No matter how hard you try, sooner or later your business will face a negative online review. Former employees, competitors, or unreasonable customers all have instant access to leave unwarranted feedback about your business. It's time to get proactive about collecting positive online reviews in preparation for drowning out that occasional negative review.
So what is a business owner to do? Go on the offense and generate an avalanche of positive reviews. A good rule of thumb is that it takes about ten positive reviews to offset one negative review. I know this sounds like a lot of work for a B2B business that doesn't generate a lot of reviews organically. But if you follow the steps below, you should be able to get this done in an hour or less, and the return on investment is great!
1. Craft a letter to your personal contacts
Here is one that I used:“Subject- Need Your Help or Big Favor” (Both Worked Well For Me)
Hi Tim,
I have a huge favor to ask. We've been working really hard to build our Google reviews as it is becoming one of the factors Google and other search engines are using to rank our business. I know this is a lot to ask, but I would be really grateful if you could you could take 60 seconds and write a quick positive review for me on Google: Use our 5 Star Google Review Link Generator to get a Direct Link To Your Reviews.and/or Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/foremostmediausa/ (Note, Facebook is now calling these recommendations)
The review doesn't have to be real in depth but anything will help. I'd be happy to return the favor as well.
Jon
Be sure to replace the links above with your own links to your properties. Foremost Media can get those links for you, if you need help.
2. Now that you have the letter written...
Go through your email contact list and find 30-40 customers, suppliers, or vendors that you know will give you a good review, and send them the email above. Don’t do this with your email marketing software; send each email separately. It needs to be a personal note from you.
One other important note about Facebook - If you're asking people to leave reviews for you on Facebook, it’s important to make sure the ability to leave reviews is turned on for your page. Please review the instructions below to ensure that the feature is enabled:
- Navigate to the settings tab of the Page.
- Under general settings click edit on the reviews section
- Edit the option to "Allow visitors to review this Page" or "Disable reviews"
- Click save changes after making the selection
That's really all there is to it. If you have other team members in your office that have good customer relationships, have them do the same thing. In addition to the mitigation of future negative reviews, positive reviews are becoming a quality signal to Google for more than just local search and can even be pulled into things like AdWords campaigns, etc.
If you like what you've read here, do me a big favor and leave us a positive review on Google by following this link: https://goo.gl/emCYvq
Thanks for reading this and I hope it helps you.