common version. So what the consumer does, well, first of all, they see your logo, so they know they’re in the right place. Simple instructions, just click on the stars, and it works on mobile devices as well.

And the domain is actually reviewsof.us or reviewsofus, which is a domain that biz marketing owns. So again, this is step one. This is what it would look like on your phone, on your desktop, all the same. Now, what do you do when they click one, two, or three? Yeah, this is what happens.

So, and it’s inevitably gonna happen where somebody’s gonna click one, two or three stars. Three stars, first, let me talk about three stars. Three stars in this day and age is a negative feedback. That’s not, you know, we think about maybe when we were going to school and a C was average grade, it’s supposed to be okay. Well, a C here is negative.

So maybe there’s grade inflation, I don’t know. Three stars is not good, so let’s just start off with that. If they click on one, two, or three stars, this form pops up. And you’ll notice what it says here. We strive for 100% customer satisfaction.

If we fell short, please tell us more so we can address your concerns. So what we’ve given the consumer the opportunity or the customer the opportunity to do is actually air their grievance, tell you what went wrong, what happened, This does not create a review online. This is a form that is sent directly to the manager of the business. And then you can fix it. So read these, find out what went wrong, and fix it.

And I’ve talked to a lot of business owners that have received these, very surprised that something went wrong. They thought everything was great, didn’t realize that there was one little thing that the customer was a little torqued about, and they were able to quickly get on it and help that customer. Which, by

Peter: the way, left unchecked damages your business time and time again without you knowing it. So the one, two, three star ratings can really be helpful. But we we all wanted the four and five. Right? So it’s a different landing page for the four and five.

Chris: Right, right. So this gets emailed to you, then you can respond to the customer. This is just an email that gets sent to you. But if they click on the four star or the five star, it’s a different experience here. So the four star or the five star is where you can invite your happy customers because they clicked on four or five stars to share their experience about your business.

So now you’re saying, hey, you gave us some feedback, Would you share your experience with others? And there’s links in this case to Google, Facebook, and our website. Now remember, we went back when I showed earlier where the Google reviews live. Google reviews are extremely important because they actually use them for ranking websites in the search engine and in the map listings that they show when people search. So Google reviews are super important.

Facebook reviews are important. Our website as well, which is an internal one. So these are easy links for people to leave. Now, one of the things that I will mention is that technically, or according to the terms of service for Yelp, you’re not supposed to ask for a review on Yelp. Now, some businesses have insisted, and there is a way to have that added here, but that’s not something we push businesses to do.

We do have some specific concerns about doing that with Yelp, but we can certainly monitor your reviews on Yelp and help a business with Yelp as well. So these are direct links. Again, we’re just trying to make it super easy for somebody to leave a review. And if they still have concerns, they can still click on this little Contact Us button here and they can leave their thoughts.

Peter: Now wait, once they get to Google review and they leave their thoughts, they still have the option of giving you a one, two,

Chris: or three star rating, correct? Yes, they do. Yeah. So this was, are just, what we’re really attempting to do here is make it much easier for them to leave that positive review. And ultimately, they want to leave a negative review, that’s up to them.

You’ll have to deal with that. And we’ll talk about that in the Q and A section as well.

Peter: Nice. So that’s where you’re at, is monitoring and responding to the different reviews and talking about the Google review as you go through it.

Chris: Right. Yeah, So, so we’re not quite there yet. So this is what the Google review looks like on the screen here. So I just wanted to have a quick example of that. If you click on that Google link and you’re logged into Google, this is what it looks like.

So it’s super easy. They can just click, click, click and post a review for you. They may not type anything in, just FYI. Then that’s why sometimes you get a review that just said five star and there’s no comment. But I noticed Google is now adding these little tags.

You can click on good quality, good value, that sort of thing, which is helpful. So that’s Google. So the next thing that you mentioned, Chris, though, is monitoring your reviews. So now that you’ve got positive reviews or reviews, you want to monitor them. So this is a dashboard.

And what we do is we want to make sure if a new review shows up online, you get notified every day whether or not it was positive or not. If it’s positive, we want you to go in and thank the customer for the positive review and you can do that directly through the service or you can go onto Google and do that as well, but we have a dashboard that makes it pretty easy to do. And sometimes people leave a positive star rating, but they may not give a positive feedback. So you kind of want to read these anyway because occasionally you get kind of a backhanded compliment in a review and you want to maybe follow-up with that person and see what the deal is about that.

Peter: And I can’t emphasize enough the importance of however you’re getting reviews. The fact that you can have a dashboard that allows you as an owner, as a manager to go directly to them and process them quickly is gonna make it more likely you actually do. If you have to hunt this stuff down or you’re not paying attention to it, you can, have business dropping, not knowing why. And then somebody says, hey. Well, you got a couple of really bad reviews online.

Are you aware of that? The dashboard prevents you from missing that, and it makes it so easy as a owner, as a manager to address them quickly and just be part

Chris: of your routine. Now you’ve gotten reviews, you’ve monitored them, you’ve responded to them, and now you’ve got a bunch of positive reviews. Well, the next thing that you want to do is you want to stream those positive reviews onto your website. So we have software that we can input on your website or you can have your web developer do that, that puts this really nice stream, if you can see this here, it takes the quotes of what the people said and it puts it directly on your website. And if it’s like a Google review, there’s a link to the underlying review.

The nice thing about it is if somebody comes to your website, they want to read reviews about them. You don’t want to say, oh, go to this other site and read my reviews because then they’re going to get lost looking at that site. So you want to have the reviews listed here. The other thing, so you want to make it super easy. So this streams automatically and every time a new positive review is left for you, it gets updated.

And this is in chronological order. And the reason chronological order is super important is that reviews, people, we value as consumers more recent reviews more than old ones. So if I see a review that and it’s like, their most recent review was June 2 and then May 26 and then May 21, right? Those are recent reviews. That means this is relevant information.

But if they’re not relevant, or I mean, if they’re old, then you’re gonna discount it.

Peter: Yeah and it also says something really important during this season. I mean remember we’re talking about how do you navigate this specific season. So I deal with another company that I won’t name out that I had some equipment that I was required to return to them. And I’ve gone back to their store probably five or six times and finally waited online online online to find out when is that store opening. And the parent company had to look it up and say, well, we’re not sure we’re even gonna open that one back up.

But you couldn’t find that online. You couldn’t see anything. If I’m at King’s Heating in this example, and I get to re review those 10 reviews that I’m gonna look for before I do business with somebody, I know that not only does their front website say, Hey, we’re open. I can see that they’ve been doing business during this time. As, as early as just a few days ago, they have somebody who’s finished the project and already uploaded it and I can see that going along.

You can see they’re active and that’s one way that they are smartly navigating this time. Exactly. You stream them now. I want to do something real quick. I want to encourage you.

We’ve got a couple of questions already in. If you have questions about reviews and how to respond to them, anything about reviews, put those in the q and a. We’re about to do a q and a session. But before we do that, I want Pete to go back to what he he’s offering you today. Sure.

Just kind of as a, hey, we’re here to help.

Chris: Yep. So yeah, so we’re offering a free review audit, and this is using some tools that we have available to us where we can go out. We just need to get the information about the business, the address, phone number, and some other information. And then we can plug that into our system and run a report and provide that to you. So that’s really important.

One of the things I didn’t mention with respect to our platform is it automatically generates a monthly report as well. So if you have somebody in your organization that’s monitoring this on a daily basis, you could just let them do their thing. And then on a monthly basis, you’ll receive a roll up report that shows how well your business did with respect to getting more positive reviews or reviews and if something negative happened as well. So that’s included. The monthly reports are included.

So it’s sort of similar to this reviews audit that we provide.

Peter: So we’ve got some questions here Pete. Are you ready for those?

Chris: Sure, go ahead. Okay, the first

Peter: one is a great question. Natalie, thanks for submitting this. Which websites do you check for the reviews? Facebook, Google, Yelp, etcetera. Now, I know we kinda cover some of that, but I love the focus of this question that’s on the spectrum.

So talk about all of these.

Chris: Right. Yeah. So so clearly, Google, we check Yelp, Facebook. And those are kind of the top sites just in general. But there are additional sites that I would want to mention.

So for example, there are specific industry related sites. So if you’re a lawyer, there’s a site called AVVO, A V B O, and there’s some other sites. If you are in the travel business, there’s TripAdvisor and our platform can actually connect to some of those. So we do industry vertical ones. I know for the dental practices, there’s some specific sites as well.

There’s some called, I think there’s one called Web Health and WebMD. There’s some doctor related sites. There’s some holistic natural wellness sites as well. So our platform can monitor and connect to about 50 different sites. And I see a question, booking.com.

I believe it does connect to booking.com. So I will need to verify that. But I will get back to you, Natalie, with that question.

Peter: Also, now let me ask you a question. Is it that if you have a website, people can review you?

Chris: If you have a, well you don’t even need a website technically for people to review you if I understand your question correctly because a lot of these platforms will go create a profile for you, for your business, whether or not you ask them to. And people can start leaving reviews for you. There might be reviews about you at some site you’ve never heard of that people just started leaving reviews on.

Peter: So it’s really a question of do you want to be reactive or proactive? Is that what I’m hearing?

Chris: Yeah, yeah. And some sites are not necessarily relevant. I mean, so I wouldn’t some sites are just not necessarily I guess they’re just not relevant for business. Our platform would even do Amazon reviews for products as well. And I have something in the office that just used that as a keyword and woke up because I used the word starts with an A.

Exactly. Yeah, the thing is it really depends on the type of business you’re in and what your goals are. And so we look at that with the business. We don’t just say there’s one size fits all. Are there

Peter: any businesses that you can think of that shouldn’t be worried about handling reviews?

Chris: Am hard pressed to find a business that shouldn’t I think there some spaces where it’s very challenging and difficult, I would tread lightly, especially in the medical fields because there’s HIPAA related things, therapy, and things like that. So there are some fields where there are some specific restrictions on the way, but even if you are in that field, I wouldn’t shy away from it in the medical field, for example. Like we work with chiropractors and the such. So one of the things we do is we don’t show the last name of the person that left the review in the review stream. It just says their first name and then their initial.

And then if something shows up in the review stream on the website that’s not appropriate, we

Peter: can turn it off That’s as really important. You know, one of our clients is a, runs the nonprofit, clinic. And for them, it’s not just important to have, good good reviews, for the people who are coming to get services, but for their donor base is also really important. So all of this is really critical to business. Okay, Pete, word.

What do you want to tell our people we’re out of time? What do you want to share with

Chris: them this last minute? Well, I would encourage everybody to take a look at their again, you can’t ignore this. I mean, especially in this day and age, online reviews the funny thing is I’ve been doing online reviews for more than ten years. I used to work in the automotive space, and that’s kind of where it all got started. And these days, it’s just continued to grow and grow and grow and grow and grow.

And it’s not going away. And you can’t neglect it any longer. I mean, with everything with the coronavirus crisis and people are just doing so much more online. You cannot ignore the online space now. So I encourage you to do that.

And I also encourage you to take a look at our free offer. And if you’re interested, you can reach out to us and let us know that you want to take advantage of the setup fee. If you want to learn more about the program as well, you can just use that same link there, bizmarketing.com/reviewsaudit. There’s a form. You can just type in your questions and then we’ll get back to you.

Peter: Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms. Please tell your friends about us, and leave us a review so even more people will find out about us. Thanks again. We’ll see you soon.