Online reviews can provide a wealth of information to potential customers, allowing them to get a sense of a business and the quality of its products before they make a purchase. Online reviews have also proven to be powerful business tools. They’re useful platforms for adding to the customer experience and gathering information for various business needs. This article will explore key ways reviews drive business, including simple steps businesses can implement to harness the power of online reviews.

How Online Reviews Drive Businesses

Online reviews help businesses drive success and meet goals. They typically involve building trust and credibility, driving sales, garnering valuable insights, and enhancing the customer experience.

Building Trust and Credibility

The vast majority of online shoppers, a staggering 98%, read online reviews, and 46% believe reviews important in their pre-purchase decision-making process. Seeing reviews—and how brands respond to them—can reveal important insights about both product and business quality. 

Reviews provide clear evidence of the overall perception of a brand by showing how other customers have felt about it after making a purchase. This is considered social proof and a highly influential asset in marketing. When potential customers see real people’s success buying from or working with a brand, they can feel more confident in its legitimacy. This makes them more likely to trust the brand enough to make a purchase.

When brands actively respond to reviews, both the good and the bad, it further builds on the credibility the reviews have begun to build. Active responses signal to potential customers that the brand takes itself and its customer experience seriously.

Driving Sales

Establishing trust and credibility is a powerful way to convert people into paying customers by encouraging them to explore what the brand offers and helping them move through the customer journey to finalise their purchase. In other words, when used effectively, reviews can become vital tools for driving sales.

Beyond converting leads to customers, online reviews can be meaningful ways to engage with past customers and foster repeat sales. When brands actively respond to positive reviews, they acknowledge and show appreciation for customers, which nurtures a positive relationship, a key element in retaining customers. Even negative reviews pose the potential for building positive relationships. By responding to negative feedback, brands can directly address customer concerns and find resolutions that satisfy customers. In doing this, they resolve the frustration and positively shift the customer’s sentiment.

Positive reviews can also boost a brand’s search engine visibility, increasing the odds that the brand will appear in search results and in front of new people. When brands appear in top-ranking positions on search engine results pages, their website is more likely to be clicked on. This, in turn, can lead to more website traffic, greater visibility for promotions, brand engagement, and, ultimately, sales.

Providing Valuable Insights

Beyond driving sales, reviews also serve another crucial role; they offer a wealth of information to brands that they can use to inform decision-making across myriad business operations. Online reviews provide insight into customer sentiment, allowing brands to take action to maintain their reputation or set to work repairing it. These actions might include improving their checkout process, customer service, and even product quality. Any customer interaction with a brand may be referenced in a review, making reviews vital insights into customer satisfaction and brand performance.

Online reviews can also highlight business opportunities, such as new avenues of product innovation and marketing strategies. Additionally, online reviews can be powerful marketing materials, thanks to their ability to sing a brand’s praises from a real customer’s point of view.

Online reviews can also be invaluable opportunities to assess a brand’s competitors, helping it identify ways to stand apart in the marketplace. By reviewing what another brand’s customers say, companies can spot weaknesses in competitors and opportunities to deliver where they’re falling short.

Enhancing the Customer Experience

Customers are vital to the success of any brand, and online reviews can represent another avenue for enhancing the customer experience long after the delivery of a product or service, extending the relationship. Online reviews, whether on third-party platforms or a brand’s website, can be used to deliver customer service to address any pain points and celebrate positive experiences. As mentioned, this can enhance trust and credibility for potential customers. Doing this can also build a lasting customer relationship by enhancing the experience with a brand, making it more engaging and memorable.

Strategies for Leveraging Online Reviews

What can businesses do to leverage online reviews to enjoy these benefits? The answer can be distilled into three key steps:

1. Identifying Key Review Platforms

Brands should identify key platforms on which their target audience may visit or post reviews. For travel and tourism-related companies, this could involve sites like TripAdvisor, while video game developers and online casino operators might identify sites like GameSpot or Casinos.com. The list of review platforms will look different depending on the company and industry in which it operates, though generally, Google Business Profile is an essential platform across the board.

2. Developing a Strategy

Once businesses establish where online reviews will be, they should develop a strategy for responding to good and bad reviews to take action as soon as reviews are posted. Responses should be personalised and aligned with branding to extend the customer experience authentically. A review strategy may also include ways a brand will incentivise happy customers to leave reviews, such as by offering exclusive discounts. 

3. Monitoring and Managing Reviews

Online reviews require ongoing monitoring and management to ensure businesses will benefit from them. Regular monitoring makes utilising reviews for marketing and brand-building needs far more manageable, as they’ll already have a sense of customer sentiment and the information available through reviews.

With these simple steps, brands will be well on their way to leveraging online reviews to propel their business efforts forward to achieve long-term success.