It's Tim from Holistic here!
That's it!
Without doubt, the jury's back, the verdict is in.
Without doubt, 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 Loc al 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 continuous stream of online reviews is a 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 over emphasize 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 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 level, 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.
Other thing that is going to influence much more than anything that you say, any benefits
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 time somebody doesn't do a
search and then go to your website and make 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 is 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 market place is the 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 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 visit 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 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 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 is 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 show 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 market place.
If you have a product or a service to 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 are 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 the 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 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 these 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.