Why Reviews Are So Important

If you’ve ever shopped on Amazon, consider whether you look at the product reviews or not. I know I do. Other consumers’ input is helpful in understanding whether a given product will work the way we want it to.

We live in a society that is quickly becoming review-focused. Many diners review restaurants (and these days, any other type of business) on Yelp. We’re using these reviews to determine where we spend our money.

So as a business, it behooves you to take advantage of reviews and encourage your customers to give them.

How to Get Reviews

Start with the customers or contacts you have a good relationship with. Ask them to visit your Yelp or Amazon page and leave a review. You want honesty, but don’t be afraid of a few negative reviews. They show visitors to the site that the reviews aren’t rigged by the company. And the more reviews you get, the less important those few negative ones become.

Make it easy for customers. Send an email after they make a purchase with a link to your Yelp or Amazon page so all they have to do is click and type. Put a sign in your store at the cash register reminding them to leave a review, and have your staff invite customers to go online to leave reviews.

Our Reviews

We’re always thrilled when someone reviews our book. It shows that we’re on the right track with our content, and that people appreciate what we’re doing. Here’s a great review we recently got:

“Visual Marketing – 99 Proven Ways for Small Businesses to Market with Images and Designs is a THE book for savvy business owners. This valuable reference is full of smart, creative and innovative ways to promote their businesses. Whether it’s on the web, in print or in-person, Visual Marketing provides fabulous ideas, illustrations, tips and the story behind each strategy. It’s one of the FIRST books I enthusiastically recommend to my business clients.”
— Teri Scheinzeit, The Savvy Business Coach

Reviews can be a marketing tool, just like social media or press releases. Use them to your benefit, and you’ll see an increase in customers coming through your door.

Photo Credit: Yelp.com via Compfight cc

Reviews and News

We’d like to thank John Sternal of Understanding Marketing, who recently reviewed Visual Marketing. He highlighted some of the tips he enjoyed the most from the book:

#3: Augmenting the reality of mobile advertising: Sharing brand information visually over mobile devices through apps. Simply put, the world is going mobile. All small businesses need to find a way to market their business through a smart phone.

#19: Good service is earned: Making a brand statement and creating viral content through infographics. We are huge believers of infographics on UnderstandingMarketing.com. In fact, we have an entire Pinterest page devoted to infographics.

#33: Blogger outreach in the cloud: Using a visually inspired word cloud to start a conversation with a blogger. Blogger outreach is a skill that is acquired through experience, not necessarily through education. But word clouds are highly effective with bloggers and should be used by small businesses in an effort to build relationships online.

Thanks, John, for the glowing review, and we’re glad you liked the book!

Also, we want to mention that author David Langton has an article featured in Boomer Experience Speaks magazine! In it, he discusses “Why Visual Marketing Matters to Boomers.” Check him out page 11!

We’re always grateful for the coverage our book gets, so thank you to all of you bloggers and journalists who have written about it.