Secrets to Google Reviews w/GUEST: Studio 28 Tattoos Owner TJ Cantwell! | Ep. 307

0:08Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately. You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwetelson. Let's do this, not that.

0:40we are back for do this not that presented by marigold and i don't know if i've ever been more excited for a guest and why am i so excited for this guest who do we got we got tj can't well now i'm excited because tj is the owner of something called studio 28 which is one of the coolest custom tattoo shops uh it's in new york but it's i hope i get this all right it is just cool wait did i get that right before i get any further did i nail that am i right it was close it was close it's uh it's uh custom tattoos uh fine jewelry body piercing the whole the whole shebang in the cool spectrum okay good and the reason i asked tj come on you're like wait a minute am i listening to this right in the marketing podcast what are we talking about tattoos is because the thing about tj's business and how he's grown it and how he's crushing it is because of testimonials, reviews, and really this attention to his customers being so loyal to him and his attention to detail in terms of really leveraging the power of social proof.

1:41And we're going to dig into all that, but he's cool. Like I don't have any tattoos, so I have to live vicariously through TJ because the dude is just cool. So I'm fired up to talk through all of it. TJ, officially welcome to the show. Awesome. Thank you. That was probably the coolest introduction I've ever had in my entire life. And I will record it and it'll be my new ringtone for sure. All right. So before we get into all things reviews, because listen, you have over a thousand Google reviews and they're not all, you know, the reason that TJ is cool is that they're not all perfect. And he's going to share with us, what do you do?

2:14Well, how do you react? How do you handle reviews in general? We're going to get into all of that, but how did TJ wind up being this guy that you are? It's a funny road. I actually, I used to be a finance guy. I worked in the mortgage sector and made it through the 06 crash and just everything went to crap. And I just really didn't want to do it anymore. I had a bunch of tattoos and I went down and did what we call a pain therapy session, which is literally just go have a session and just let your mind kind of go free. And I ended up in a conversation with my artists. One thing led to another to a dinner.

2:52And then it was about 120 days later, I opened the business. That was 15 years ago. And yeah, and just like took the roller coaster of the ride for it. That is wild. That really is wild. And so when you you open up your business, okay, and you're you're you're starting to get people to show up and whatever. At what point were you like, wow, I need to reviews or what's going to be the the thing that kind of fuels people deciding whether or not they should come to me. Did you prioritize getting reviews out of the gate for your business or just something that happened and then you jumped into it?

3:28It happened a little more organically. So, you know, 15 years ago, you know, Google didn't have a review system. It was basically Yelp or nothing. So we got the first couple notifications because I had my Yelp page all set up. Yelp was one of the first marketing campaigns that we ever worked with. And we got the notifications about the reviews coming in. And then all of a sudden it was like, wait a minute, this is, you know, this is something that people are going to be looking at to, to validate a business before they start coming into it. So I started jumping onto it pretty early. And I mean, groveling, you know, I mean, literally like just begging customers, you know, like just if they had a good time, I would be emailing them.

4:03I would call them and just be like, Hey, like I saw you had a good time. Like, you know, can you please go give us a review? Just trying to, I figured from the, from the start of it, it was more of a numbers game. You know, it was like, the more you have, the better you're going to look. So let's just try and get as many as we can. And yeah, but it literally just started from a couple notifications coming in about, oh, people are talking about us. Okay, so great. Now you start getting reviews. And I love how you prioritize getting reviews, right? That's kind of like your North Star. How do you go about doing that now?

4:39I mean, is there some sort of automated thing? Somebody comes in, they get a tattoo, they get this email, the cashier says this. How do you actually go about being intentional about getting reviews? There's so much, actually. We have a bunch of different avenues for it. So first, we have in our lounge areas, we have these really cool wooden plaques that we got someone from Etsy to make that have the QR codes that go right to our Google page. So they're right there while they're sitting in the lounge. So we're automatically just off the top of their head, they're seeing it. We're not really assuming that they're going to scan those ones because they haven't even gotten serviced yet, but they're already seeing that reviews are important to us.

5:16There's another plaque on the way out the door. We have a fully automated booking system that goes through our website. And then once you complete your appointment at the end of the day, you get a follow-up email from the system with the message, you know, Hey, hope you had a really great time. Here's a link to Google, you know, please go give us a review, tell us your thoughts. And then I also do once a month, I send a mailer from myself personally to all clients that came in for the month. Again, reiterating our mission statement and what the experience we hoped that they had. And we leave it like an open line of communication too.

5:51So it's, A, if you had a great time, awesome. Here's the link. Please go give us a review. If you didn't have the greatest time, which happens, you're not going to make everyone happy. That open line of communication to be like, hey, you can respond to this email and I, the owner, will personally get back to you to hear your concerns and kind of go through where we failed you and what we can do to improve or make it right or correct what you think was an injustice that was just a misunderstanding. The thing that's really cool about what you're doing is you're a business owner, successful business owner, and it's not like, oh, the reviews, we'll get to them whenever, or some random person on the marketing team should look at the reviews or whatever.

6:32you have realized that social proof is the way that whether you're a giant business or a small business that we all are deciding about who we are going to spend our money and time with and you're prioritizing which makes it a priority in your overall organization and i i hope everybody listening kind of thinks of it that way so i have a question though the thing that i think is super cool is how when you get a negative review right or one that's not like oh my god this is the greatest experience ever. What do you do? What are your rules of the road? Like, okay, we are on it this fast. This is what we do.

7:05Like, how do you handle the not great review? The first thing, obviously, I read through it a few times. I want to really try and get adjusted a bit. I'm going to look up the client card in our CRM system so that I can see who are you? Who are you here working with? Go and talk to them about the client. It's one of those, if you're on top of your business, you will, I, you will know if you're going to get a bad review before it happens. It should not be a surprise. So we'll always go over it with the staff and then kind of, and then we'll reach back. We'll respond publicly to it, of course, and kind of go over like, Hey, you know, again, it depends on the circumstances of it where no one's perfect.

7:48So like we could have easily failed you. We could have had a misunderstanding. We could have put the wrong piece of jewelry in you, you know, God forbid the worst scenario ever. We could misspell a tattoo. um like which is horrible um which we actually that's why if you get lettering tattoos we actually make the clients initial um the stencil before we do it um that way we have the proof of like hey like this is the spelling you gave us um but once once i kind of get the story from it we'll then respond publicly on the review um but i think the big thing we'll do is we'll also end it right there um in the review response we will we're never going to attack we're never going to justify, you know, it's usually just a very, Hey, like, we're really sorry that you had that experience, whether they're wrong or were wrong, they had a negative experience and that did happen.

8:32So we will always apologize for them having a negative experience. We don't want anyone to have a bad time coming into the shop. And then we'll always extend the offer, you know, Hey, like, here's my email, please reach out to me. And I would love to discuss what happened so we can see what happened along the road and what we can do to make it right for you. that way we can move it out of the review into a private conversation instead of just having you know review responses go back and forth that's just never conducive for anyone i think it's so important that when you get a negative review that you respond to because for me personally like if i'm looking at like a hotel or whatever and somebody writes something negative on trip advisor or whatever and then the hotel management writes back i'm so sorry blah blah to me uh the fact that they're on top of it and are applying to it says to me okay they have good customer service, but a negative review that goes left unresponded to is to me indicative of, of an organization that's just doesn't care.

9:28So definitely right. Yeah. Well, and it's also an, you know, like I, uh, I read like reviews are so important to me. I don't go to a business without reading their reviews. And it's, it, it's always mind blowing to me, the amount of people that just don't respond to reviews or only respond to the positive ones, like responding to a positive review takes 10 seconds. Great. Thanks for coming in. We hope to see you again. Thanks for the review. I think the biggest thing for people to take away from it, especially if you do get a negative review, is in the 15 years that we've been open, now we have over 1 ,100 Google reviews with a 4.8.

10:03We have around 500 on Yelp. I can't remember one single time that someone has ever come into the studio and mentioned a specific good review. They'll come in and be like, Hey, you have so many good reviews. That's so great. But we have people that come in that actually decided to come and do business with us because of the way that we responded to the negative reviews, because it shows that the business cares and that we really do care about all of our clients. So respond to every review, especially the negative ones. If you're not going to respond to all of them, then at least only do the negative ones.

10:36Cause those are, those are the ones people look at. Totally agree. And this probably sounds so horrible, but from this podcast here, I really try to prioritize getting people to leave reviews. Number one, it helps the algorithm and all. But the other thing that I'm sure everybody else already knows this, that if you have a boatload of good reviews, that when you get a negative review, there's not enough negative reviews to pull down your ranking that much. I mean, for you to go from 4.8 to 4.4, you probably we would need like 200 bad reviews. So it's really, it's mathematically like impossible.

11:14Yeah. Right. Right. I mean, is that like a plan? You know, that's when I plan it a hundred percent is because like when we were getting started and we didn't have as many, you know, like we got a bad review, it was, it was freak out mode. You know, it was like, Oh my God, like my, I'm going to lose my business. No one's going to want to come in because, you know, Karen came in and said that she hates us. Like, and then, so yeah, it's like the more you get, it's a math game. It gets, you know just math it's statistically hard to change that review the uh the rating on it um so yeah and plus it's you know the more you have it also it takes the edge off a lot like that's one thing i will say like it i i don't even get stressed about reviews anymore um and i used to get freaked out about it like like genuinely freaked out like i had to leave work and like you know go like go do a shot real quick or you know like walk around the block um like just something to like calm down.

12:04Um, and now it's like, Hey, like, okay, that happened. It's okay. Like, how are we going to respond to it? What can we learn from it? When can we grow? Um, you know, we talked before, you know, the whole, my, my whole concept of there's no such thing as a bad review. Um, so like, it's, it's nice to be, once you get those, those numbers built behind it, it makes it a lot easier to deal with it. And then you actually become way more effective in the way that you deal with it. Yeah, I totally agree. So let me ask you this. Is there any way, let's say somebody, a competitor or whatever goes on and purposely writes a nasty review.

12:37You know, it's not real. It's complete fake. It's total garbage. Can you actually get a review removed? So here's the first major misconception. There's no way. So you hear all the time with Yelp. There is no amount of money that I can pay to Yelp to have them remove negative reviews. They have their algorithm, and it's the most hardcore algorithm with filtering of reviews. And Google's the same way. They filter reviews. You can never pay to have them removed. All you can do is report them. And then it depends on how Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor, whoever it is, how they're going to view the review and what your circumstances of reporting it are if it violates their guidelines.

13:17I have had plenty of reviews removed. But because they violated the guidelines. So I guess the number one thing to do is know the companies that you're getting your reviews on. Know what their guidelines are. Know what customers are allowed to do and not do. And then you can use that. If you get a really bad... It was probably eight or nine years ago, we had someone that went on and left a scathingly bad review. And in the end, once we looked it up and figured it out, it was a mom that was mad at us that we wouldn't tattoo her underage daughter because they were from a state that allowed for underage tattooing, but New York does not.

13:56And she's like, well, she has a bunch of tattoos. And we're like, super cool. It's illegal in this state. We can't do it. And she went and left the review that we were using dirty needles. She called the health department on us. It was crazy. So that was something I was able to have removed. But it wasn't because it was a false review. We were actually able to have it removed because she cursed in the review. Oh, wow. And we knew the guidelines that you can't use language like that. So yeah, but it's actually really hard to get rid of a review. Even if it's a competitor that's leaving a negative review against you to hurt the business, they would have to be dumb enough to use their actual name.

14:36Like that you can be like, Hey, look, this is John Henry that is listed as the owner of this tattoo studio. That is a major competitor of ours. Like, so it's actually, it's pretty hard to get reviews, uh, removed. I think, I think the easiest thing to do is just make sure you're always doing the best by your clients and giving them the service that, that, that you would expect to get any business you go to. And then you'll just, you'll get the reviews and then you don't have to worry about the bad ones that come in. You can use them to your advantage. so let me ask you something i may go to google review jail for this but um this is my take so for one of my clients my marketing agency they they spend forever they spend a ton of money building out this app this shopping app whatever and they go and they pushed it live and they uh their competitor i guess had like a boatload of their friends go and leave horrible reviews on this app right out of the gate the day it launched and the app never recovered from it because the reviews were terrible nobody downloaded they went out of business right and so i'm a fan which is probably bad that when you're going to be launched something you know whether it's your book on amazon or it's your little store or whatever that you have a group of friendlies that when you are launching are going to go in there buy the thing do the thing whatever and then leave you a good solid review and not gain the system but kind of like get it out of the gate in the right way is that terrible am i a horrible human being no um i think everyone should do that i did that um that's where you get like that's where you know if you're not if you're not leaning on you know the people that you know and your friends you know what what i don't agree with is having people leave reviews that don't don't have anything to do with it um like i have a friend that owns a um a product company that they were on shark tank and like they got a deal and everything it was super cool um and then like after that like they hit all of us up we're all in the same fraternity um and they were like hey like i want to send you the product you know and then just you know you or no it was go on amazon buy the product i'll reimburse you for the cost of it and then use it and then go give us an honest review about it that's cool which is totally fine to do because we're still an actual user of the product it's just you're leaning on your friends and family to be a part of it um if you're just telling your friend you know if you're just putting up a a Facebook post, you know, be like, Hey, like, here's my new company.

16:54Go leave it a review. If you haven't done anything with the company that that's, that's low. Yeah. I think that's crap. I agree. I'm glad you kind of like pointed out that version of it. Cause I agree with exactly what you said. All right. Before we wrap up here, I want to ask you like, uh, since I've never gotten a tattoo. Okay. Um, where is like, where on my body is the starter tattoo? Like the most common starter tattoo spot. Is it like my wrist? Is it my arm? Like if I'm coming into your shop, like, jay listen you're a nerd you have no tattoos you should start with like a circle on your toe uh we definitely like your upper shoulder okay it's it's an easy it's a really it's one of the least painful places to get one it is easy for you to see it it's easy to show people it it's also very easy to hide it most clothing is going to cover it up so yeah i tell everyone like just get it on your shoulder because you don't want to you know you have people that get it on their back for their first one and then you see them like in the mirror like you know trying to like look at it and stuff like get it somewhere that you can see it that's for sure all right wait i got another question so like you're at the shop or whatever and people are coming in and you have like rules okay we you know in terms of what type of tattoos people would do and then somebody has to come over to you get are you okay if we tattoo this because it's super weird right like like what is something that you have to like make the judgment call on that yeah all right we'll do it even though it's i don't mean something like like offensive or or mean or whatever but like if somebody wants a picture of like a like a donkey like flying in the air does that have to come to you for approval or something no way those are the most fun ones um absolutely not we're there we have our things that we will not do we don't do any like gang tattoos um we won't do anything that's anything that would be considered offensive to any you know group of people or any you know anything racist, anything like that.

18:41Other than that, like, no, like honestly, like with tattoos, the weirder, the better. Like when you come in, like when you come in with like a crazy, weird idea, like those are like, those are just the super fun ones because those are also the clients that are going to come in. If you want to get something really weird, generally speaking, you're also the most open to artistic interpretation. So you are going to let the artists just have the most fun. And that is how you're going to get the coolest tattoo is you let the artist just do their thing give them a concept and just let them rock out on the design and that's how you're going to get like the really cool stuff so yeah the weird ideas bring up all day studio 28 new york city all your weird tattoos bring them all right i'm coming i'm coming i'm gonna get the mike tyson face tattoo it's happening uh all right everybody tell everybody where to follow you uh where your stores everything they got to follow they got it we're gonna put in the show notes but tell everybody everything yeah so it's studio 28 uh fine jewelry body piercings and tattoos we're at 108 west 28th street in manhattan new york um you can follow us all of our social media is studio 28 nyc my personal instagram is tj cantwell feel free you can follow me you can reach out ask me questions i never mind it at all and uh yeah come in and see us i love it i love it and we're gonna put this all in the show notes i'm telling you if anybody's getting that tattoo you go in there you say you heard tj in this podcast you can get out you get the logo of the podcast on your arm.

20:04Yes. Dude, I will put it. If someone comes in and gets the logo of the podcast, I'll pay for it. I'll pay for it. And then I'll block that person for the rest of their lives because I'll be scared of them. Oh, all right. Amazing, man. Thanks for being here. Appreciate you. Absolutely. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over. Subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketers. And hook us up with a five-star review if this wasn't the worst podcast of all time. Lastly, if you want access to the best virtual marketing events that are also 100 % free, visit guruevents.com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like Damon John, Martha Stewart, and me.

20:53Guruevents.com. Check it out.