Reviews — How to Get the Good One

As the situation stands at the time of writing this, good or bad online reviews can literally make or break someone’s decision to reach out to your company or not. I doubt I need to even write that. But it needs to be addressed regardless.

I have known business owners who are petrified of bad reviews. Been there, felt that. Understood. Everyone gets them.

The trick — and your task — is to get an overwhelmingly greater number of 5-star reviews than 1-star reviews. This is honestly not that hard to do. Case in point — at my company, we received over 500 reviews in one year alone after finally devoting to it the attention it deserves. In this chapter, I’ll share just how we accomplished that!

Yelp is a problem. Their algorithm (which is a pre-programmed system that dictates how they automatically treat your business) is so unfair. I have a Yelp ad following me around on Facebook, and all the comments are from business owners calling out their unfair business practices. You cannot ask for reviews. If the algorithm thinks too many reviews are coming in at once, it will suppress those reviews to the “not recommended” section, so they don’t show up on your main Yelp page. The way to combat this is to work on your Google reviews, your BBB (Better Business Bureau) reviews and any and all review sites you can get your hands on: Houzz, Angie’s List, Thumbtack, etc.

The system we use is this:

When a customer of ours says something positive to a team member about the service they received or the results of their campaign, we have that team member politely ask the client if they wouldn’t mind writing a review. The team member sends them a link to make this easy on them. They also throw in there, “We play a game here to see who gets the most, so it would really mean a lot to me.” Then we send a link generated by Podium — this has done wonders for us.

podium.com

In 21 years, we had about 320 Google reviews with a 3.6-star rating. Why? Because when people are mad, they are way more likely to go online and spew than if they’re satisfied. With the new system in place for two years, we are at 931 reviews with a 4.7-star average rating after 23 total years. We have far more reviews than any of our competitors.

There are many competitors to Podium. Podium costs us about $300/month, $3,600/year. It seems like a lot, but I’m sure we bank way more business because of them. If that’s too pricey for your business, you can check out alternatives to Podium, like Trust Pilot, Gather Up, and various others.

If you don’t already have a review system in place, there is no better time to start than now. Google “PostcardMania Clearwater FL reviews” and see the first page. We work on this proactively. You can too.