The Power of Online Reviews
Peter Brissette • Nov 01, 2016
Hello, Peter Brissette here, and I have a new video for you here this month. In this video, I want to talk about a new survey that was just completed in September from a company called Bright Local.
It is a local consumer search survey, focused on how consumers are using reviews right now, and their thoughts about reviews. I’m going to share my screen here, so that I can point out to you some of the highlights of the survey results.
One of the first stats is that eighty-four percent of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. Now I think this is significant because a personal recommendation, a referral, is the number one, most-trusted form of advertising; the most-trusted form of marketing that there is. Nothing is trusted more than that. Based on this question that was asked, and how the survey responders responded, they’re saying that most people, eighty-four percent, trust reviews just as much as that personal recommendation. That’s a big deal in my mind, because there is so much trust given to a personal recommendation. I think this is significant to the fact that reviews are very highly trusted in general. It’s one of the most important activities that you can do to help demonstrate to someone who doesn’t know your business; that’s not familiar with your business; on what kind of company you are; that you are a trustworthy business; that you can be trusted; and your reviews are a reflection and demonstration of that. This is a significant statistic.
The next one that I thought was interesting is that seven out of ten consumers will leave a review for a business if they are asked to. This is our mantra when we talk about our ReviewMeMarketing system to clients. There are really two things that you have to do: First, you must make it easy for them. So part of our tools and training that we do is to help you be able to do that; make it easy for your customers and clients to leave you reviews.
Secondly, you must ask (for reviews), and you have to systemize the way that you ask. This is pretty evident, and I totally concur with the stats that they’ve found. I’ve found this to be pretty similar, that most people will leave reviews if they’re asked, and if you make it easy for them to do that. Do you want more reviews for your business? You’ve just got to ask.
Next, we see that “Ninety percent of consumers read less than ten reviews before forming an opinion about business.” There are a couple of different ways you can look at this: You can look at like “Well, I’ve only got five reviews, so I don’t need anymore. Done. I don’t need any more than that.” But another stat we’re going to share here says that’s not the case, that, if you just have five, and never get any more, it’s not going to be as effective for you. It does mean that the reviews that they do see, the reviews that they do read, doesn’t require more than ten for them to form an opinion about your business. So if all you have is a few reviews, and a couple of those are bad, that’s going to be a challenge for people to trust your business. However, if you do have some bad reviews, but they’re from awhile back, then that’s not as big of an issue. We’re going to talk more about that.
Fifty-four percent of people will visit the website after reading positive reviews. You want to get more reviews (traffic) to your website to your website, have positive reviews. People are going to check out your website, because they want to learn more about your business. They’re obviously interested. They’ve trusted you enough to take the next step, to try to look more into your business to find out if you have the service or the product, whatever it is that they happen to be looking for.
Seventy-three percent of consumers think that reviews older than three months are no longer relevant. We were just talking about that, about the number of reviews that people look at, less than ten, typically, when making a decision about a business. But they also look at how old the reviews are. Are these reviews recent or not? If they’re recent, within the last ninety days, they’re going to have the most impact, be the most relevant. If you just got a negative review, it is a challenge. The best thing you can do? Get ten more positive reviews as quickly as you possibly can. Build up those positive reviews. As time goes by, and as the quantity goes by, it’s going to move that negative review down the spectrum and cause it to have less impact on how people are making decisions about your business.
Seventy-four percent of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more. Again, most people trust online reviews, and it helps people trust local businesses more for the most part.
Fifty-eight percent of consumers say that the star rating of a business is the most important. That overall average, that overall aggregated score that you have for your business, whether that’s three stars, three and a half, four, four and a half, five, that overall star rating is that quick glance, that zero moment of truth, “Z-mot”, as Google calls it, that zero moment of truth, where I have an instant to try to make a decision about your business, and one of the quick ways that people do that is looking at that overall star rating that your business has.
That’s what I wanted to share with you today. Just some quick stats from recent surveys on how people are interacting with reviews. It just tells me that reviews are continuing to be more and more relevant, that you need to be working on your online reviews, and we’re here to help you do that. If we can serve you in any way, please reach out to us and let us know. Thank you, and go Broncos!
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The last question that should we follow our competitors on social media? Sure, why not. You know, you want to see what they're doing and see what's happening there. You know if you're going to be active and you're really trying to use social to build your business then having a good idea what's what your competition is up to is probably important. And you know sometimes what I find with so called competitors is that we you know often times find people that we can collaborate with. It doesn't necessarily mean they are competitors so we work with a number of other marketing agencies and provides some services for them for their clients that they don't necessarily do, but they hire us to do it for them. So like I work with other marketing agencies, so they're not necessarily, you know, your competitor and everything. So but yeah, see what's going on you know, investigate, read up on them, see what they're doing, check out their websites, see what they're ranking for. You know, the more you understand the competitive landscape, the more you know what you should be doing and what you need to do.
And the last question that we have is, can you say more about running a test on TikTok yeah, I so I'm not on TikTok I'm not using tiktok. I wind up watching a lot of TikTok videos on Facebook and the Facebook reels. I think it's fascinating. I find it very interesting. But it's not a platform that I've taken the time to jump on at this point. Again, based on where I'm at with strategy and so forth, it's not a fit for me. But anytime you're using any platform, if you're going to do something, you want to come up with some means of measurement. How am I going to measure success? What does success look like? Is it I, you know, posted a video and I got a thousand views. Is that success you know or is it actually driving traffic and are you tracking how much traffic and then are you tracking what happened to that traffic? Did they fill out a form, did they make a phone call? Like what's the, where do you want that to go? So we really need to step back and think about that whole process. Of creating content, I'm pushing this through to, you know, to my website. And this is what I want to have happen. This is what I wanted the results to be. And then how am I going to track it? How am I going to measure it and do that so anytime you're spending, anytime you're doing something new in particular. Or you're spending any money you need to track it all the way through. All the way through.
The next question that we have is if you have a GoDaddy web page already and are having some issues, are you able to switch over somehow? You can build your website on any other platform and then just you just change the domain where the domain points. So yeah, you can do that anytime. Thank you, Peter.
Next question is how powerful are paid plans to things like Google Adwords or whatever it is called now regarding driving traffic, how can you possibly compete when you don't have the cash to put towards such programs? Yeah, so that's where you gotta get creative. So again we're small businesses and we don't have you know, unlimited funds to you know, just throw a bunch of ads up and you know compete with some other big companies so. Again, this goes back to what are the things I can really do better, because chances are your website is getting some traffic and it could be getting good traffic, but if your messaging isn't clear on your website, you're not getting them to take the next step. They're not making a phone call or filling out a form. So where I can put energy and effort is in that messaging and that and being very clear about who I'm working with, the problem I solve, how I solve it. So that whoever does come across my radar, I have a much higher chance of converting that person then someone else. So you know it's not the best product that always wins, it's who's the best communicator. And so that's why I talk about what you own and what you can't can control and making sure that is dialed in. And doing what it's supposed to do so that if you do go I, if I'm dialed in and I know everything is working well with my website and it's communicating clearly now, I can spend a small amount on ads and drive a small amount of traffic knowing that I'm probably going to get a decent amount of conversions because my messaging's on point and so I don't have to spend as much as the big guy. But I can be more effective because I've spent time working on the stuff that really matters. Thanks, Peter.
The next question is, we have a couple more here. What is your choice for a website hosting platform? So if you're going to host WordPress, my number one choice would be sitegroundsiteground.com That would be my top choice for WordPress hosting that, great support and all that. And again, you can have your. Domain on GoDaddy and it can point to wherever. It can point to Squarespace. It can point to site ground wherever it needs to go. But yeah, for WordPress site ground would be my top choice.
The next question is, can other businesses similar to mine attach to my website and then their ads show up on their Facebook page? No, I don't see how that can happen. Thank you.
The next question that we have is I used to utilize local provider gizmo to be able to personally update my website due to its ease of use. If you knew word you could do gizmo. Do you know of a website editing platform that would be as simple. I don't need an online store so our website just needs to be simple clean design that I can update content. So any of those platforms we talked about we believe with Squarespace can do that. Our platform that I mentioned can do that as well. So that's something that I know someone that was asking about that, I'll just give you my contact info. You guys you know can provide my contact info. If you're interested in looking at that, we can we can talk about that one-on-one Thanks, Peter.
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