Are you asking your customers for reviews?

Let’s talk about customer reviews.

As a consumer, I bet you rely on reviews a lot. I know I do.

As a business owner, customer reviews are gold. Not only can you share them, providing social proof that you’re legit, but you can mine them for information on what your customer’s pain points are, allowing you speak to other potential customers out there.

So first, are you asking for reviews? 

If you’re using Google My Business (which you should be), check out these instructions on how to generate a short URL to share when asking for a review.

But Google isn’t the only place for reviews. Ask for reviews on other platforms applicable to your business. (Search for yourself online to see all such places.)

I also have a page and form on my website that I send to clients once we wrap up a project where I ask for their feedback.

Now that you have some reviews, what are you doing with them?

If the review is public, feel free to respond (whether the review is good or bad). Be polite and friendly.

You can also display reviews on your site. Some sites have a dedicated testimonials page, some display all the reviews on the home page. I display each review on its individual project page. There are also services that aggregate reviews from various online sources that you can show anywhere on your site.

Don’t forget to read the reviews. Look for information on what you’re doing well, what you can improve upon, what concerns your customer had before you started working together and how you were able to uniquely address those concerns. Use their words to write your marketing materials.

Last month on the blog I managed to get three posts out (epic), but none of them are specifically related to the type of content I try to share in this newsletter. Just in case you’re interested, though, I recorded my WordCamp Kent presentation on freelancer finances, wrote a recap of WordCamp Kent and taught a course to teens at my local community college on how to build a web page.

Thanks for being here!

P.S. Check out my new free guide if you’re looking for the why and the how of implementing a lead generation system on your small business website.