Turning reviews into successes

- [Announcer] Welcome to On Top of PR with Jason Mudd, presented by ReviewMaxer.

 

- I wanna welcome everybody to the podcast. We're so thrilled to have Garrett with us today. Garrett is with ReviewMaxer, and ReviewMaxer is an online platform to help you manage, monitor, and promote your positive online reviews. And Garrett, it's a real pleasure to have you here. We appreciate you being our, not only our partner in this podcast, but also our partner in helping us develop a great solution for our clients at Axia Public Relations to use the ReviewMaxer platform to help them improve their online reviews. So welcome to the show Garrett, we're really pleased to have you today.

 

- Jason, thanks so much for having me. Really happy to be here.

 

- Yeah, I'm glad to be here, too. And I hope that ultimately the outcome of this podcast or vodcast, depending on where you're watching it, will be that you're glad you listened today, too, because you had the opportunity to learn from a thought leader and an expert in the online review management space. While we're recording this, although we wanna record a product that is evergreen for all of our listeners, we're certainly thinking about COVID-19, we're thinking about small businesses who have been impacted, whether completely shut down or operating on a limited basis, and I keep thinking about them and ReviewMaxer and how they could be using ReviewMaxer to ask their loyal customers who might not be able to do business with them right now to help them out as a business by leaving them an online review or encouraging their team by leaving an online review and helping them attract more customers with online reviews. What are you seeing on your end with ReviewMaxer and beyond?

 

- Yeah, I mean, so I'll admit, I am an evangelist when it comes to ReviewMaxer, but reviews are really important right now when it comes to the local search space. Naturally with depending where you are in the world, where you are in the country, businesses, the brick and mortars are really shut down. You're not seeing the same sort of foot traffic that you're used to and so, as a community we're all trying to figure out how can we support local business. And naturally there are a lot of financial ways, whether it's buying gift cards or trying to take advantage of services that are available. But one of the best and easiest things that your customers can do for you right now is leave you an online review, because online reviews have a variety of value to small and local businesses, whether that's kind of boosting their visibility, reviews are actually a major ranking factor as to when someone is searching in your industry for someone, for your type of business, you're more likely to show up if you have a lot of positive online reviews. It actually turns out that reviews account for 15% of how Google ranks a local business. So in term of visibility it's very valuable. And then the second part of that is social proof. When someone sees other customers who enjoy your services or your products, they're that much more likely to solicit your business. So reviews are really important for local.

 

- Gotcha, so 15% you said?

 

- Yeah, they account for 15% of how Google ranks a local business. The primary factor will always be the proximity. So when you're searching, whether you're on your phone or in a car via voice search or from a desktop at home, where you are is going to be the number one factor Google wants to provide you a business that's relatively close, especially when the intent is to get to a business near you. The factor right after that is going to be reviews. And you're gonna look at the quantity of your reviews compared to your competitors as well as the quality of your reviews and the recency of your reviews, how recent they are.

 

- Got it, got it. So we're talking, we're saying basically, that geographic proximity is probably the number one factor. Then the second factor would be is how do your reviews compare to your competition? How were your reviews overall? And I would say that's probably been my experience, too, as using search engines and experiencing Google as well. So, well good. And since we were just talking about COVID-19 I just, I wanna share that I'm really pleased to see that ReviewMaxer has been able to offer kind of its own little economic stimulus by offering basically the bulk, the highest level bulk pricing, $50 per month per account, to everybody, especially small businesses, even those that might just have one account to sign up with. That's a pretty cool thing.

 

- Yeah, you know, it's funny, we understand that everyone's dealing with a lot of economic challenges right now, a lot of things that are outside of people's control. So at ReviewMaxer we decided, normally we charge about $100 per month per account, we wanted to provide that enterprise package, as you mentioned, with the full suite of features for that $50 price point to really be able to help out where we can, do our part, because it's hard for small business owners.

 

- Yeah, sure is. And being a small business owner, I completely agree. Tell me, where do companies typically make mistakes when they're trying to do a good job of getting more reviews, or just more favorable reviews?

 

- Yeah, so the biggest thing is most companies don't ask. Especially if you're a small business and you don't have a ton of employees, it's really hard to remember to just ask for the review, and typically that's the most effective way to get the reviews. Seven out of 10 people will actually write a review if you just ask them. Not only that, I mean, it's not always the most top of mind. So once they walk out the door, it's important to be able to remind your customers to leave you the review. And so that's where something like ReviewMaxer comes in to generate those reviews to basically send some sort of message to the customer after they have left, whether that's via email or via text message, and to leave a review and to make it as easy as possible to leave a review as well.

 

- That's good information. I've also experienced that where I think it's Yelp usually, but it sometimes might be, say, Facebook, and it just says, hey, I saw where you checked in here or you were at this location, would you like to leave a review? And I literally wanna face palm and just say, I can't believe that I haven't already left an online review for this restaurant of mine or this business that I do, I go to all the time, I frequent on a regular basis. Somehow big brother of search engines or social media has figured out that I'm there all the time, and I'm kinda like I can't believe I left an online review. Where simultaneously I've gone to leave a review for somewhere and I go, oh I've already reviewed this place? I don't even remember doing it. So, clearly it's authentically me, and it was probably because maybe they asked or something like that, but you said 70% of consumers are willing to leave a review if they're just simply asked?

 

- Yeah, and that's the biggest mistake when it comes down to it is business owners don't ask, or they forget to ask. If you're running around fulfilling orders or trying to make sure that your customers are happy, you don't, some people are uncomfortable to ask for the review in the first place. But it's that important.

 

- Yeah that's really good food for thought. I feel like there's a fear of asking. Can you address that a little bit? 'Cause I heard that just recently.

 

- I think it really depends on the industry. Some industries are definitely more fearful than others. Some people think it's tacky, but it's really a way, the way that you position it, and just kind of especially in the context of this environment, highlighting that it's an opportunity for them to support your business, to give. You know, it really takes very minimal time, it doesn't cost any money, and it really makes a difference when it comes to other future customers finding the business. So, it's okay to ask. And you can do it a variety of different ways. People are trying out all different types of ways to get in front of their customers. Naturally you have to do what works for your specific audience. And as a business owner you're gonna know your audience. Are they more likely to appreciate your emails? Are they more likely to appreciate your texts? It depends on different demographics. But finding the way to communicate with your customers on their level and send that ask and meet them where they're at is gonna make a ton of sense.

 

- Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So, yeah, as I was kinda thinking about our conversation today and online reviews in general, I do sense that when you ask people, or first of all I would say, given the current economic climate you have a really good feeling of where you stand with some of your customers and clients and all that. You can tell the ones who are loyal through thick and thin and others are just facing tough times and they can't do business with you. And I think those are the people who are especially willing to do something to give back. I had a very popular post on LinkedIn recently where I just say hey, find a small business that you wanna support and either buy from them now, buy a gift card from them, or to minimum, just leave them an online review. It won't cost you anything to do it. It won't cost you anything to leave them an online review, maybe a few minutes of your time. And that was something that our PR agency did right away. We reached out to some of our clients and just said hey, it's tough on small businesses right now, you know we're a small business, could you take a minute if you have it and leave us a review here, here, and here? And I think we asked for Google, HubSpot, and Facebook. And we talked about maybe doing Yelp, but we don't have any reviews on Yelp yet, and it's not really a place we wanna be listed anyway, so we just kinda opted out of that.

 

- Yeah, I think that when it comes to having a diverse review portfolio, if you will, there's a lot of value there. In terms of Google, for the most part, will always be the most valuable, since it's the biggest search engine and it has something like 90% of searches on the internet. So people are gonna see your Google reviews. That said, no matter the industry, there's an industry-specific review site that's gonna generate a ton of value for your business. For instance, in the legal industry you have Avvo, in the healthcare industry you have HealthGrades, home services there's HomeAdvisor, Angie's List, Thumbtack. The thing with the industry-specific review sites is those are hyperqualified targets and prospects, so these are people who are specifically looking to buy, a lot of times. They're not in the initial search phase. They're usually really getting to who they wanna work with, and so if someone goes and searches for a carpenter near me on Google they're gonna see a link to Angie's List, and you're gonna see those stars in the search engine results. Who are you gonna choose if you're seeing someone with two reviews and a three star rating versus 40 reviews and a 4.7.

 

- Yeah, yeah. It's funny, I'll have people go online and say on my Facebook feed, and they'll say, hey, could you recommend a plumber, whatever it might be, and I'm thinking to myself, and even like can you recommend a product that does this on Amazon? And I'm thinking to myself, just go search and sort by reviews. I mean, that's what I do now for everything. I don't even do a Amazon search unless I'm sorting by four stars or more and that's just my go-to now.

 

- Yeah, people are definitely more advanced with their search capabilities, and even Google provides the ability to filter out by the star rating or filter out by the specific attributes of a industry, for instance. Before all this when you were searching for a hotel, if you were asking for a hotel with a pool, Google was actually gonna send you just hotels with the pool. So it can filter all of that out. That said, you mentioned Facebook, even Facebook has its own recommendations, and that has a little bonus value because when someone leaves you a recommendation on Facebook, that recommendation will typically appear on their Facebook feed as well. So there's that social component when it comes to Facebook reviews.

 

- One thing I think that's really awesome about what we've been able to do with ReviewMaxer is, as you eluded to earlier, is really customize it for every industry or platform. We have clients who are shocked when we tell them yes it works with Amazon reviews if that's what you wanna do. Yes it works with, as you said, HealthGrades or whatever. And could you just kind of remind me, I know that one of the messaging is that ReviewMaxer is on more, or works with more review sites, as I recall than any other platform out there, and even if the platform you want isn't currently working with ReviewMaxer you've got a solution for that. Is that right Garrett?

 

- Yeah, so it's great when you're looking to generate new reviews, when you wanna get reviews, ReviewMaxer has over 100 different review sites across all different industries, and the really cool way that it works is, first we were talking about asking for the reviews. So you send out an email or you send out a text message. It sends your customer to this review funnel landing page, and the review funnel landing page allows you to segment your happy customers and your unhappy customers. Now, you can either do a segmented land out where the happy customers go directly to the review site of your choice. You can pick out one. Or you can actually give them an option of three different review sites. And the reason that's valuable is because not everybody's comfortable on every review site. Giving your customers the option to choose which review site they're most comfortable in will not only guarantee that you're getting a review, but it will also, as we said earlier, diversify your review portfolio across these different sites, kind of amplifying your review value to not just one location.

 

- We're always recommending to our clients that they serve up three different options when it comes to reviews. We always recommend to our clients, you almost always wanna offer three options, three choices. Market in threes. We've really found a lot of value from doing it that way. We could do a whole podcast on that. But that just kinda gets me thinking, sometimes I see some of our clients who are using ReviewMaxer, they might be serving up six options, and so we kinda counsel them on that and kinda get them to narrow it down three. What are other mistakes you see companies doing either through their ReviewMaxer portal or just out there trying to get reviews?

 

- Yeah, I think, well, as we mentioned, the biggest one is not asking. The second one is, in addition to ReviewMaxer having their listings set up, making sure that your listing, in the first place, is ready to receive the reviews. There's a lot of value in kind of massaging that listing, making sure it has all the updated information. I agree with you 100% when it comes to giving your customers the option of three. Anything more than that starts to become a little bit of choice paralysis. Sometimes when people have too many choices, they don't know what to choose, and then they just, they bounce out of there, and then you don't get any of the value. And then the other thing is is when it comes to asking the reviews, like one thing that we have in ReviewMaxer is the ability to set up an email drip campaign. If you send someone an email and they're busy at the time when they read it, and they don't get over to the review funnel and they don't leave the review, they're not gonna remember a lot of times to go back and do it again. So, we recommend sometimes having a secondary nudge email or even a third email, just as a reminder, because even though for your business reviews are top of mind, for your customers, they've got so much going on right now that it might not be the case. So we recommend using the email drip campaign to actually request the review a second or third time. And when someone does actually go and leave the review to make sure it automatically turns off.

 

- So Garrett, we've established that a lot of companies are hesitant to ask reviews, but we've also established that if you simply ask you will get. And it's kind of business 101, so I like that. But let's talk about ways, other than a personal ask, other than an email or a text message ask through, say, a platform like ReviewMaxer, what else could small business owners or big companies and chains, what could they be doing proactively to collect additional reviews from their customers?

 

- Absolutely, so via ReviewMaxer there are a few different tools that you can use. Now ultimately the goal is to get your customers to click a link to take them to that review funnel. One of the great tools for print or even media that you can use is for every ReviewMaxer account you get a QR code that links directly to that review funnel. So that can be printed out in any sort of in-store signage or on the receipt, as you mentioned. But for when people aren't actually going to your brick and mortar store, we actually also provide a button that you can embed right on your own website. So, say we were talking about reviews being a form of social proof and how they have value on these third party websites, they also have a ton of value on your own website. So, if you're generating testimonials and reviews, you can stream 'em through ReviewMaxer through a variety of marketing tools, which we can talk about, and then on that review page, you can set up this simple review us button, you click the button, and it would open up the process of leaving the review right on your own website, which would then send you to the third party review site when the customer chooses it. So there are a variety of ways that you can still have your customers leave you those great reviews outside of just the email and the texts.

 

- Awesome, awesome. And I've also seen some of our customers that are using ReviewMaxer put it on pizza boxes, on store windows, on little table tents, receipts. Some of the medical clinics that we work with, they put in, they used to, I don't know if they still do, they put an iPad in the lobby where someone can, when they're checking in there's an option to leave a review, or checking out, there's an option to leave a review. I know you have to be careful about, say, that exact example for the same IP, the same location, that people keep leaving you reviews and stuff like that. It seems like also, and I'd like you to speak to that and also speak to, it seems like Yelp might be the one that is the most sensitive to encouraging online reviews. Could you talk about those two points real quick?

 

- Yeah, so when it comes to best practices, naturally every review site has their own terms and conditions, and I think for your business, there is value in learning what those are. When it comes to the major ones, like Google or Yelp, Google, as you mentioned, does not wanna see reviews come from the same IP address. And what does that mean for your small business? That might mean from your WiFi. When someone logs into your WiFi and they're using your IP address, from Google's perspective, and the reason for this rule, is that if they're seeing all of these reviews coming from the same IP, they're potentially coming from the actual store, and they wanna prevent any sort of fraudulent review that's happening. They want these reviews to be as authentic as possible, and so if they can control from having a business owner standing over the customer's shoulders saying, "Oh, I want you to write this." Saying, "If you don't do this why I oughta." They wanna prevent that. And how do they do that? They do that through the technical IP. So ReviewMaxer has a great solution, which allows, as you mentioned, this kiosk mode. And what does the kiosk mode do? It allows you to set up the review funnel on an iPad in the location. Instead of leaving the review right at the doctor's office, you will basically be prompted to write the review, put in your email address, and then the review content is emailed to you after the fact, as soon as you leave the doctor's office. And it's cool 'cause then right in the email you have what you've written and then you have the prompts to leave the review on those third party review sites that you've selected from the funnel. So, that's the terms and conditions you wanna think about when it comes to Google and some of the other review sites. Not all of them. When it comes to Yelp, Yelp has a very strict policy that you shouldn't actually solicit reviews from your customers. Now, you're allowed to have a sticker in your storefront that says find us on Yelp. That's this very passive subtle way to ask for reviews. But technically, Yelp says you can't ask your customer to write a review. They do have a couple of ways that you can kind of solicit reviews that are pretty clever. You could probably makeshift do it through ReviewMaxer, although we would never endorse breaking any review site's terms and conditions, but one thing you're allowed to do with Yelp is you're actually allowed to ask for a photo, for a customer to take a photo at their experience, at your business, and post the photo on the Yelp profile, on the listing, and one thing about the Yelp's workflow is that when you do leave a photo, they will then, right next to the photo will be the leave a review. And so that's another kind of passive way that business owners can leave a review on Yelp. Because when it comes down to it, Jason, Yelp does have a lot of value for specific industries, say like the restaurant industry, reviews do still matter on Yelp. And so while you technically can't ask for a review, they still have value, and there are ways to kind of passively guide your customers there.

 

- Got it, yeah that's interesting. As you were talking about IP addresses I started thinking about those lobby iPads, and they probably have a way of detecting, man, these reviews keep coming from the same Mac address, which is probably not only probably a no no, but certainly a quick way to get it figured out that you're doing something proactively in store or in location to do that. Let's say you've got somebody who's been using ReviewMaxer for more than six months, and they're really a heavy user, Garrett, what would kinda be two or three things you would challenge them to explore as an advanced feature or an often overlooked capability of ReviewMaxer or, to be candid, maybe even just any online review platform they're using, that would be kind of what you're seeing best practices in sitting in your seat?

 

- Yeah, so there's a variety of different ways that you can use your reviews to benefit your marketing. So assuming they're using ReviewMaxer, they care about their marketing, and they care about how they're kind of digitally marketing themselves. So, one of the great features that we have is setting up either the review stream, which dynamically pulls in the five-star reviews, and you can put that right on your website, so you're showcasing the positive reviews. Recently, in the last few months, we've added a floating carousel badge to ReviewMaxer. And this is really cool. What you do is you basically take this very simple code, you paste it on your website, and then in the bottom left-hand corner of your website, you have this updating carousel, we call it the floating carousel, that shows new reviews from any review site that you're generating your reviews from. So those are two ways to market reviews. You can also connect your ReviewMaxer account to, if you have a Twitter or Facebook, to share your positive reviews on your Twitter feed or your Facebook feed automatically. And one of the trickiest things with a lot of these, with our busy local business owners is automating the processes. So doing it so you don't have to think about it. You set this up to share only your five-star reviews on Twitter and Facebook. You automatically ask for reviews via the email review request. We actually have a connection via Zapier, which is, every time, you can connect Zapier to your CRM, and so it'll automatically send out a review request every time you add a new customer's email, for instance. So that's an advance. We have a, one more significantly advanced feature that we're testing in beta, which is connecting ReviewMaxer to your Google tag manager. And you'll have to ask your ReviewMaxer rep to connect that. But if you're into digital marketing, you can do some really cool stuff with this, which is basically pulling the data of the people, your happy customers, who visit your ReviewMaxer review funnel, and then you can use that to set up retargeting ads, or you could use that to set up look alike audiences in Facebook that would send out more advanced advertisements to people who are like your happiest customers. So you can imagine all of sudden, the people are leaving five star reviews, people just like that, whatever that persona is, are seeing your business's ads on Google, on different websites through an advanced Google ad retargeting campaign.

 

- Very cool, I like that, and I didn't even know that existed. That's cool. I've got like, we're running out of time here, so I've got like two questions for you, two more. One would be are there any closing kind of factoids that you feel like I need to share this with your audience today?

 

- Yeah, absolutely, so one thing we really didn't talk about when it comes to ReviewMaxer is the whole idea of review monitoring, and naturally, beyond reviews as a way to grow your business, it's also really important for customer service and the customer experience, right? People are writing reviews to either celebrate the experience they had with your business or if it is a negative review, they're trying to share with the world about why they had a bad experience. Now, with ReviewMaxer you can set it up so you're not getting as many negative reviews through the system, but people will still find a way to leave a negative review if they felt like they were wronged, and that's why review monitoring is really important. So through ReviewMaxer you can actually get email alerts to let you know if you do have a negative review, that from your customer experience staff can reach out to and recover that experience, because it's good business. If someone has a negative experience, you wanna make it right. So by using the review monitoring feature, within 24 hours you can reach out to that customer, respond to the review on whatever third party review site that they left it on, you can actually do it in the system through Google. Some of the other sites you actually need to go to the third party site and log in and leave it, but that's another best practice is making sure that you're listening to your customers with the bad experience, showing empathy.

 

- For sure.

 

- Giving them a way to contact you so you can take it offline and recover their experience and make sure that whatever happened that you can fix it. That's good business.

 

- Yeah, for sure. I'm glad you mentioned that, 'cause that hadn't yet come up, and I was gonna ask you about what's new, but you mentioned the API and other features that are what's new, so that's very cool. And so just kind of in wrapping up, I know that ReviewMaxer has made a special offer to our listeners, which is, and correct me if this is wrong, but if you go to reviewmaxer.com and you use the promo code, all one word, no spaces, ontopofpr, you will get an additional discount on your first month as a listener to the On Top of PR podcast. So, I think that's very cool. Did I get that right, Garrett? Does that sound about right?

 

- Yeah, I mean I love this partnership. It's such an honor to be on the show with you, Jason, and really talk reviews. I geek out about it, I love it when it comes to local marketing and talking reviews, but yes, you go to reviewmaxer.com, you use ontopofpr, all one word, as the promo, and you get that first month off. It's a special discount that we are excited to provide, and you know, right now when it comes to COVID-19 and the importance of reviews, we think that getting as many businesses on here earning reviews is only gonna benefit them in the long term.

 

- Excellent, excellent. And appreciate the opportunity to connect. I know the email address is success@reviewmaxer.com. We use ReviewMaxer on our site. The floating carousel just went live recently, and I was pretty excited to see that, and I know you guys are always responsive when we email success@reviewmaxer.com. I've always enjoyed all of our interactions that we have, and it seems like a lot of the clients we've recommended this solution to have stuck with it and almost always have seen a quick boost in their initial online reviews because they're using the tool and they're using the platform, and I feel like those that use it the most get the most out of it. Those that kind of have it and use it occasionally get the least value out of it. I mean, it's like everything else in life, the more you put into it the more you get out of it.

 

- I think you make a really good point, if I can just chime in, with this idea that when you first start you get that boost of reviews, but to your point, it's an ongoing thing. It's not a, you get your reviews and then, boom, you're good to go. Because of the way that Google values new and fresh reviews and the way that customers value new and fresh reviews, has a ton of, it's really important when it comes to your review management, and it's actually 85% of consumers think that online reviews older than three months aren't relevant. So if you stop, if you stop generating reviews for three months, all the sudden they depreciate in value over time, and so that's why you wanna continue to generate reviews, have a steady stream, it's going to benefit your visibility and then social proof.

 

- Garrett, we're totally out of time, but as I think about what I'd like to talk about in the future with you, if you're available, would certainly be this whole idea that some of our smartest clients get it, which would be using a platform like ReviewMaxer or whatever you decide to use to encourage employee reviews. You can't comingle asking for an employee review while you're also asking for a customer review. So that does require a separate account, but we've seen some really smart companies, especially when the market is such that it's hard to find good employees, that you're also asking your employees to leave reviews, and so maybe next time we'll just do a dedicated episode just on employee reviews and how to navigate those. But it's been a real pleasure having you on the show today. I appreciate it. I appreciate Suzanne and the rest of our crew who have helped put together this podcast. If you go to reviewmaxer.com and use the promo code ontopofpr there's a special offer for our viewers and our listeners. Garrett, I hope you have a great day. Thank you for being here, and as always, we appreciate our partnership working with you and ReviewMaxer.

 

- Thanks for having me Jason. It's a pleasure. Wherever you need me, wherever, I'm there.

 

- Thank you, appreciate that. All right, well that's our show for today. Thank you for watching, thank you for listening. We're glad you're here. I hope you were glad to be here, too, and if you have any questions for me or for Garrett, feel free to reach out anytime.

 

- [Announcer] This has been On Top of PR with Jason Mudd, presented by ReviewMaxer.