Over 80% of Americans say they read online reviews when hiring lawn care and landscaping contractors. It’s no secret that potential new clients trust more what others say about you than what you say about yourself. What are you doing to gather more good reviews for your business?
Here’s to get more online reviews so you stand out to potential clients.
Where to Start? Focus on the big three platforms: Google, Facebook, and Yelp. Millions of consumers use these. For professional contractors, your Google reviews are particularly important because they impact how you show up in local searches.
Won’t Reviews Just Happen? Don’t passively wait and hope your clients will review you. If you wait, the only reviews you will receive will be the ones from the upset noisy clients – not the happy, satisfied clients. (Sadly the upset clients often take to venting on social review sites.) If you want good reviews, you have to ASK for them!
How Do You Ask for Reviews? Typically the best way is to send a structured email campaign to your current and past clients with links to the review sites. Typically, these campaigns yield a 7-10% response in generating new reviews. It’s important that your campaign be well structured, timed and messaged to get great reviews that make your business shine. (We can recommend service providers that specialize in our industry to conduct your campaign.)
What Other Methods Can Boost Reviews?
- Include invitations to leave reviews into all your communications with clients including invoices, e-newsletters and website. These make it easy to review you by just clicking a link.
- Let your clients know that you really value their positive review feedback. Often they don’t realize just how valuable their helpful their comments can be.
- If you do internal customer satisfaction surveys, respond to the positive ones with a direct request for the client to repeat their kind words on one or more review sites. Your most loyal and satisfied customers often are very pleased to help. For those that are negative, connect directly with the customer to find out how you can resolve the situation before it turns into a larger problem.
Potential clients are reading your reviews right now. Be sure your company’s outstanding reputation shines through!