Reviews to revenue: Using feedback to grow your business

This webinar deals with using the feedback a business receives via customer reviews, testimonials, and survey responses to grow their business. It can be an absolute game changer for growing local businesses. 

If you would like to know a little more about the value of reviews in reputation management and how it connects to business growth and revenue, here is a small excerpt from the conversation in this webinar. 

Sneak peek of this webinar

Welcome to the first installment of Birdeye’s Reviews to Revenue Series. How to use feedback to grow your business. So we're going to start with the million-dollar question that brought us all here: how do reviews or online reputation impact your bottom line? It goes without saying that they're a vital part of an online reputation strategy. But how specifically do we connect the dots between reputation and revenue? So we're going to put George on the spot first. So SEV Laser operates in a highly competitive wellness industry. From your perspective, what impact have reviews had on your ability to attract new customers?  

Well, we operate in a medical, health, and beauty space, and both topics together are something that people care a lot about. You know, they want to avoid making a mistake by choosing the wrong place to get treatment. So these days, what do we do? All rely on reviews and testimonials to get an idea of if this place is good enough and if the brand is known. So we grew our history. The beginning of the company was through social media, Instagram, where many influencers happily shared their experience about getting treatments at SEV Laser. And I consider those testimonials, and testimonials are kind of considered as reviews too.

You know, they don't become stars, but they are, in a sense, a review of some sort so that we grew through testimonials. And then when we started growing as a chain,  obviously, we stepped into Google and other platforms, and there that's where we saw the reviews coming in and how the business actually started growing and growing with the help of reviews, where more people would know about us and would be able to find us. And basically, through testimonials, through like word-of-mouth influencers to testimonials, to reviews. That's how we really grew this into a chain across multiple states and then nationwide. 

Sunburst Shutters and Window Fashions is a premium product. And I understand you have a lot of low-cost competitors.

Do you hear from customers that they select you over low-cost competitors because of your reputation? Yep, all the time. That's pretty much the day-to-day, given that we are a niche product. We offer a niche product within a niche industry besides family, friends, and that awe-inspired neighbor. That's like, Hey, I want shutters too. Those look like great window treatments. It's kind of like one of those snowball effects. But in this line of business, our audience is known to and has to put that extra time and effort into researching because it is a lifetime product. So, when someone is ready to make that big purchase in really any industry for, for that matter, that that has that big price target, they're going to do a lot of research to know where they're going to get not so much bang for their buck, but where that service is in alignment with the product as well. 

Service is going to be a theme we hear a lot about in this conversation. It's the core of your reputation. It's how you make people feel.

It's clear that reviews are important when consumers are deciding on their research process, but it's also really important in determining how you show up online when they're starting their search in the first place. It has a big impact on Google rankings, so we're going to dove into that a little bit.

And Shawn, my understanding from our past conversation is that Google is your top source of leads. Can you walk us through that a little bit and talk about the impact of reviews on your Google rankings? 

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in the search space, Google is obviously the 8,000-pound gorilla. And that's the reason that we're a Google partner. We, in essence, act as the agency for our franchisees. So that's where we put a lot of our efforts. And, you know, they're increasingly important to our brand. In the research that we've done, some studies out there, we'll say up to 96% of customers are actually looking at online reviews when they're looking to select a residential home services provider. 

We're endeavoring to bring traffic to the places where those reviews are upfront and personal. These are our top sources of leads and they happen to be places where we're actually syndicating reviews. We syndicate every review given from every provider on our site when it comes to our top sources. This includes Google my Business (now Google Business Profile), and of course our website, where the Google marketing platform drives the vast majority of our leads. We also have Google Ads because our competitors do, and we do not want to lose any eyeballs there. But it's interesting that it brings a different kind of juice than the organic or the review traffic where we make an overt promise about our service experience. 

We are finally at the point in our brand where we can start to sell purely on our service experience and reviews. Because glass is glass, we're not going to be the low price leader. So it has to be about service. So we don’t have any choice to continue to get better and be more adept at navigating this landscape —continue with this current trend of increasing our reviews, our ratings and the overall response rates. We need to ultimately build customer trust and continue to drive our organic rankings.

To know more, watch the entire webinar.