Online Reviews Why they are so Important
There is no doubt, especially for a local business, your ability to get a continuous stream of great online reviews is THE number one competitive differentiator in 2014 and beyond..
Watch a video explanation of this chart on our training page here:
Online Reviews – Why they are so Important – Video Explanation
Online Reviews – Why they are so Important – A Processed Video Transcription
It’s Tim from Holistic here!
That’s it! Without a doubt, the jury’s back, the verdict is in.
Without a doubt, an online review is where the action is. Our clients have figured out how to get great online reviews.
The continuous stream of online reviews is doing significantly better than the ones that are not.
Online Reviews are Critical for Any Local Business
It is clear that getting online reviews is critical to moving forward for any local business.
This is why we are saying, without any doubt now, in 2014 and beyond, as we are moving to the future this is only going to get more true.
As a business, your ability to get a continuous stream of online reviews is the number one competitive advantage in the market that you can have.
If you are in a market, where you’re trying to convert clients, whether you got competition or not, the reviews are the single, biggest most important thing that you should be doing at a marketing level to get more clients from online sources.
I simply can’t overemphasize how important this is to understand and execute all. So let’s look at this data.
These tons of data online, research has been done to analyze the influence of online reviews and this is an amalgamation of all that data.
What I’m going to do is go through the highlights of that data so that you, without doing all the research and all the work, can just claim the key points – the key things that you need to understand in order to grow your business.
The General Trend Online
As a general trend, consumers are growing much more accustomed to consulting reviews when making purchases on all types of products and services.
Now, this is particularly the case if you have a local business. This works much more strongly.
It’s true, generally online, but, it’s much more true when you have a local business.
Fifty-seven percent! This means over half of people search online for a local business.
So if they are making a decision as to some company to work with other local levels, more than half of the people that use a local service search online for that local service.
Overall it’s 57%, 88% of those people read reviews to determine the quality of that local business.
So, in other words, the reviews, when they search online or find a local business, the reviews on the quality of those reviews are the major, by far the major. Almost 90% is the determining factor, is how they make a decision.
People Trust Reviews
The thing to understand about reviews is people trust reviews. They are driven by other consumers and they trust that much more than other forms of information.
So, if you have a website and you give the visitor to your website all the benefits, all the reasons why they should work with you, they should buy your product, understand that the reviews from other consumers equal credibility.
Another thing that is going to influence much more than anything that you say, is any benefit you provide, any evidence you provide, that your service is the one to use, it’s the online reviews that are going to influence the visitor much more than anything that you say on your website and that influence is on an upper trend.
So, it’s only increasing. It’s not going down at all.
Now, it’s important to understand the cycle that most searchers go through. They typically go through a phase where they just do research. They do searches online and your website may or may not show up.
They will go to the website they may be looking and they’ll look at somebody else’s and then they’ll look at another website and they’ll just be doing research to see what is out there and what’s available.
The importance of the review at that time is relatively low.
Another thing to understand about this is the majority of the time somebody doesn’t do a search and then goes to your website and makes a decision there.
They’ll do some research; they’ll spend a bit of time. They’ll look at one company, they’ll look at another company, they looked at enough company.
If they’re impacted positively by your website, they’ll return to your website.
Now let’s do some serious decision-making as to who they’re going to work with.
Consumers – From Research Mode to Buying Mode
Consumers typically go from a research mode to a buying mode.
When they go to that buying mode, they’ll put in a much more targeted lingering on the buying phase.
At that point, when they’re in buying mode, they’ll look at the reviews. They will look to see what other people have said about your products or services.
It’s that point when they’re in buying mode they are most influenced by those reviews.
This is why getting online reviews is so important when you want to get leads or buyers of your products or services.
So just think about that for a second.
When clients or when visitors to your website, or when people searching for your services are in buying mode, that’s when the reviews have their maximum effect.
You clearly want people when they’re in buying mode. This is kind of good to be in, but this is where you need to be for sure.
Go Beyond Ten Online Reviews
If there are just one or two reviews the impact is somewhat minimal. In order to have a really strong impact than you need to be up beyond the ten reviews level.
It’s having at least ten reviews gives you the maximum level of credibility from the searcher’s point of view.
It then used to be, in the old days, in the pre-internet days, that personal recommendation was one of the strongest things you could get to get a new client.
A key change in the marketplace is that online reviews weigh pretty much, as much in the visitor’s mind as personal recommendations. They’re as strong in their influence as personal recommendations.
So this should help you internalize just the power of these online reviews. It’s just like getting referrals.
It’s just like getting clients to give other clients personal recommendations associated with your service.
When they see those online reviews and typically, they’re often on some other website or in search results, what’s the next step? What do they do? This is the spread.
In more than half of the cases, the next step is they’re going to go from looking at the reviews to visiting your website.
So that’s the outcome; they’re going to look at the search results and then they’re going to land on the website or return to your website.
Fifteen percent, a significant percentage, are going to just pick up the phone and immediately call you after reading the reviews.
However, 22%, a bigger percentage, are going to look at your competition and they are going to compare reviews; they’re going to compare those reviews for the quality of the reviews, what the review is actually saying, and the quantity of reviews and how recent those reviews are.
So having a continuous stream of good quality reviews is really important if you want to capture those people that are doing that comparison much as a significant percentage.
Online Reviews vs. Testimonials
Some of our clients get confused by testimonials and online reviews and what the difference is.
In the following video we’re going to give detail on that; but, suffice it to say that testimonial is a note that you get from your client that you publish. Their credibility is very poor. They have minimal effect.
So it’s a good thing to have. It does help to a degree compared to testimonials, online review is the Holy Grail, is the gold dust, it’s the big influence impacted. These outweigh these dramatically.
It’s online reviews, online customer reviews, that you want if you want to influence decision-making in your consumers, not testimonials.
Does it have testimonials? This is where the action is now.
Where Online Reviews Should be Found
Where do you need to get clients leaving online reviews?
The answer is anywhere. Anywhere they can go and publish an online review is good news.
None of them are negative. They all help.
There are lots and lots of different places. There are probably at least 150 different online review places where people can leave reviews.
They’re all good to get. The more you have across different platforms the better.
However, there are some that are more influential than others and there are the big three that we see that are causing a positive influence.
Yelp
The number one by far in terms of its strength of influence is Yelp.
Between Yelp and Google, I’d say that something around two to one.
Getting a string of positive reviews on Yelp outweighs getting positive reviews on Google, two to one.
This is where you want to be if you’re going to start anywhere you want to be getting reviews on Yelp.
The catch to this, the other side of that coin, is it’s the most difficult to get reviews on.
In the following video, we’ll talk specifically about Yelp and how to get reviews on Yelp. But suffice it to say if you can, this is where you want to be getting your reviews.
Google Local
Second to that way out in front of any others is Google Local.
This result shows up directly in the search results and they influence the buyers, big time!
This is the second most important place to get reviews.
Then there’s a big gap. This one applies really only if you are in the Home Improvement marketplace.
If you have a product or a service for people that are doing remodeling or building a home or adding some kind of a new feature to a home or buying something for the home.
Houzz
Then Houzz, this is Houzz by the way, is very, very strong.
We’re hearing from our clients and we see data online that supports the fact that Houzz is very influential and drives a lot of lead generation and purchase decisions.
After this, there is a whole slew of different places to get reviews.
Bear in mind, this is the place to start, and these are the ones that you want to focus on above all others.
This is why we say in 2014 and beyond, your ability to get reviews is a competitive advantage that you can have.
Get a Continuous Stream of Online Reviews
You need to be getting a continuous stream of positive reviews; because it is the recentness of the reviews, it is the quantity of reviews, and it is the quality of those reviews that is going to strongly influence decisions to click and visit your website.
It’s going to influence buying decisions, it’s going to influence people to pick up the phone and call you.
One last footnote to this whole process is there’s a whole process around how to get reviewed.
You don’t actually ask for reviews, you should be asking, “Did you love our service?”, and by asking this question, you are more likely to get people to leave you reviews.
Training at Holistic Web Presence
The rest of this training and the rest of the videos is all about we have established that you need to get online reviews but how exactly you go about doing that.
Holistic Web Presence created some tools to make that process easy for you and we’ve created a stream of tips of things that you can do to change your behavior so that you have a much greater chance of getting reviews in the first place.
We also talked about if you have an organization where other people are involved in this process, how to make that work in another company as well.
