Why the Gold is in the Reviews

0:00Alright, so we are going to talk about why the gold is in reviews because pre-show Neil and I were talking about the reviews we've been getting on our podcast and we want to talk about how to talk about why the gold is in the gold is in reviews. as the more five-star reviews you get, and if your average is four and a half or above out of five, typically you'll do well, and the more of those reviews you get, the more sales you'll generate. That's obvious, that's not where the gold is. The gold is actually in the one-star, two-star, three-star, and even four-star reviews. The reason the gold is in there is because you can then take all the learnings from why people are upset or dissatisfied and then work on fixing your product or service.

1:00You won't be able to fix everything, but you'll be able to fix a lot. And in the long run, what you'll find is, yes, you'll naturally get more reviews, but typically the biggest way most companies grow is through word of mouth marketing. And the better product or service you have, and you get that by getting feedback, the reviews, the one stars, two stars, three and four stars give you that feedback. You start fixing all this stuff. You'll see over time, more word of mouth marketing and sales is driven from, hey, my friend told me about this product or service. Yeah, so this is known as qualitative versus quantitative feedback.

1:34And when you're reading reviews, this is qualitative feedback, right? So the quantitative piece might be the number of stars that you're getting and the average number of stars. But what you're really looking for is you're looking for signal versus noise. And so an example of this would be, the other day I was looking at booking a sushi restaurant. And actually I booked a sushi restaurant for tomorrow, but I was looking at the three-star reviews. And so there were a lot of three-star reviews saying, oh, this place has fallen apart and this food quality isn't as good as it was before. And so I didn't go with that one.

2:03I went with another one where it's been pretty consistent for the last six months or so. I look at the last six to 12 months, but you can look at this as a owner of a business or a founder of a business or a VP of marketing, whatever you are exactly. And you can say, well, this is the stuff that people are saying over and over. And in fact, on my ad agency's website, I don't know if you've done this, Neil, but on single grains website, it literally says level up your marketing without leveling up your headcount or without increasing headcount. And that was directly from one of the MPS surveys that we sent.

2:33Someone said that I was like, Whoa, that's a really good headline that came from one of our customers. We should just use that one. Speaking of what Eric just mentioned, and this is where you can use your five-star reviews. When you look at your five-star reviews, if you see customers saying something specific about the business, such as let's say with Eric's company, Simran, if he gets multiple reviews of people saying, yeah, we like the company because it allows us to do better without adding more headcount. That's appealing to a lot of people. If that's a message he's getting hypothetically in a handful of reviews, then what you'll want to do with your positive reviews.

3:09And once you figure out the commonalities, take what's making them happy and push that copy on your website, not the review copy. But what Eric's talking about here, he gave the example of, hey, you can level up your marketing without leveling up your headcount. He could start pushing similar verbiage on his website, right? His tagline could change to leveling up your marketing without leveling up your headcount. Or he could talk about services. Hey, with SEO, we have all these people. So that way you don't have to hire them. And he can keep reinforcing that message, which also boosts conversion rates.

3:44And this only works well when you do this with your five-star reviews, if you have enough of them that have commonalities. So when you're getting the positive reviews, you can't just look at two, three, four, look at 30, a hundred, however many you have, and look for the commonalities. And a lot of these tools can break down clouds like Survey Monkey. When you have tons of surveys, they'll break down the most common keywords and phrases. And that'll help you also determine what website copy you should be using to increase conversions. So to give a quick recap, use your one, two, three, four star reviews to figure out what's wrong and fix those things.

4:18Use your five star reviews, assuming you have enough quantity of them, figure out the commonalities and use that copy to encourage more people to convert from a visitor into a customer. And this is done for both products and services and both B2B and B2C. Yep. The other thing to add here is, or just more so to reinforce is your messaging matters at the end of the day. So you want to make sure that you're testing your messaging constantly. And if it doesn't work, then take it off and try something else, right? And so there's a good tool out there, or I should call it a good product from, he used to have a company called CXL, but he has a company now that just focuses on helping people with messaging called Winter.

4:55That's spelled W-Y-N-T-E-R. And I've heard great things about it. I haven't personally tried it myself. So I think it's at least you can check it out and decide where to go from there. The other piece that Neil is talking about in terms of your basically consolidating and putting your reviews into a word cloud, that certainly works. Plus, now you have all these AI tools where you can upload the reviews that you have and you can upload in bulk, right? And there are a couple of plugins now for ChatGPT. BART, it can be pretty flexible at times. and you can just ask it to summarize what type of messaging that you're seeing or what are the commonalities with all the reviews that are there.

5:31Maybe you have hundreds or thousands of reviews and then you could ask it to write the messaging for you. By the way, I haven't done that. That's just an idea that I have. Anything else, Neil? That's it. Make sure you rate, review this podcast. We appreciate all the five-star reviews. So the more you give us, the better off we are. And of course, the more listeners we can get and more people we can help out with their marketing. Thank you for your time.