What Other Ways Can Online Reviews Positively Impact Your Tech Business?
It’s easy to make a direct correlation between collecting good online reviews and gaining more business because of them, but have you ever considered other ways that reviews might influence your business?
There is a lot of power packed behind each star rating and personal testimonial, and if you capitalize on your reviews, it can open up a whole new world of benefits that you’ve been missing out on.
Let’s take a look deeper at how building online reviews can be your secret weapon to gaining a competitive edge in multiple facets of your tech business.
Online Reviews and Their Star Power
The obvious benefit of a good review program is the continuous injection of power into your marketing engine. A new review gives you the opportunity to write a great blog, send out a new social media post, and let your customers’ words be your online evangelist.
A fresh injection of that power is important, otherwise reviews can get stale, excitement wanes, and your reviews aren’t doing as much for you as they used to.
If you gathered some great reviews about 2 years ago and think you’re covered, you might want to reconsider that! Old reviews can have the opposite effect, making people wonder, “Why does no one like working with that IT firm anymore?”
73% of consumers feel reviews older than 3 months aren’t relevant.
An automated review program can help you continually refresh your reviews by asking customers to review you on places like:
- Yelp
While your sales and lead generation will flourish with online reviews coming in regularly, there are many other areas of your business that can also share in that star power.
Beyond Sales… Other Areas Reviews Can Benefit Your IT Company
When customers say good things about you, it has a reverberating affect that can benefit your business both online and offline. Reviews go deeper than just some nice words, they’re like a biography of your business.
How are you to work with (or for)? Are you trustworthy? Do your technicians get the job done on time? Do you go the extra mile when your clients are in a pinch?
Reviews, more than anything else, tell your story to the world and if it’s a good one, the impact can be astonishing.
Here are some of the many other areas of your IT business where you’ll find the impact of reviews.
Attracting New Qualified Hires
Finding the right employees can be challenging and even more so if there’s a lot of tech business competition in your area. How do you convince a talented candidate that your company is the one they want to work for over someone else?
Great company reviews can go a long way towards attracting the top IT talent in your market. If a job candidate reads in online reviews that your company is “great to work with” and clients mention they’ve “been with them for years,” they’ll get a picture in their mind of company that offers great job security and treats their customers right.
Companies that treat customers well, often also treat employees well, and that will come through when a job candidate sees your reviews online.
You can make the most of reviews in your hiring process by:
- Mentioning in your job advertisement “Take a look at our reviews on Google!”
- Giving candidates you interview a sheet of chosen customer reviews
- Asking your employees to review you on employer review sites like Glass Door
- Emailing a link to your reviews as a follow up to a particularly good candidate
Keeping Your Best Employees
Online reviews can help you not only hire the best, they can help you keep the best employees too. A sense of pride is important for many people, and especially those who want to help others, which describes many folks in the IT industry.
It’s important to share your customer reviews with your employees so they can know what a great job they’re doing and also gain insights into the customer experience.
Positive customer reviews can foster pride and employees that have pride in the place they work are not only more likely to stay, but also be more productive. Here are a few confirming statistics from research by Great Place to Work.
Employees who are proud to work for a business are:
- 13x more likely to want to work there a long time
- 4x more likely to go the extra mile to get the job done
- 8x more likely to share where they work with others
Improving Your Search Engine Rankings
By having multiple reviews spidering out online, you can improve your tech business website’s search engine ranking and give it a boost that website SEO can’t do alone.
According to the Local Search Ranking Factors report by Moz, review signals make up 15.44% of local search ranking factors.
Those “signals” include things like:
- Review quantity
- Review velocity
- Review diversity
Local SEO is particularly important to IT businesses who are trying to come up in the top positions for computer and tech service keywords in their service areas.
Beside getting the boost from backlinks to your site from the various review sites, the shear number of reviews you have about your business are taken into consideration in the Google ranking algorithm.
And what’s the biggest driver of clicks in local SERPs? Review ratings!
Attracting the Best Business Partners
Often, IT business owners will work with other partners. For example, you might have a relationship with a company that does data recovery work that you don’t do and refer customers to them, and they in turn they refer their customers to you for services they don’t provide.
This win-win scenario is a great way to increase business, and great reviews about your company can help you attract the best partners to do business with.
It’s another scenario, like new hires, where a partner firm may have several IT shops to choose from. What makes them refer customers to you over all others? Positive reviews about your company can often be the deciding factor. After all, they want to make sure they’re sending their customers to a great place, otherwise it could reflect poorly on them.
Helping You Get a Bank Loan
Getting a small business loan is common when you want to expand your business and invest in your future. In order to get the loan you want, you have to convince the bank loan officer that your business is in good standing and you have the ability to make good on the loan
While financial records and credit history are going to be key factors in that decision, if someone is on the fence, reviews could be a deciding factor that convinces them your business is trustworthy and going in the right direction.
An “A” rating at the Better Business Bureau or 4+ stars with multiple satisfied customer reviews on Google are all evidence that your company is in good standing and that you are a great business partner.
Statistics show that positive reviews make 73% of consumers trust a local business more, so it only makes sense that the same trust factor would rub off when a bank is sizing up your company for trustworthiness.
Boosting Your Visibility in Your Area
Imagine your local TV news station is doing a story about the newest high-profile data breach and is looking for a local IT expert to bring on for the 5:00 newscast. They do a Google search and see one tech business seems to have really great reviews. That’s most likely the one that will get invited to appear.
You never know who is looking at those reviews that you have (or don’t have) online. It could be a local rotary club looking for a speaker or a reporter needing input on a tech-based story.
The bottom line is that the businesses that have the reviews are going to be more visible than those that don’t. Sometimes, having no or few reviews can be on par with having negative ones, because people tend to pass by the companies that no one is talking about and instead go where the buzz is.
Injecting Morale and Positivity
If you’re having a particularly stressful day, nothing can pick you up faster than a customer leaving a review telling you how great you are. The injection of positivity into a long day can perk up both you and your employees.
70% of employees say that hearing “thank you” more would massively boost their motivation and morale.
The power of positivity can improve productivity, mood, and an overall sense of happiness and well-being. Happy employees exemplify that sense positivity in everything they do, including in their interactions with your customers and each other.
Don’t discount the mental benefit to them (and yourself) of hearing a big “Thank You!” and “Job Well Done!” through your customer reviews.
Make Online Reviews a Habit
Too many companies approach customer reviews as an afterthought, when it should be a regular habit. Positive customer reviews can impact your business from all sides and give you the power you need to succeed on a daily basis.
In what ways have online reviews helped your business? Let us know in the comments.
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