Reviews are one of your main tools when it comes to building trust and marketing yourself, yet many contractors neglect this crucial asset.
Especially during the early stages of your business when you have to market yourself on a tight budget, reviews are huge boons. The idea is to aggregate positive reviews fast so that any potential clients that land on your profile pages can see for themselves that your business is trusted and approved by other clients.
Let’s discuss how you can use this to your advantage and land more jobs by racking up some reviews on your pages!
Reviews build trust instantly
You can say whatever you want about your business and it might even be true, but potential clients like to hear it from others like them.
Most clients will instantly trust your business so long as they see a heap of positive reviews, and that’s incredibly valuable. Think about it: your business can go from being an unknown variable to a safe bet, and all it takes is to make sure your page has a few recent reviews. That’s a pretty good deal.
If you have a website (which you should) you can highlight any reviews you want, but for profile pages like Facebook or other review aggregators like Yellow Pages, you don’t get to choose which reviews are highlighted. This is where a constant influx of new reviews and learning how to reply to them comes into play.
Recent reviews are even better
It should become a habit to ask for reviews whenever you finish a job. Reviews that are over 3 months old start to lose their value, so you want to keep a steady influx of new ones coming in.
The easiest way is to simply ask, as most clients won’t mind leaving a word of commendation after a job well done. And that’s even more important because generally speaking, people are far more likely to leave a review on their own when they have a negative experience.
Obviously, you want to avoid giving any client a negative experience in the first place, but some clients are hard to deal with. If that ever happens, you should at least have a good deal of positive reviews in the mix to show potential clients that the negative ones were the exception.
Replying to reviews shows commitment
Especially early on, replying to your positive reviews with a word of thanks for your clients shows you’re committed to your brand. Negative reviews will eventually show up, and replying to those is perhaps even more important.
There’s no point trying to bury those negative reviews or pretend they don’t exist because clients notice that. It’s much better to reply politely and try to make amends in some way because that’s an opportunity to impress your potential clients from a place of vulnerability, which is very powerful.
Learn to deal with negative reviews
As mentioned before, negative reviews are an unavoidable part of the job and you have to learn how to deal with them – preferably with some degree of elegance.
You have to approach the situation with the mindset that your reputation is at stake. While this particular client may have had a negative experience, you can still show that you’re mature and committed to your brand to other potential clients.
We’ve already discussed how to deal with negative reviews at length, it’s definitely worth a read!
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