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If you’re a business owner, you’ll hope that your efforts at marketing your products or services will convince your target audience to become paying customers. However, many of them won’t be moved to buy anything from you just because you’ve said positive things about your offerings.

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By contrast, potential customers often trust reviews as faithful depictions of the quality of the products they’re thinking about buying. That’s because these reviews are typically written by other people who have used those products and are sharing their honest views on them.

You can expect people to look for reviews of your product online before deciding whether to buy it or not. It’s something you’ve probably done yourself. Given how important online reviews have become to the process of making purchasing decisions, it’s not surprising that brands are now trying to leverage them to increase their sales.

In this article, we’ll share five ways you can take advantage of reviews to boost your sales and grow your business.

Use Positive Reviews As Testimonials

We have already mentioned that prospective customers often look up the reviews of products before deciding whether to buy them or not. Where the reviews appear genuine and mostly positive, the potential buyer may want to try the product out themselves.

You can take advantage of positive reviews by trying to get them seen by people in your target audience. For example, if the review was shared on Twitter or Facebook, you could broaden its reach by resharing it so that your followers will see it. You could also use a relevant and widely searched hashtag so that it gets to an even larger number of people.

Besides amplifying positive comments about your product on social media, you could also use them on your website and other online channels. If you’ve had several five-star ratings and great feedback on review sites and online forums, it’s not a bad idea to refer to them on your own website, blog posts, and emails. This tactic could attract more customers to your business.

Demonstrate Your Responsiveness

We all like it when vendors are responsive to our requests or complaints. We are pleased when our issues with a product or service are promptly fixed by its provider.

Your customers will react the same way to your service delivery. And if they aren’t customers yet, they may imply the potential that you’ll respond to their concerns from your reaction to reviews left online by existing users. So it’s crucial that you engage reviewers as quickly as you can.

But it’s not just the speed of response that you should get right. Your interaction with commenters should be courteous, relevant, and helpful. Thank people who commend your product; express regret when someone says they’ve had a poor experience with it, and ask them to channel their complaints to your official helplines; and recognize and thank people who suggest possible improvements.

Potential customers will be impressed by your responsiveness and may be moved to purchase your product or use your service.

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Find Keywords

At a first glance, this doesn’t look like an important benefit derivable from reviews. But if you recognize the importance of optimizing your website and other web channels for online search, you’ll know that this is crucial for growing your business.

If you take a close look at the reviews you get for your product or service, you could find that they talk about certain issues quite often. For example, many of these comments may talk a lot about how to use your product. If you haven’t already put up a ‘How to use (insert your product name)’ article on your blog, you probably should. Doing so could enable you to capture more prospects who are using that phrase (or keyword) to find out more about your product online.

Improve Your Product

Sometimes, your product’s users will spot an issue with it before you do so. Be grateful when they point it out in their comments; their submissions could save you from losing a lot of present and future buyers. Of course, the right response from you would be to check for the problem, fix it as quickly as is possible, and inform your customers that you’ve done so.

But reviews won’t always note obvious problems. They may suggest improvements which you probably don’t think are necessary. If you find that the reviews repeatedly request that a particular change be made, you may want to consider that suggestion.

On other occasions, one comment will recommend an improvement that immediately strikes you as a brilliant idea. Be sure to turn the idea over for a while (and maybe ask the opinion of people on your team) before going on to implement it.

Don’t overlook the requests and tips you glean from reviews. They may prove instrumental to building a product that’s a market leader.

Track Your Competitors

Have a look at the reviews of your competitors’ products, to see what they’re doing right and find shortcomings that you can make up for in your own product. Doing this will enable you to plug gaps in the market and attract more customers who are looking for features that your competitors’ products don’t have.

A study of reviews from across your niche or industry could reveal evolving consumer tastes that have barely been noticed by other businesses. This might give you a chance to gain a first-mover advantage by offering products that are in line with those tastes.

Final Words

Reviews can be a treasure trove of insights. When they’re positive, they indicate that you’re doing something right. And if they often raise issues with your product, do what you can to fix them. The suggestions you get from your product’s users may also prove helpful for fashioning an offering that your customers would love.

Featured Image Source: Eternity Marketing
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This article was first published on 14th March 2022

ikenna-nwachukwu

Ikenna Nwachukwu holds a bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He loves to look at the world through multiple lenses- economic, political, religious and philosophical- and to write about what he observes in a witty, yet reflective style.

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