Customer reviews are crucial for your brand because they drive brand credibility, which leads to trust in doing business with you.
Consumers now take more time to think about and research brands before purchasing. There are more and more ways for consumers to find information about businesses, and what they find is crucial to their impression of brands and their decision to move forward.
We decided to share our recommended platform for reviews and some other popular ones that would be wise for you to try. Here’s part two of our two-part series on how to get positive reviews in the right places.
If you haven’t already, check out How To Get Positive Reviews: Tips That Make It Easy (Part 1).
Recommended Platform
If you have the time and staff to ensure that your reviews show up on multiple platforms, by all means, do! That is the ultimate situation. However, if time is an issue (and for most of us, it is), we recommend you funnel all of your reviews to one source, and then display that source throughout all your individual marketing platforms.
If we had to choose one platform, we highly recommend Google Reviews:
- Almost everyone now has a Google account, which is the starting point for any review process.
- It’s the largest search engine in the world. When you want to know about a company or an individual, the household term that most of us generally apply is ‘Google it.’
- The search engine optimization boost you receive from utilizing Google Reviews is just plain common sense.
According to BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2022, 81% of consumers used Google to evaluate local businesses in 2021. That is up from 63% in 2020 and indicates an increasing use of Google’s review platform.
You must have a Google Business account to receive, read, and respond to your reviews. Visit the Google Business Profile page for more information. It’s a relatively simple process. Once it’s set up, the rest is super easy.
Other Platforms
Some other platforms people use to submit reviews are Yelp, Amazon, Facebook, TripAdvisor, Better Business Bureau, and Apple Maps.
Like Google, Yelp has seen an increase in users from 2020 to 2021, from 32% to 53%. Facebook saw a slight decrease in users but remains a popular platform for consumers to write and read reviews. And although Apple Maps is the least used by consumers in 2021 out of the platforms mentioned, it still attracts a small percentage of all the consumers surveyed.
Based on these trends, we highly recommend that your efforts to get positive reviews do not revolve around Google alone. Using Google Reviews is a great starting place, but as you become more familiar with the platform and the process of asking for reviews, it would be wise to venture into other platforms to diversify your brand’s reach.
The Takeaway
Customer reviews are more important than ever in a world where consumers constantly search for information about brands before doing business with them. What they find online can make or break your business. Use our tips and advice on how to get positive reviews to ensure your prospective customers learn more about your brand through the experience of happy customers who’ve already worked with you. After all, there aren’t many things more convincing than recommendations from people who’ve “been there, done that.”
Need a brand for your business that customers can rave about in their reviews? Discuss your brand with us today and start increasing brand awareness through your reviews.
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BrandFace® is a personal branding firm for entrepreneurs and experts who want to STAND OUT from their competition and attract their ideal customers so they can become recognized and sought after authorities in their space. Tonya Eberhart & Michael Carr are the partners behind BrandFace. Their mantra is, “People don’t do business with a logo. They do business with a person.”