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Beginners all face the same problem. You’re creating a new object, and you need to make sure two things:
- That’s your solution worth buying.
- That your young company is reliable and trustworthy
No small task! Especially when your market is mostly “early adopters” and you’re trying to cross the chasm to “early majority”.
But online reviews and customer recommendations can help you ensure both, which will lead to more customers and other benefits. I’ll show you how to take advantage of this opportunity using steps that have worked for us and our peers.
Figure crossing the chasm from early customers to the full market. Credit: CoBloom
Why use online reviews for startup growth?
Online reviews are probably your number 1 marketing asset, for two reasons.
1. Potential clients don’t care about your opinion.
Of course it means your product and company are good! But as a consumer, I don’t know you yet and I can’t trust you. Instead, I want to see unfiltered feedback from your current customers. So I turn to online review platforms like Google or G2 to see what my customers think about you.
If you don’t have reviews on these platforms, you’re losing customers.
2. It takes time to build inbound marketing.
You’re creating a new market and people aren’t actively looking for your solution – yet. But they will, and they’re trying to make sure they find you instead of the competition.
Online reviews help you rank higher in search results, and help you rank in the “Top 10” and “Best of.” [XYZ] Providers” listings. Once you’re done with those two, you can move on to more and before long they’ll be recommended solutions on the web. That’s the dream.
This important work takes time to produce, so it is better to start early.
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How to find online reviews
It actually takes two steps.
1. Provide incredible customer experiences.
Customers will only leave reviews and refer others to you if they have had a good experience. Here are three things to create those best practices.
- Solve their problems. Customers don’t care about you or your solution as much as they care about solving their problems. Your product should do what you want.
- Do it right the first time and every time. Unreliable products – products that only work sometimes – cause more headaches than they’re worth. You must prove that you are trustworthy and reliable day-in and day-out.
- Be nice to work with. This is a key point in creating good experiences that customers are willing to talk about. The review or referral will be as much about you as it will be about your product, so be quick to respond, helpful, considerate, available, open to feedback, and respectful – a pleasure to work with.
2. Ask!
Customers are unlikely to review and recommend you on their own. They need a little breeding. You are close to these customers, so use your judgment when the best time to ask, but here are a few things to consider:
- Time management: Wait until the customer gets value from you, but wait long enough to forget that great experience.
- The question: Ask on your channel. Using email and texting together for online reviews makes it work best. For referrals, in-person meetings work best, but any open communication channel will work.
- follow upFor an online assessment, be sure to respond publicly to the assessment. Potential buyers want to see that you’re engaged, and your existing customers will appreciate the compliment. If customers provide some other type of recommendation or referral, thank them personally, and consider a gift such as a service discount or gift card.
How many reviews or recommendations do you need?
The number of reviews or recommendations you need depends on many factors, but as a rule of thumb, you’re better off taking a quantitative approach to online reviews and a qualitative approach to reviews.
For reviews:
See how many online reviews your competitors have on key review platforms. Make sure you earn more from them. Star rating is important, but more important is the number of reviews and how often you get new reviews.
For suggestions:
For case studies or testimonials that live on your website or are used in your sales materials, you really only need one great case study or testimonial for each of your main customer types.
It’s more useful, but better to have a big case study of their problem, why they chose you, and the results they’ve seen (including hard numbers).
Make sure you make it easy for customers to share these assets with others. More on that in a moment.
If you focus on both reviews and recommendations, you will definitely convert previous customers into referral sources, and more new customers will buy from you.
Steps to get more reviews
1. Start promoting each client.
From your first customer conversations, make sure you’re talking about outcomes throughout their lifecycle. You want customers to think about the money they are spending on you and what dollars or other metrics they are getting in return.
This is helpful for reviews and recommendations – and customer retention – because they can clearly articulate your value to themselves and others. After that, you just have to remember to ask.
2. Allow customers to recommend you on their own.
Customers aren’t likely to give reviews or recommendations without being asked, so see how to incorporate incentives and questions into your daily customer interactions. A few that have worked for us:
- Adding a review request to regular customer success communications
- Reward customers for giving feedback (positive or negative)
- Create email and text message templates that customers can send to others
- Putting together packaging resources that our customers can easily share with others who want to recommend us
3. Consider whether you need an assessment management tool.
Because it’s easy to request reviews and manage those reviews across all platforms, you can have a low customer base. As you grow, you may want an assessment management platform to help you do that. Tracking reviews as a key performance indicator (KPI) will be important, and you’ll likely want to manage that in one place instead of jumping around platforms.
Whatever you choose to do, make sure you focus on continually finding reviews and recommendations online. Your startup’s growth may just depend on it.
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