Over at AdAge, Abbey Klaasen just published a great story on “Your Best Marketing Tool Is the Humble Product Review.“ As the story states:
…for all the ink spilled on the importance of Twitter and Facebook as feedback and customer-service channels, there’s another social-media tool marketers are increasingly finding useful, not just as an online-shopping tool but as an internal, culturally changing consumer-criticism channel: the humble product review.
This is a great point that deserves reinforcement. While it is easy to get distracted by the latest “shiny object” in Digital Marketing, the product review is one of the simplest and yet most impactful, tools for a marketer.
If your brand hasn’t yet embraced Product Reviews, Klaasen recommends 4 steps to get started.
The right way to use reviews
- Embrace the Feedback: Sure, it’s scary to let customers say what they will about your products on your home turf — your website. But both the positive and negative feedback provides hints to what you’re doing well and where improvement is needed. FIGURE OUT WHO NEEDS TO KNOW. Assign a team to read all the lowest reviews. Make sure it includes the right mix of people who can react quickly and fix the problem — before more customers can get riled.
- Tout Your Customers Favorites: While negative ones give insight into manufacturer or customer support problems, positive ones can make great ad copy. Use them in circulars, marketing material and on store shelves.
- Incorporate Customer Service: Negative reviews can tip off your customer service and support teams to issues that they’ll soon be dealing with. Use them as early warning signs.
- Don’t Stop There: Oriental Trading started with reviews but after seeing how people liked to share their opinions, it has turned its website into a more robust community. It asks users to help solve each others’ problems and share their stories, using Bazaarvoice’s other tools.
Tags: BazaarVoice, Customer Reviews
