Bad Digital Habit #1
Bad habits. Mine is acting like I’m going to start working out. We all have them, especially as business owners.
Let’s talk about the most common bad habits as it relates to your business’ digital marketing strategy. I tend to ramble, so we’ll do a recurring series featuring one of these at a time.
Inconsistent Online Reviews
This bad habit shows up in three ways. First is not getting any reviews at all. Second is getting way too many in too short of a period of time. Third is back and forth, on-and-off focus. We’ll take a look at all three.
Getting no reviews at all is the worst offender. Insurance agents love referral business, right? It’s the best when a client tells their friend how great of an experience they had with your office, and even encourages them to switch their insurance to you, too. Now picture this: imagine if you had tons of these people telling everyone who is looking for an insurance agent in their area how great of an experience they had with your office? Online reviews is your digital “word of mouth” except on steroids.
Now let’s discuss the thorn in my side: getting in a huge number of reviews in a short time frame. I’m talking like, 50+ in 3 days. Believe me, we’ve seen it all. It’s bad for so many reasons. Google is smart. If they see 1-2 reviews come in monthly for years and then all of the sudden there are 50x that amount in a week, don’t you think that’s a red flag? It is, quite literally. Google will likely flag these reviews as spam, and take them down while they review to make sure they all meet Google’s guidelines. So that contest you just had with your team to get as many reviews in as possible was all for nothing. If you’re lucky Google will put them back, but very often they will remove some if not all for good.
Now, for the hot and cold reviews. We see it all the time. An insurance agent will come in hot and heavy with tons of Google reviews, only to taper off after six weeks. Before they know it, it’s been years since their latest Google review. Potential customers are left wondering, what the heck happened to this business? Are they even open, their last review was three years ago? Your reputation score will drop, which means your Google rank will drop. Don’t let this happen to you.
Tricks to get the right amount of reviews consistently? Build it into your team’s process like any other. We recommend having the service team be “in charge” of getting reviews in. The sales team should be focused on pivoting their conversations into additional sales opportunities, let them do that. The service team’s job is to provide the best customer experience, so shouldn’t they be the one asking their close customers to go online and spread the word about how great they did?
This bad habit, whichever one of the three you may fall into is easy to get out of. Utilize your Uptown Girl to work with your team directly on ways to implement this process into your day-to-day for good. Don’t forget, we provide our clients with multiple tools to make asking your happy customers for online reviews simple & easy.
PS - Facebook and Yelp need reviews too. Get after them all.