Don’t Ignore Customer Reviews

“You know your business best,” is a common line that business owners and leaders hear, but it isn’t the whole story. Customers know your business just as well, sometimes even better.

Customers are the ones engaging in the customer journey, interacting with products and services, and deciding whether they’ll give a business more of their hard-earned money and time. Customers are keenly aware of their own needs and how those needs may evolve over time, which is why customer reviews are such an important data set for any business.

As a business owner or leader, it’s important to understand the value of customer reviews beyond just improving discoverability. While it’s true that customer reviews can help increase SEO for your service or product, they can also provide actionable insights that can impact the effectiveness of your marketing and growth strategies.

Customer reviews are a powerful source of data that can help you identify product roadmap opportunities and produce more effective marketing tactics. They can help you better understand your target audience, their needs and preferences, and the most effective ways of communicating with them. By leveraging customer reviews in this way, you can create a more customer-centric approach to your business that is laser-focused on meeting the needs of your customers.

So, if you have customer reviews you’d like to harness to take your business to the next level, here are two of the best ways you can get started. (And don’t worry if you don’t have any customer reviews, that’s covered too).

Utilize reviews to help prioritize your product roadmap and/or growth strategy

We all know that sorting through customer reviews can be a tedious task. Plus, it’s easy to get caught up in the positive reviews and disregard the negative ones. However, if marketers can move beyond this binary mindset of “positive/negative”, they can uncover valuable insights that can help improve their products or services.

After all, the “product” aspect of the four Ps of marketing (product, price, place, promotion) is crucial in determining the success of a business. By carefully analyzing customer reviews, businesses can identify patterns and trends in customer feedback. If customers repeatedly ask for a certain feature or improvement, it’s a clear sign that something important is missing. Keeping track of these feature requests can provide actionable data that can help prioritize your organization’s product roadmap.

While it may not always be an enjoyable task, wading through customer reviews can lead to valuable discoveries that can help improve your business and ultimately lead to greater success.

Use the voice of the customer to inform effective copy 

One often overlooked benefit of customer reviews is their potential to provide valuable insights into the language that resonates with your target audience. By analyzing the language used in customer reviews, businesses can gain a better understanding of how customers perceive their products or services and what language they use to describe them.

For example, if a customer leaves a glowing review about how a product has positively impacted their life, they may use specific words and phrases that resonate with other potential customers. By taking note of these phrases, businesses can incorporate them into their marketing copy to create messaging that speaks directly to the needs and desires of their target audience.

Additionally, analyzing customer reviews can help businesses identify common pain points or concerns that customers have about their product or service. By addressing these concerns in marketing copy, businesses can alleviate potential barriers to purchase and increase overall customer conversions.

What if I have no customer reviews? 

Even if public-facing customer reviews don’t make sense for your business, soliciting feedback from your customers or users is still important. This can be achieved via surveys (email, on-site) or manually via customer interviews.

Customer reviews are a treasure trove of valuable insights that businesses can use to improve their products, services, and marketing strategies. Leveraging customer reviews can lead to more conversions, greater customer satisfaction, and a direct impact on a company’s bottom line. So, don’t overlook the power of customer reviews – they may be the missing piece you need to take your business to the next level.