I’m Director of Marketing at Lindus Construction. We have about 150 employees and $43 million in revenue for 2021. Our goal has always been to grow our number of reviews by having our team work together to provide multiple touchpoints for customers to do so.
Here are some tips we use to make that happen.
1. A Team Effort
Our entire organization understands that positive online reviews are a team effort. Clients are sent links to our profiles on review platforms and asked to share feedback after their project wraps up. Our installers ask homeowners to leave positive reviews of their experience before they even leave the jobsite.
Our salespeople also request reviews when they follow up with homeowners after the project is completed. All these different approaches allow us to collect an array of reviews from happy clients.
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2. Make a Continuous Commitment
Getting reviews needs to be a continuous effort. Many clients are happy to leave one but just need the prompt. It can be a challenge to get less tech-savvy customers to leave a review, and in these cases, we call clients and walk them through how to leave a review.
3. Know When and How a Client Can Give a Review
A great time to ask for a review is right after the work has been done. There’s a spot on our company website where the homeowner can click on our preferred review sites, enter their information, and leave a review while the installers are still there.
We focus on Google the most because the more positive reviews we have, the better our SEO and trustworthiness rankings are. Facebook is great as well. It helps to have a high volume of Facebook reviews because often homeowners use Facebook to ask for contractor recommendations. Homeowners can quickly see a high volume of positive customer reviews.
Yelp’s algorithms select which reviews are recommended and hide others, so we prefer to put our focus on platforms that give equal weight to all reviews.
4. Give the Client an Experience to Pass On
At least a third of new customers come to us as referrals.
This helps reinforce the fact that our team does their best to make each client a raving fan of our company. This greatly helps us maintain our high rate of past customers referring new customers.
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5. Acknowledge and Address Bad Reviews
No company is perfect and negative reviews happen. We do our best to respond to each one as quickly as possible. We want the client to know that they have been heard and that we want to do everything we can to rectify the situation.
In many cases, customers revise or update their negative reviews because we were swift to act with a resolution that fully addressed their concerns.
About the Author
Bridget Cramer
Bridget Cramer is the director of marketing at Lindus Construction.