Amazon didn’t become the biggest eCommerce brand in the world overnight. It took years of planning, vision, and hard work. It also took a particular strategy that many brands don’t focus on enough: reviews. Amazon’s entire business model is built on product reviews, which help consumers decide whether to buy one product over another.
That said, not every business has physical products to sell, but this doesn’t mean they can’t benefit from reviews. In fact, reviews can serve a lot of different purposes no matter what kind of products or services you provide. Every business can use the power of good (and even bad) reviews to grow their brand and reach new people.
So, let’s take a look at 5 ways reviews can help grow your brand!
Establish Your Reputation
Whether you publish customer reviews on your own website or through a third-party platform like Yelp, reviews can help establish your reputation in the digital sphere. Maintaining reviews on your own website gives you more control, as you can promote your most positive reviews to new and potential customers. This allows you to self-promote using the words of your existing customers.
Build Trust With Your Customers
Just about every business claims to be the best (or one of the best) at what they do. Customers are used to hearing it, so more often than not, these kinds of company-driven messages go in one ear and out the other. However, when customers read reviews of your business written by real people, they are much more tuned in to what’s being said. This helps build a sense of trust between you and your customers.
Highlight Your Strengths
When consumers want to know what your business excels in, they might visit your website homepage or read your mission statement. However, they can get more useful, detailed information from reviews. Most of the time, positive customer reviews get right to the point, highlighting what your business did best for them. This allows potential customers to quickly scan your brand’s strengths based on the experiences of past customers.
Become an Authority
Reviews aren’t all about making your brand look good. They can also just be a great source of information. Informational reviews for certain services you provide can help consumers learn more about your services before they make a decision. For example, consumers might search for real reviews for joint stem cell therapy in order to find out more about how joint stem cell therapy works.
Learn From Your Mistakes
While reviews serve a number of functions for your customers, they should also serve a purpose for you. When you receive a negative review, your first inclination might be to go into “damage control” mode. You may provide an official response to the negative feedback from your business, you might remove the review from your website, or you might just try to ignore the review and move on. However, what you should do is learn from it. What does the review tell you about your business? More importantly, how can you use negative feedback to improve your brand going forward?