How to use Google Reviews for Marketing?
You already know about Google reviews and Google ratings. That’s cool. Do you know that these Google reviews and customer feedback can be used in your marketing strategy to motivate more customers to engage with your brand?
Nope. It’s not a foggy idea.
People believe people. They have a hard time trusting company advertisements. But it is very natural for a person to have faith in another person’s words. This is why testimonials and customer reviews are marketing gold.
The majority of brands limit customer reviews to review sites. They miss out on the potential of these nuggets of customer feedback to get more customers. There are numerous ways google ratings and reviews can be utilized in the marketing machinery.
Table of Contents
Let’s begin with the obvious one. Social media channels like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are the best options for content propagation. Marketing teams are anyways short on content. Google reviews make for great content.
You also get the liberty to tag your actual customers. This grants an additional layer of credibility to the review. You can post a link to the review or create a graphical image of the review. If you have a good budget you can add a voice-over reading out the review and post it as a video.
One thing you should do is thank the customer for the review. This creates a possibility of getting additional comments from the customers as well. Imagine you see a company tagging and thanking you.
Any person is likely to share this post, as well as like and comment on it. Now you have not only got social media engagement, but also visibility on the customer’s wall. In a way, this visibility serves as a recommendation of a sort.
Aggregator
Another great place to boast about your fabulous reviews is aggregator walls. While we are on the subject, check out the Kooyal aggregator. It goes very well in combination with Kooyal reviews. You can link the two and have your best reviews automatically displayed on your aggregator walls.
If you don’t have Kooyal aggregator, you would have to first sort out your reviews and post them on social media. These posts are displayed on your aggregator walls. These in turn can be displayed anywhere.
Most companies display aggregator walls at their retail outlets, events and websites. You should advertise these at any places which are customer-facing. You want your present and future customers to see what wonderful things your past customers have said about your brand.
Read more: How to use social media aggregator apps to make your website more engaging?
Website
Customer reviews give a great amount of credibility to a brand. So naturally, you would want to display them on the website. Even most website templates have a section for testimonials. You can display this in form of aggregator walls or create an RSS feed sort of section. This should also be linked to the google review site.
A website is usually the first place anyone would come to get information about the company. As they learn about your companies and products you should also show them how it feels to be associated with your brand. This is where google reviews are crucial.
Read more: How important is social media wall for brands in 2021?
Most companies send out a newsletter to clients, investors and customers. These usually include achievements of the company, upcoming projects, future visions and so on. Another important thing that most companies miss out on is our customer reviews. Only adding a couple of reviews and a link to the review site can go a long way.
Happy customers are among the biggest achievements for any company. Along with all the other information, adding customer reviews to the newsletter can be really impactful. This method is also great for not only showcasing reviews but also for collecting reviews. By showing examples of good reviews you have received, you can also ask them to give reviews of their own.
Either way, you get to show your stakeholders what a great job you have been doing keeping the customers happy.
Digital Ads
The majority of ads on social media and websites only highlight features of a product or a service. This is where customer reviews should be allowed to speak in volumes. While every company will be bombarding users with boring features and bland statistics, you can win their trust by showcasing your reviews. Owing to the simplicity and recognizability of google reviews a simple graphic combined with a voice-over would work wonders on a customer’s mindset.
Especially if you have long reviews which tell the story of a customer before and after using your service. This kind of review advertisement can also be used to urge your existing customers to give reviews. A video of existing reviews can serve as an example for them. These videos would revive the emotions they felt when interacting with your product, service or brand.
Packaging
This technique has been adopted by several food brands. They find out some of the best customer reviews received by a product and feature them on the packaging of the product. The reviews are replaced periodically based on the company’s convenience. Customers featured on packing really appreciate the gesture and market the product even further.
You can also upload a picture of the packaging on social media and tag the customers. For the customers, this gesture feels like a reward for their loyalty to the brand. In a way, the customer is promoting them as brand ambassadors. Who wouldn’t like that?
Brochures & Manuals
Just like product packaging, brochures and pamphlets are great customer facing marketing material. This applies to user manuals as well. Here too, positive customer reviews enhance the credibility of the brand. At the same time it legitimises the features and benefits presented in the printed material. In user manuals and brochures, you can pick specific reviews which highlight the benefits or features you want to promote.
In case of user manuals especially, you can also add QR codes or links for the new customers to leave their review. By adding reviews in user manuals, you have created an expectation and an impression of what the customer is likely to experience when using your product or service.
This practice of putting reviews in printed materials is not common. So this will also help your brand’s material stand out from the rest.
Marketing Bad Reviews
The above examples tell you how to market good reviews. But there is a way to market bad reviews as well. It is tricky and needs to be handled delicately. This method should also be sparingly used for marketing. If you do it too, people will think you are only getting bad reviews.
The first step of the method is to resolve the customer’s problem. You can check out our article on how to turn a bad review into a recommendation to learn more.
Once you have resolved the issue and gotten positive feedback on the same, you can proceed with this method. You should showcase the complaint you had received and then tell the story of how you resolved the customer’s problem.
This should end with the positive feedback of the customer which you gathered after resolving their issue and offering compensation. This would serve as a testament to your after-sales service. It will reassure future customers that no matter what happens, your brand will be by their side.
About Kooyal
Kooyal offers a wide arsenal of business management, organization, communication and marketing tools. Online Review Management is just one of our amazing products. You can check out more of our offerings here.
The world of online business is changing and so are the customers. Kooyal helps your brand be up to date.
