How to Leverage Reviews and Social Proof for Business Growth

Word of mouth is still the best marketing channel. In fact, it is the single largest source of brand discovery on the Internet in the United States. It’s reviews and testimonials are worth their weight in gold. But many businesses aren’t effectively using social proof to reap the full benefits it can provide.

Reviews do not appear out of thin air, and simply having them is not enough. You have to work to fix them, filter them and display them in the right places so that they have maximum impact on your work.

Below, I’ll share some of the strategies I used to get 19,000 glowing reviews for my home services company, dam maxx – and how you can do the same.

Related: 4 Things to Know About Online Reviews (And Why You Shouldn’t Ignore Them)

The best way to conquer your fear of feedback is to do it faster

Many business owners are not proactive about asking customers for reviews, and here’s why. They worry that it will upset their request and upset customers will not leave positive reviews. It’s a completely understandable concern. It just becomes invalid.

Yes, it can be a pain to call or email out of the blue, especially when contacting a customer after a sale that happened weeks or months ago. But this is not a reason not to ask. When you don’t ask for reviews, no matter how good your products or services are, you tend to gravitate toward negative ones rather than positive ones—a phenomenon known as negative reviews.

Whatever you actually need to do, you’ll want an instant review as soon as you finish each task.

At Damax at Maxx, we’ve made this process easy by automating it for every seller in our network. Each time a warrant is issued, a request for an investigation is issued. That way, the customer’s experience is still fresh in their mind, and giving feedback feels like a natural way to close the loop.

Bottom line: Asking for a review should never feel like a new question on your part. It should feel like the last step in the process that your customer already accepts as part of the original sale you made.

Related: This review campaign took our company to almost 5 stars on Google – here’s how you can replicate it.

How to get positive reviews that your potential customers actually trust

You can think of offering incentives to get customers to review your business. But I’m here to tell you that it’s not always necessary. In fact, it may actually have the opposite effect.

First, most of your customers won’t actually need an incentive if you’ve timed your request correctly as per my advice in the previous section. Remember: They don’t give anything for nothing. They perform the last step in the sales process. When you wait when you wait before you wait before you ask if you can’t come back.

Dam Maxx is a perfect example: To date, we have 18,917 customer reviews on Google, Hubspot and Facebook, with an average of 4.9 stars, and they cost us nothing. It was not necessary to offer an incentive in one of them.

This is important for another reason: A free review is always more honest and reliable than one with a premium or discount. As a true signal of the brand’s confidence in these thousands of reviews, we can point to the van as a metric.

With America’s number one ranked number one, we provide compelling evidence to support this claim. Another US roofing business has these very slam-dunk reviews that are freely offered by their customers.

Related: 4 Ways to Use Social Proof to Grow Your Business Online

How you display your reviews has a direct impact on customer perceptions

Whatever you do, don’t count on other platforms to display your reviews for you. Waiting for customers to stumble upon them on Google or Facebook is passive. It only provides a fraction of the image you could achieve with a little more guest work, and it doesn’t do any quality control.

Every channel you use to reach your audience is a potential place to display a good study or testimonial. At Damaxx, we put our best reviews on social media graphics. We invite hosts with glowing reviews to send us video testimonials, then upload to YouTube. We reach out to those customers because we can activate brand promotions and use them to directly drive new business.

You want to focus on how reviews are displayed on your website. Learning how to show the reviews that will be most relevant to your audience is more valuable than shooting them all without any filters. You want people to find information that answers their questions and helps them decide if you’re a good fit for their needs.

We built it in-house by adding a rosette to our website. These reviews are then displayed beautifully on our site where new potential customers can find them.

I’ve written extensively about how important it is for growing businesses to embrace new technology and add to your team instead of threatening it.

Word of mouth is still the best marketing channel. In fact, it is the single largest source of brand discovery on the Internet in the United States. It’s reviews and testimonials are worth their weight in gold. But many businesses aren’t effectively using social proof to reap the full benefits it can provide.

Reviews do not appear out of thin air, and simply having them is not enough. You have to work to fix them, filter them and display them in the right places so that they have maximum impact on your work.