With the changing times, businesses are also compelled to keep pace or face the difficult consequence of getting left behind. This goes for marketing, sales, and services, as it does for every other aspect of your business.
If you are a business owner, with an inclination and interest towards marketing, you’d know how traditional marketing methods are increasingly fetching diminishing returns. Marketing is no longer about telling lies to sell your product, and let services deal with the after-sales chagrin faced by your customers.
Marketing is now about the genuine stories you tell consumers about your product and how it will transform their lives. In this day and age of the internet, and consequently, the informed and educated end-consumers, there is no scope for spinning a web of lies around your product.
Good marketing tends towards honesty. Good marketing connects with the humans that your consumers are in a respectful manner.
Well, the good news is you don’t have to tell this story all by yourself. You can always enlist some help. Forget paid influencers, and fake bots praising your product on social or Google. Enter genuine rave reviews by your genuine, satisfied customers, who just can’t stop talking about your product. Yes, it includes a little bit of following up with your consumers, after the sale has been closed. But when you touch base with consumers, with a request for them to post a review for your product, it enforces the belief in them that your business doesn’t want to forget them in a hurry after the sale is done.
It also enforces a positive image about your business as one that listens to consumers, and tries to innovate further for the future.
If you aren’t doing it already, here’s why it is a great idea to include online customer reviews in your business:
1. Establishes authority: Imagine your business’ Google listing, and its Facebook page adorned by scores of positive reviews about the product that you are pitching to the market. Now imagine a stranger reading the reviews before making their mind up about whether to transact any business with your company.
Yes, that’s what such reviews do. They establish authority. This authority flows from the genuineness of the reviews you have received. Many businesses try to game the system by generating fake reviews. But to tell you the truth, the informed and educated consumer can very well tell a fake from a genuine compliment you’ve received online.
2. Establishes trust: It is not just about authority. Modern businesses
are built on trust, and customer delight. If you are not mindlessly engaged in
the race to the bottom by competitively slashing prices, then you’d like to
give your customer something extra. Trust is that extra. In the crucial moment
when a potential customer is comparing your businesses with competitors,
wondering who he should do business with, online reviews can serve as the
decider.
3.The Best Marketing for free: To be brutally honest with you, the ad dollars that you are burning up every day in your marketing quest has less impact than genuine online reviews that speak well about your brand. This is genuine and authentic content marketing at its best. As Seth Godin, the sharpest marketing mind we have today says, content marketing is the only marketing left.
With traditional marketing efforts becoming weary, content marketing in the form of online reviews and more, is no longer an option. It is a crying necessity.
4.Makes your business look approachable
Yes, many legacy and tradition-minded businesses are wary of opening themselves up to public criticism in the form on online reviews. But trust us, negative reviews are a blessing in disguise, as they offer you the unique opportunity of turning a bad review into a god one. Only if you have the patience and the integrity to engage, reply, and make amends about something that the customer didn’t like.
Guess what? While you do this, it is out in the open for the world to see. It shows that the world that while your business may not be perfect, you are approachable and willing to make amends when things go wrong. It makes your business look more human.
At WebZeb, we believe in and recommend an honest way of marketing as a more effective way of converting fence-sitters into repeat customers, done at half the budget.
We offer state-of-the-art Content Marketing services that make your businesses human, because at the end of the day, your consumers are human too! To know more, enquire with us today.