Why You Should Be Using Customer Reviews in Your Marketing Strategy

Michelle Nickolaisen, Content Marketer, TrustRadiusAs a vendor, the entire job of your marketing strategy is to persuade potential customers to give you a try (and, in many B2B cases, help those potential customers persuade decision-makers to give you a try). There’s a problem, though: most buyers don’t trust vendors, and in fact, actively look for sources of information that aren’t the vendor’s website or representatives.One of the sources of information that buyers turn to to supplement vendor-provided information is user reviews.Buyers Use Reviews Throughout Their JourneyUnlike B2C reviews, which tend to come in just before the point of purchase, B2B reviews are used throughout the buyer’s journey:Buyers tend to:

• Use reviews at the discovery stage to learn more about a category of software and get the lay of the land, seeking a better understanding of which products are widely used and why
• Use reviews during the evaluation stage as an efficient way to find specific details about how a product works in different situations and compare the strengths/weaknesses of products on their shortlist
• Use reviews in the selection stage to validate vendor claims and justify their recommendations to the decision maker

There aren’t many other pieces of marketing collateral that can be used throughout the buyer’s journey — but with reviews, you get a lot of bang for your buck.Reviews Give You A Common LanguageAside from using the reviews themselves in your marketing efforts, you can let the reviews inform your marketing strategy. By looking at the language that your customers use to describe your product, its features and benefits, and the onboarding process, you can get a new level of insight as to what really matters to your customers. In turn, that language can be used in your web copy, social media shares, and other marketing collateral, where it’s more likely to resonate with your potential customers.In particular, B2B buyers are looking for insights on adoption and scalability, and will trust insights from customers much more than a vendor representative — whenever you touch on those topics in your web copy, blog posts, or other marketing collateral, make sure to include a relevant customer quote.Review Programs Are ScalableIf you want to incorporate customer feedback into your marketing strategy, there are other options besides reviews — namely, case studies and customer references. The difference, however, is that reviews are much more scalable than either of those methods. Individually contacting customers for interviews and references can be extremely time-consuming, whereas a review program can be fairly self-sustaining after a certain amount of work is put into it. In addition to that, the TrustRadius 2018 B2B Buying Disconnect report showed that reviews were more influential in the buying process than case studies or customer references.After reading the above, you want to do a review program — what’s next?Once you’ve decided to create a review program, your next step is to set it up and start driving reviews. You’ll want to set up a custom landing page on your review platform of choice to send your customers to, and then reach out via email to either your entire customer base, or a random, but representative, sample of your customer base.For B2B reviews, offering incentives like gift cards or branded swag can help increase the response rate (as long as those incentives aren’t tied to leaving a positive review). Make sure to follow up with unresponsive customers, and to track your results so that you can learn what’s working and what isn’t. And if you want to learn more about creating successful review campaign, make sure to check out our how-to on getting your first 10 reviews, or the Definitive Guide to B2B reviews.