How To Tap Into the Social Media Power of Employees for Content Amplification

Social media has evolved significantly in the past six years. At the beginning, businesses focused solely on just having a presence on social media. Then, brands beginning honing in on social listening and figuring out the “science” of a good social media campaign.

Marketers then realized that social media was a great tool not only to engage their audience, but a prime opportunity to amplify their content and draw even more people in to consume, engage with and share that content. Recent studies have found that social networking accounts for 30% of all time spent online.

Last week at MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum, David Honig and David Thomas (otherwise known as Dave Squared) focused on another very important element of social media that most businesses are not taking full advantage of, the power of employees. While employee’s are often the most loyal supporters of the brand, they may be intimidated or scared to promote content on behalf of the company. Below are some ways that employers can encourage and help employees amplify brand content using social media.

Create Clear Instructions

Fear many times is a result of not having all of the information about a particular topic. The last thing you want to do is create or enable fear when it comes to encouraging employees to amplify brand content on social media.

No matter what you say, if you have a workforce it will be important to remind employees that you want them to share and that it is valuable. And you have to show them how to do it.

If you put a series of guidelines that tells people what to say and how to do it, you take away that fear factor.

Understand The Workforce

Employee’s personal and professional lives are intertwined more now than ever before and are constantly connected to devices which creates a remarkable opportunity. There are estimates that nearly 75% of the global workforce will be made up of Millennial’s by 2025.

These employees’s were raised with cell phones and the Internet which requires an approach beyond email to reach them.

Turn Employee’s Into Storytellers

What do you think would happen if employees become the storytellers for your brand? Research says that around 15% of consumers actually trust a brand while 85% trust their peers. With the average employee having around 1,500 connections on social networks, think of the possibilities.

Brands have the opportunity to empower employees as storytellers by informing them, engaging them with the content and inspiring them to create and share.

These stories aren’t just about selling your brand; it’s about what the company believes in. It’s about sending the right content at the right time to the right employee.

Identify Early Adopters

As with any new program, it’s important to have beta testers before rolling out a program to the entire population. This will provide a chance to find out what they are doing currently, gauge their level of interest in supporting the brand online and getting them involved in the process.

Finding an executive champion can also help spread your initiative like wildfire. When there is support shown from the top, it will be easier to get other employees on board.

Add Gamification

We live in a gaming world. From gaming systems to mobile applications, they’re everywhere. If you add gamification to your employee social program, you can create some healthy competition and even offer incentives to encourage participation.

Make Consuming & Sharing Easy

The number of tools that we have at our fingertips today can help create efficiencies and offer new opportunities in all aspects of business. Social media is no different. Employee’s can be trained to use tools like Buffer and Hootsuite to share brand content on social media. Better yet, tools like Dynamic Signal offer a mobile application and admins can push notifications to employee’s that allow them to read and share brand content with the click of a button.

Everyone Benefits When Employees Get Involved

Data supports the importance of sharing content with employees. There is an opportunity to make employees better at what they do, by providing them with relevant content on a consistent basis. Building an employee advocacy program benefits both employees and the company in many ways including:

Employee Benefits:

• Better connection with the brand
• Feeling more “in the know” with company news
• They may become viewed as a thought leader
• An opportunity to establish their personal brand
• Easy ways to grow their online audience

Company Benefits:

• Increase brand awareness
• Deepen customer loyalty
• Strengthen company culture
• Drive leads and sales

For a successful program, it’s important that your employees don’t feel like you’re exploiting them to promote your marketing message. This fear can be alleviated by introducing the information clearly and transparently with the whole team. Of course, you always want to encourage employees to share what is relevant for their audience.

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Email Capture Optimized: How one small change led to a 364% increase in leads

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If you ask anything of a customer you must make it worth it for them to give it to you. This applies to every step in the sales process, right from the very beginning.

This is the conclusion that MECLABS, the parent company of MarketingExperiments, came to after studying more than 20,000 sales paths over 15 years. Of those sales paths, the latest MarketingExperiments Web clinic reviewed nine that focused on email capture. Here’s what we discovered: small changes that help customers perceive that it’s worth their time, effort and risk to provide you their information increased email capture from 21% to more than 600%. Watch it here.

Here’s one of the tests.

Background: The partner has an email capture process that offers downloadable reports in exchange for information. They wanted to capture and qualify emails.

Goal: Increase number of form submissions.

Primary research question: Which process will get the most submissions?

Approach: Adapt the registration process to reduce friction (friction is anything that makes the customer work harder to get through the sales process)

The Control was loaded with friction. It forced visitors to take four steps to access the reports.

The Treatment reduced those steps, but changed nothing else.

The result was that 364% more visitors submitted their email address to download reports.

Why was there nearly a four-fold increase in email capture?

The Treatment did not cost the visitor too much time to go through the process. They perceived that it was worth taking two steps to get access to the reports. However, the Control was perceived as too costly — visitors thought it wasn’t worth their time and effort to go through four steps to get access to the reports.

Everything we ask of customers is a transaction; closing the deal is the culmination of a long series of transactions. At any step of the sales process, if customers think that what they’re asked to do costs more than what they’ll receive for doing it, they’ll walk away. That’s why it’s critical to apply these three principles when you ask customers for their email — or anything else for that matter.

Principle #1

Any action we want our visitor to take, even a non-monetary one like giving an email address, comes with a perceived cost. Reduce the implicit cost associated with the request.

Principle #2

Tell customers why you’re asking. Communicate a strong process-level value proposition that answers the question, “If I am your ideal customer, why should I give you my email address?”

Principle #3

Perceived cost — whether that’s money, time, risk or resources — can be positive. Here’s why: marketers can use it to control the size and quality of email lists. In essence, if you want more qualified leads, ask the prospect to do more. The more prospects want what you’re selling, the more likely they’ll do what you ask.

Now is the time to start optimizing your pages. Want our feedback? It’s not too late to submit a page for MarketingExperiments’s MECLABS live optimization webinar on October 29.

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Email Marketing: Top 5 most effective list growth tactics

Lead Generation: How to build your own list [From the MarketingSherpa blog]

Lead Generation: Content and email combine for high-quality list building [From MarketingSherpa]

MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 — At the Bellagio in Las Vegas, Feburary 22-24 (MarketingSherpa is the sister company of MarketingExperiments)

Value Proposition: How a local business doubled its space in 9 months

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There are really only two types of marketing.

There’s “Let’sThrowEverythingWeHaveAtTheCustomerAndSHOUTITREALLYLOUD!” marketing. The value for the customer is not very clear with this method, but if the company buys enough TV spots, throws some huge incentives in the mix and pays high enough affiliate marketing commissions, it will move some product.

As for a sustainable business with reliable margins? Well, the marketer running these campaigns will be long gone by the time those topics come up.

And then there is …

Value-based marketing

This type of marketing is harder. Way harder. It involves discovering what customers really want, creating products and services with true value for the customer and clearly communicating those values.

You can see this battle most clearly in marketing for local businesses. I was thinking of this topic when I flipped through our local copies of Money Pages and Mint Magazine. These are essentially coupon circulars with local businesses and some national brands filling every inch of the space they bought with ink, shouting at the customer, practicing “Let’sThrowEverything …” — well, you get the idea.

Flipping through these circulars, I have no idea why I should go to one tire shop over the other or eat at one restaurant instead of the other. They’re all the same. The only question is — which will shout louder to get my attention or offer a bigger discount?

Local businesses have a huge advantage over national brands

Now here’s the irony.

You might say local business tend to practice this type of marketing because they don’t have professional marketers on staff or, if they do, the companies are too small to properly resource them.

However, local businesses have something that every marketer at a major brand covets — a seat at the table.

Whether this is because the marketing is done by a solopreneur or partner in the business, or just because the business is small enough that even a junior marketer can speak with and perhaps influence the CEO, the people running small business marketing can provide more influence than the coupon and the ad — they can help shape and create a value proposition.

This got me thinking …

 

What does a local business look like if it was built from the ground up with an effective value proposition?

At MECLABS Institute, value proposition is a core research topic. So when Zuzia Soldenhoff-Thorpe submitted an application to speak at MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 with her story about launching Bay & Bee (a locally owned eco-friendly play space here in Jacksonville, Florida), I saw it as a great opportunity to reconnect with her and learn about building a business from the ground up with a real value prop.

[Note: MarketingSherpa is the sister publishing brand to MarketingExperiments.]

Zuzia worked with me at MECLABS (here is a replay of a webinar Zuzia and I did with Facebook about strategic social media marketing), directly helping MECLABS Research Partners find their value propositions.

She knows the topic inside out, so I was curious to see how she applied it to her own business.

 

Find an unserved consumer need

“Bay & Bee was actually created due to the lack of such a place in Jacksonville,” Zuzia, Vice President, Bay & Bee, said.

At MECLABS, we teach that a key element of your value proposition is your “only factor.” This is something marketers try to tack on after a product is created. However, it is far better for marketers to influence product and service development to make sure an only factor that meets a key customer need is baked into the product.

Zuzia and her co-founder, Monica Pharr, built the company around an only factor. Here is how Monica explained it in a story about the company’s creation written to customers. Note the use of the word “only.”

“Basically, we are the only eco-friendly, non-toxic, clean and safe indoor play space for young children … We are the only ones using organic disinfecting and cleaning products, beeswax crayons; wooden, sustainable toys; have antimicrobial, sustainable cork flooring and are Montessori and Waldorf inspired.”

Don’t try to be everything to everyone

MECLABS defines a value proposition as the answer to this key question — “If I am your ideal prospect, why should I buy from you rather than any of your competitors?”

In the same story, Monica said, “We don’t communicate our value prop enough because I don’t feel like mentioning the negative aspects of [the] overstimulation, toxic plastic, etc. of our competitors, and people who appreciate our concept notice it all right away. Those who don’t care about these aspects can make the choice for themselves.”

If you look at the value proposition question above, it’s very easy to focus on the “why should I buy” part. But don’t overlook “If I am your ideal prospect.” An effective value proposition is one that does not try to serve every possible customer, but rather focuses on your ideal customer and leaves out the ones Monica refers to as “those who don’t care about these aspects.”

You would likely only win these people over with massive incentives that kill your margin and degrade the value of your products and services in the minds of the prospects you can’t serve best.

 

When you’re not the best option, tell your prospects

Once you’ve established a value proposition, the challenge is to live it through not just your marketing, but your business practices. In this way your potential customers experience it and you build trust with them.

Sometimes you should tell potential customers not to buy from you.

For example, in addition to being a play area and hosting birthday parties, Bay & Bee has both a brick-and-mortar and ecommerce store. But they don’t always carry the products potential customers are looking for.

In that case, Zuzia and Monica direct people who make inquiries on the website or through Bay & Bee’s Facebook page to other stores after making sure the desired item is at that location. “Might seem silly but, in the long run, those customers appreciate it and almost always return to our store,” Zuzia said.

Not only does that build trust with potential customers who may buy from them next time, but it builds a network that can refer customers to Bay & Bee when it is the option that can best serve customers with its value proposition. “That has become a norm by now, so other stores do the same now when they know we have something they don’t at the moment!” Zuzia said.

 

You still need the basic blocking and tackling of marketing

Having an effective value proposition doesn’t mean you can overlook the basics of marketing. But it does mean you can get far more bang for your buck … and time.

Zuzia’s budget is, “$100-$300 per week, depending on how many events we attend, what materials are being printed and sponsored posts ordered/written” which includes Google AdWords, “although we set a low budget of $1-$5/day to less competitive, more broad keywords,” Zuzia said.

“Most of the word spread is organic though,” Zuzia said. This is where that unique value proposition really comes in handy. “We have sparked conversations about classes, services and products we offer, as well as why we are different than others throughout popular blogs and sites around Jacksonville.”

For example, she has targeted closed Facebook Groups such as Jax Moms, Jax Beach Breastfeeding group and JMB Beaches/Intracoastal Moms. “We watch or join conversations, but without trying to sell. Just honest opinion, usually through our personal profiles rather than as business,” Zuzia said.

She also invites all local online influencers for exclusive deals and services exchanges, such as Jax Moms Blog, Fun 4 First Coast Kids, First Coast Babywearing, Jax Beach Breastfeeding Support and many others. “We became friends and we share each other’s events and posts on social media outlets, and have been given reins to their Instagram account on several occasions (when Bay & Bee takes over their account),” Zuzia said.

This has helped SEO as well. “Being consistent with our concept from the day the business plan was created [and] finding how Bay & Bee could differ from other local activities and indoor facilities let us achieve [a strong] online position and obtain most of our traffic organically,” Zuzia said. For example, Bay & Bee has received organic first page rankings for key terms like: play space, Jacksonville; mommy and me jacksonville fl; jax play space; Tula jacksonville fl; Tegu blocks jacksonville fl; life factory jacksonville fl; and Montessori play space jax.

Results

The results from having a unique value proposition and then effectively messaging through organic and (a little bit of) paid marketing are:

• Expanding to double the space after nine months in business
• More than 4,000 Facebook likes and more than 240 active members within a year of opening
• 5,000-10,000 visits to website per month
• Positive media and reviews, such as being named “Best Mommy & Me” in Jax in 2014 and 2015 and “Best Party Venue in Jacksonville.”

The biggest challenge, as it is for many brick-and-mortar retailers, is attribution. “Our biggest marketing challenge is not being able to measure conversion for each channel,” Zuzia said. “Membership sign-ups, party booking and most of all in-store purchases all happen after the initial visit to Bay & Bee. The goal of each campaign is to bring foot traffic.”

 

You can follow Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS Institute, @DanielBurstein.

 

You might also like

Value Proposition Worksheet

Value Proposition Development online certification course [From MECLABS, MarketingExperiments' parent company]

Direct from the Source: What a value proposition is, what it isn’t and the 5 questions it must answer

Incentive: The bacon of marketing tactics

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2016 — At the Bellagio in Las Vegas, February 22-24

5 Techniques to Get 5 Stars: How to Get More (and Better) Online Reviews

Everywhere you go, you see reviews.

Whether it’s a physical or digital product, if it’s worth talking about (in good or bad ways), it has reviews.

Some of this feedback is simply comments on blogs and forums.

But mostly, reviews exist on large e-commerce sites where companies sell their products.

The most important thing about reviews is that people care about them.

About 30% of Internet users check out reviews on Amazon before buying a product. And that’s just Amazon.

Another 13% head to Google.

Before, people would ask their friends about products. But now, they rely on online reviews.

People trust reviews to inform them about their decisions, and reviews play a huge role in people’s purchasing decisions. 

Although there’s no way to definitively say that reviews are good for business, just about every study or anecdotal case suggests that they are.

For example, Capterra analyzed the effect of adding reviews for software products and found that conversion rates increased significantly as more reviews were added.

Furthermore, a more general analysis found that conversion rate could more than double if you had a large enough number of reviews.

Although there is a mini-plateau after 20 reviews, conversion rate begins to increase again soon after.

You don’t have to be a big e-commerce site to add reviews to your personal website store.

Adding reviews increased Figleaves.com’s conversion rates by 35% and eSpares.co.uk’s by 14.2%.

These are massive increases in conversion rates that can result in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

Potential buyers trust reviews for a few reasons:

• They represent a real use situation
• They are less likely to be biased (than a sales page)
• They give visitors confidence to buy, proving there won’t be any issues with the purchase

Getting reviews is hard: If you’ve been selling online, you’ve probably noticed that it is difficult to get customers to leave reviews.

People want their products, but they don’t really want to do any extra work. Writing a good review can take 5 to 15 minutes without providing much of a benefit to the reviewer.

People typically leave a review for one of three reasons:

• They hate the product
• They love the product
• They’re somewhere in-between but would like to clear up any confusion around the product for other potential buyers (essentially just doing something nice)

The first two reasons are pretty self-explanatory.

Obviously, you don’t want people leaving reviews if they hate the product. That’s how you get negative reviews and one-star reviews that actually decrease your conversion rates.

So, how do you prevent it? Simple: have a great product along with great customer service.

If you create a product that everyone loves, you’ll get tons of reviews.

In reality, most products have customers that fall into all three camps.

What you need to do is focus on the people who already love your product and the ones that like it. A solid three- or four-star review can still help your conversion rate.

And that’s what the rest of this post is all about.

I’ll go over the best ways you can maximize the number of reviews you get from your customers.

You might not like this, but it’s what you have to do…

Most business owners love to create products.

But only some business owners love to sell those products.

Selling often feels like you’re doing something wrong and imposing on the people you genuinely care about.

Asking for anything can be difficult.

But it needs to be done.

You need to start by realizing that selling doesn’t have to be underhanded. If you create a truly valuable product, sales is simply letting people know about it.

If your product is great, people will buy your product and thank you for the opportunity.

After you make the sale, however, you need to ask customers to review it.

If you don’t ask, most will never even think of doing it, even if they don’t mind.

Although it might seem like you’re imposing on them—asking for something without giving something in return—you aren’t.

Most happy customers are glad to help you spread the word of your product so that other people will also give it a shot.

So, stop thinking that you’re taking advantage of your customers and realize that you’re helping each other.

Ideally, you want to ask for reviews as soon as you can after the purchase is made and your buyer had the time to receive and test the product.

If you ask too early, customers can’t review the product because they haven’t had the chance to use it.

If you ask too late, they’ll have forgotten about it and are less likely to review it (although late is better than early).

Amazon typically sends an email reminder asking you to review a recent purchase a few days after you’ve received it:

Customers don’t hate giving reviews—if you ask right…

It’s important to carefully approach the subject of reviews with customers.

First, you want them to receive the product and be happy with it.

The more satisfied they are, the more likely they are to not only leave a review but leave a positive one.

Before asking for a review, I recommend contacting customers and asking them if they had any problems with their order.

If they have had problems, they’ll let you know, and you’ll have the chance to fix them.

If they haven’t had any problems, some will let you know, but the others just won’t reply. It’s safe to ask any of these customers for reviews.

Finally, the way in which you ask for reviews is important.

Being persuasive with your request can double or triple the number of reviews you end up getting.

Tip #1 – Be appreciative: To be frank, reviewers don’t really get much out of the process. It’s just a nice thing they can do for other people reading reviews in the future.

However, many reviewers will do reviews if they know that they are important to you.

After all, you’ve just created a great product for them.

Even though they have paid for it already, many customers will feel that they should have paid more. This leaves them feeling indebted to you.

Many customers will leave a review if you tell them how important they are to you because then they can consider the two of you “even.”

For example, RealSelf is an online medical professional directory. It publishes reviews on all types of cosmetic doctors so that you can find one you can trust.

After you have found a doctor through the service, RealSelf asks you to contribute a review to the site.

There are two parts of the email in particular that make it work so well:

1. “…would love for you to share your experience…” - They’re not just asking you to leave a review for the fun of it. They’re making it clear that they appreciate it and value it.
2. “…will also help others make informed decisions” - Since the customer was just in the tough situation of trying to make a good decision, they are likely to be empathetic to other people in the same situation. Some customers will leave a review just to help others.

Tip #2 – Make it simple: So we’ve established that most reviewers leave reviews because it’s a nice thing to do.

However, there is a limit to how much most people are willing to give to be nice.

If you make customers jump through hoops to leave a review, most aren’t going to bother.

The solution is easy: make leaving a review as easy as possible.

First, if you’re asking for a review on any third-party sites, always link directly to the review forms on the specific sites:

Alternatively, if you’re asking customers to leave a review on your site, let them start the process by clicking on a star rating within an email. All the biggest sites do this for a reason. It works.

The other benefit is that it makes it really clear that you’re looking for the customer to leave a review (they know what stars represent).

Tip #3 – Do NOT offer an incentive: Want to get every customer to leave you a review? Just offer them $100 if they do.

Incentivizing reviews is a gray area.

It has obvious moral issues. In some ways, you’re essentially bribing your customer for a good review.

Even if you don’t intend your incentive to be a bribe, most people feel compelled to provide good reviews if they’re being compensated for it (without any other potential buyers being aware of it).

A potential problem that might be even bigger is that you could be fined huge amounts if caught by the FTC (if you do any business in the United States).

Not all countries have these rules, so it’s up to you to check if there’s an equivalent organization in your country and determine if you’re morally okay with incentivizing.

If you are going to offer an incentive, you should ask your reviewers to disclose that fact in their reviews. If the review discloses the incentive, not only is there no moral argument, but it’s also not violating any laws.

Tip #4 – Be clear about what you’re looking for: If you just have one textbox that says “your review,” customers could write about anything, even irrelevant things.

However, if you break down the review into descriptive fields, your reviewers will have a much better idea of what to include:

One way to improve the above form would be to add a description into, above, or beneath the “review” box.

You can prompt the customer to talk about certain aspects of the product that you believe influence buying decisions (shipping, packaging quality, durability, etc.).

Speaking of great reviews…here’s what’s in them

You can dictate the contents of a review by prompting your customers to think about certain topics.

This is important because most people don’t know what a good review consists of. They’ll often leave reviews like “great product” even though that’s not really very useful.

Instead, you want to prompt them with any (or all) of the following:

• including their background situation
• any special features of the product or buying process
• their overall impression
• would they buy again?

When you send your review request, just tell your customers that they can include any information they’d like. However, they should consider things like…(pick from the above list).

Part #1 – A quick background: Not everyone buys a product for the same reason or knows as much about a specific type of product as others.

The best reviews include a quick statement about why a customer bought a product. If another potential buyer is in a similar situation, they will automatically become more interested (it resonates with them).

Additionally, any mention of expertise also makes the review more credible (e.g., “I have purchased x types of product”).

Here’s an example:

Part #2 (optional) – A brief description of product and buying process: Unless you’re selling your products through a well-known fulfillment service like Amazon, shipping speed and safety are still big concerns for online shoppers.

They affect almost every purchase:

You should obviously make your shipping information very clear on your sales pages.

But people also want to know how fast and secure your shipping is in real life, not just in theory.

If a potential buyer sees multiple reviews praising your shipping process, they’ll feel assured.

Part #3 – The overall result: The most important part of any purchase is how good the product is. That’s going to be the focal point of any review.

If you’ve done your job right on the product creation end, customers will have great things to say about your product:

However, you can still guide what they mention.

You could include a question in your email or on your review form like: “How did you like X feature of product Y?”

They will be more likely to take some time to think about that specific feature.

Part #4 – Would you buy again? Customers can often find at least a few good things to say about a product. Nice people leave nice reviews—it’s that simple.

However, the ultimate test of a great product is if it earns the loyalty of a customer.

When customers say that they will definitely buy from you again in the future, anyone reading the review will know that the reviewer is serious when they praise the product:

Get automatic reviews with a system

Getting reviews shouldn’t be something that you try to do periodically. It should be something that you do with every single customer.

To maximize the number of positive reviews you get, you need a foolproof system.

We already looked at Amazon’s system:

1. You buy a product
2. You get the product
3. You get a request to leave a review on Amazon a few days after

They’ve done their own internal testing and determined that this particular timing worked best for the majority of their customers.

However, your customers may be different, so always test.

Timing is important: Why are customers different when it comes to this? Most of it comes down to the type of customer you have and the product.

First, certain people expect online shipping to be faster. They want their product right away so they can start using it. This is typically true if you have a young demographic.

Secondly, some products take longer than others to test thoroughly enough to leave a good review. A frying pan only takes a few minutes to test, but a large book can take weeks to read.

If your product takes a longer time to test properly, give your customers a bit more time.

How to get consistent results: The only way to ensure that your customer gets your review request “X days” after they’ve purchased something is with an autoresponder.

After they buy something, add them to a new list just for customers:

Then, set up your autoresponder to send out an email asking if everything went well.

Finally, send your review request sometime after that first message.

I recommend trying different time delays to discover which one produces the most reviews.

The best way to get great reviews if you’re starting from scratch

Every business faces its own unique challenges when it comes to getting online reviews.

The hardest stage is right at the beginning when you have no reviews.

When you have no reviews (or very few), potential buyers are hesitant to be the first buyers. They want to see that other people have bought your product and liked it.

To make things worse, people often don’t want to leave the first review. Unless they are an expert on your product, they don’t want to leave an opinion and look stupid if they’re wrong.

Instead, they’d rather look at other reviews first, get a general consensus, and then leave a review if their own opinion matches everyone else’s. This is also why it’s important to get off to a good start with a few glowing reviews.

Do not get fake reviews: Incentivizing reviews is a gray area, but buying fake reviews is clearly over the line.

If you go on Fiverr or Google phrases like “buy 5 star review”, you’ll find a ton of people willing to write you a five-star review without even seeing your product.

Even without considering the ethics of doing this, it’s obvious that these reviews won’t be very useful.

Sure, you’ll get five-star reviews, but they’ll include no actual information that your potential buyers will care about.

In addition, most fake reviews are extremely easy to spot. And if a potential buyer sees multiple fake reviews, their warning bells will go off and cause them to buy someone else’s product instead.

So although you could buy reviews, you are better off focusing on earning them.

To do so, follow these steps.

Step #1 – Pick a site to focus on: There are tons of third-party sites that aggregate reviews on products or businesses.

For example, both Google and Yelp focus on local businesses, while Amazon obviously focuses on physical products and e-books.

To start with, pick just one review site to focus on. You can always expand to other sites once you’ve gotten some traction.

Step #2 – Offer a free sample or product: As I said, you need to earn your reviews, which means getting them from actual customers.

This is where it’s a good idea to offer a discount, sample, or even free product in exchange for a review.

Wait, what? “Didn’t you just say NOT to offer incentives?”

If you remembered that, well done. That means you’re paying attention.

Incentivizing reviews is murky territory, but only if you don’t disclose it. If you do, they are perfectly compliant with the law and just about anyone’s ethical code.

And when you need those first few reviews to get the ball rolling, a few reviews that aren’t perfect are still extremely valuable.

Additionally, just because your customer needs to disclose that you offered them something doesn’t mean the review will suck.

Here’s an example of what one might look like:

As one of the first customers to buy (product name), I was lucky enough to be offered a free sample to try.

I received the product after 3 days in perfect condition. Since then, it’s worked exactly as expected.

In particular, the (feature) is better than every other (type of product) I’ve tried.

I’ll definitely be buying more in the future.

Obviously it’s not a perfect review (since I’m dealing with a non-existent product), but if you could get started with 5-10 reviews like that, you’d be set.

The disclosure reads naturally and doesn’t really take away from the rest of the review as long as the reviewer is being honest.

Step #3 – Provide instructions: Figuring out how to leave a review is easy for you and me. However, for the non-tech-savvy person, leaving a review might be a head-scratcher.

To make sure that customers have no problems leaving a review, provide detailed instructions on how to leave a review:

Even if they shop on a well-known platform like Amazon, most people have never left a review before. You need to walk them through it.

Step #4 – Make sure their experience is amazing: This is something we’ve already noted, but I want to re-iterate it.

To earn a great review, you need to provide a great experience.

The buying experience is composed of many different parts:

• the branding
• the packaging
• the shipping process
• the product itself
• follow-up/customer service

Too many businesses make a great product but ignore the rest of the buying experience.

Then, they get three-star reviews saying the product was fine, but the shipping sucked, or they couldn’t get fast replies from the company when they needed help.

It’s not hard to make sure these other parts of the buying experience are great, but you need to spend some time and effort making sure that they are.

If you do that, the quality of the reviews will take care of itself.

One other great source of reviewers you should use

Let’s say you are starting from absolute scratch. I’m talking zero previous customers.

It’s hard to get customers to leave reviews to encourage more people to buy your product when you have no customers in the first place.

In this case, you can go for paid advertising to get your first customers. This is great if you have a budget and a little PPC expertise. However, it can get costly since not all customers will leave reviews.

Otherwise, if you have a tight budget, you’ll probably be going the content marketing route, which can take months to draw any customers.

However, there is one more opportunity that you can take advantage of to not only drive sales but also reviews.

Here’s the basic procedure.

Step #1 – Look for reviews of competitors: For this series of examples, let’s pretend that I just created the best keyword research tool ever.

Since there aren’t stores where you can sell this particular type of tool, I need to get some reviews to put on my sales page.

To start, I need to assemble a list of all my established customers.

This is pretty easy. Just Google “best (type of product)”.

Ideally, you’ll find a big expert roundup that has all your competitors in one spot. Alternatively, you’ll just have to go through the first few pages of search results and record down competing products.

In my case, I was able to easily find the 10 most popular keyword research tools right away (lucky me):

For each of these tools, I’m going to find people who have reviewed them and then approach them to get them to review my product.

To find reviews, just Google “(product name) + review”:

Then, make a list of all the reviews you can find (which can be up to 100 for each product).

Step #2 – Contact the bloggers and make a proposal: Now that you have a large list of reviews, you need to get in touch with the reviewer.

Important note: Bloggers get pitches all the time through their “contact” forms, and most of them are terrible and just get ignored. To stand out, the best strategy is to join the blogger’s email list.

When you join an email list, you obviously get emails from that blogger, which contain their email address.

Then, you can create a personalized message that will definitely get to their inbox.

If you can’t find an opt-in form on the review page itself, go to the homepage:

You’ll usually be able to find an obvious opt-in either front and center on the homepage or near the top of the sidebar:

When you get an email from them, you can send one back, requesting a review of your product.

A template like this will work:

Hi (blogger name),

I came across your review for (competing product) today and was impressed with how detailed you were.

I actually just released my own keyword research tool, called (product name). I’m not sure if you’ve heard about it yet.

Considering how great your previous reviews have been, I wanted to see if you’d be up for giving my product a try. (I’ll provide you with a free license, of course).

The reason why I believe (my product name) stands out from all the others on the market is because of feature X: (describe feature).

If you’re interested, just let me know.

Thanks for your time,

(Your name)

Again, you are incentivizing the blogger to create a review, but as long as they include a disclosure somewhere on the page, there’s no issue. Most blog readers are used to such disclosures by now and don’t consider them in their decision-making.

Once you get a review, you can then publish the appropriate parts of the review on your website and attribute them to the blogger (let them know about it).

The results of different reviews: If you get a review done by a popular blogger, you can drive some serious sales.

That being said, popular bloggers are the toughest ones to get reviews from since they get pitched so frequently.

I’m not saying don’t go after them, but be aware that you will face a lot of rejection.

Lesser known bloggers, on the other hand, will be more receptive to your approaches. If all you want are reviews (and you’re not too worried about sales), target these bloggers first.

Conclusion

If you sell anything online, remember that reviews are one of the biggest factors that affect your sales, so don’t ignore them.

First, come up with a plan of attack to determine what type of reviews you need.

Next, optimize your sales funnel to maximize the number of customers who leave you reviews—and not just any reviews, great ones.

Finally, if you’re starting from scratch, use one of the methods I’ve laid out to start generating reviews for your new product.

Have any other ideas or questions about reviews? I’d be happy to discuss them in the comments below.