Ratings and Reviews are key to any business

Ratings and Reviews

As a company that is in the B2B space, we try to help our clients improve their business results. While our focus is on promotional product marketing, I like to also share other helpful bits that may have nothing to do with our core business. Today, an old colleague of mine published an article in ClickZ about ratings and reviews… it is well worth the time to read it for any business.

In my agency days, we worked with a lot of clients that did not pay enough attention to the ratings, neither encouraging ratings nor responding to them. Gregg Stewart explains some of the key components of rating and review management.

I can tell you from experience, ratings matter… a lot. We’ve run user tests, and on the top of the list of influences, following word of mouth, are ratings. You can see it in Google search results. Google pulls the ratings from sources around the web as a way to add value to the users deciding on where to make a purchase. This gives some indication on how important this is.

While Gregg’s agency is focused on local businesses, the principles apply to any business, consumer or B2B, brick and mortar or internet based. The same need for validation and assurance applies in any purchase situation.

We like to use TrustPilot to provide our customers with a verifiable way to provide feedback. The advantage of TrustPilot is that all purchasers are independently validated as real buyers by TrustPilot. One of the issues Gregg points out in some reviews is that these can be polluted by false negative reviews by competitors or disgruntled ex-employees. The reverse is also true – false positive reviews by company employees. False reviews, positive or negative, do no one any real good.