Would you mind leaving me a review?
Perhaps the most important thing you can do for your marketing is continuously collect positive reviews.
In The Beginning
The first thing I send forth my marketing interns with is getting three testimonials.
From teachers, coaches and best of all, any employment experiences, it’s critical to establish trust. “Why would we open up the backend of our content management system to a kid?” — is what an early client reaction was when I was introducing the program.
The very next class I told them they needed to make testimonials a priority. I didn’t know how to answer my customer’s question immediately but I knew within three testimonials they’d have a really solid starting point in putting their trust in a student.
You should always be collecting these trust builders. Never stop.
Trust
When you purchase something nowadays do you use reviews?
Likes, votes and comments have become a substantial fabric in our digital lives by which we navigate the mountains of data we encounter daily.
Whether you’re a student, building your career or lifting your company’s visibility within your community, trust is powerful connection device and a relationship builder.
Students · Interns
Many don’t know how to ask.
Here’s an example of how you could ask:
Hi Karol, I’m taking a digital marketing class at school and I’m creating a web page for myself. I was wondering if you could provide a short testimonial for when I picked up your mail and watered your plants.
Here’s some examples for other students in the class if it helps — you can also read examples of intern testimonies at marketingInters.org/reviews
“Zach is timely with his work…he is always there whenever we need him. Zach is also incredibly dedicated to his work, he thinks outside the box to differentiate ourselves from the competition.”
“Mary’s endless want to do better combined with her willingness to take risks, leads me to believe there will be no limit to her growth and achievements in life.”
“Tyler is an exceptional young man. I have hired him twice and he demonstrated a great work ethic. He is a self-starter, reliable, and pleasant to work with. He demonstrated leadership skills, and also the ability to problem-solve.”
“Mia is just a hardworking and talented young person who constantly amazed me with the quality, speed and creativeness of her work.”
The key in the ask is to make it easy for them to see examples.
Testimonials for Companies
This is typically quite a bit easier for companies than interns because all you and everyone in the company need do is to be on the lookout for those moments when a customer is experiencing a strong satisfaction with your product or services.
Pretty much every client I work with has those moments and are just not capitalizing — myself included.
My favorite one stop review shop: YourCompanyURL/review
As in:
“Thank you! I’m so glad everything worked out. I’m very proud of what we accomplished together. Would you mind giving us a review at orbisDesign.com/review? It really does help people find us and allows us to keep doing what we love for other companies like you.”
“Thank you. If you’re happy with my service today you can go to orbisDesign.com/review and give me a star rating and optional comment. It helps my company know that I’m doing a good job.”
As you can see, this is your company website followed by the word “review”. It’s easy to remember and share and particularly powerful to whip out when a customer interaction is peaking.
What this link forwards to is a Google Review form for your business. Many people will mention Yelp which I recommend if you have many competitors on Yelp but Google is universal and it really bumps our search engine positioning the more stars and positive reviews that are posted to Google.
Then, you can copy your favorite reviews to your website — curate the ones that tie more specifically to the products or services you offer to really tighten up the engagement and trust.
Create Your Google Review Link
This button will take you to a page by Whitespark which by entering your business name, this application will find your Google Business listing and then spawn a review form specific for your business.
This is what it looks like when the link is spawned. Notice how in the light background we are actually at the Google Search Results for your company with your business listing over on the right. Visitor then has the option to star rate you, leave a comment and leave an image if desired.
You can then share this link with customer, post it on your website but if you really want to make it easy, you’ll create a link specific to your company that points to this link.
Create Your Easy Review Link On Your Squarespace Website
Settings > Advanced > URL Mapping
Within your site’s URL Mappings section, you can place the name “review” and “reviews” to point to the link you created above. Note, that my link in the example is shortened using a URL shortener so I can measure how many are using the link — you can use the full link generated above.
Adding reviews to your website
Add a gallery to your Squarespace page, choose the circle crop design option and take the time to find and/or improve low quality pictures. Make the as sharp and clean as you can. Faces are really important in marketing. Pro tip — try to crop and size so everyone’s head is the same size.
Conclusion: Just do it
There’s also a great email template you can send to customers which I highly recommend (and will share in another post), but first you should create and use this method and then work with everyone in your organization to proactively and easily ask for a review. And take the time to help them and make it comfortable on how to ask.
That’s where my interns get stuck is how to ask.
And one final tip with Google Reviews, be prepared for negative reviews because they can actually have a stronger, positive impact.
People can be weary of nothing but positive reviews and will often zero on that single negative review. I’ve seen customers respond effective in both taking ownership of the issue and clarifying points the reviewer made. Be ready for those and then jump on them knowing you have a chance to really bump up your trust by being transparent and honest.
