What are prospects looking for with reviews?

I'm excited to share this with you. This is a local consumer review survey by this company, Bright Local. Bright Local is an industry leader. We actually pay for this information, and we pay for their service because it helps us with information that is not readily available to businesses. And so in this video, we're going to go through what they found, and I'm going to go through and talk about how local businesses can actually utilize this data to help them increase their footprint online, but also grow their business. My name is Phil Risher. I'm the owner of Flash Consulting, and we work with local service businesses to help them increase their sales and keep their schedules full. And on this channel, we talk about growing local service businesses. So let's get right into this. So local consumer review survey. Are reviews important? At this point, you should know. Reviews are important. Google, Yelp, Facebook, all these different platforms you can leave reviews on. We're going to go through and talk about what is important about reviews, specifically from a consumer perspective, which is really important because you rarely get that. All you hear is people say, yeah, you got to get reviews, but what exactly is important? All right, so the first thing that they share here is that 98% of people read online reviews for local businesses. If you didn't know people, even if it's a referral, they're going online, they're reading about your business, and they're saying, do I want to work with this company or not? And it's really important to make sure that you're getting reviews. And we're going to talk about the different platforms, but people are reading reviews to make a decision about buying. 87% of consumers use Google to evaluate local businesses in 2022, which is up from 2021, which was 81%. What this tells us is that people trust Google more now than they did a year ago. And people are using Google to search for local service businesses. And so if you're not doing everything you can from a Google business, Google my business, or Google Business profile perspective, then you're missing out on a lot of opportunity that's only continuing to grow in this channel. So how are consumers actually using reviews? You can see here that 98% of consumers use the Internet to find information about local businesses in 2022, which is up from 90 in 2019. So 98% of consumers are using the Internet. And so done are the days of just straight referrals. Even if you get a referral, they're going online to find the phone number. They're going online to look at pictures. They're going online to check out the websites and Google business profile. So this is really important to make sure that your digital marketing is tight because you can get referrals all day long, but reviews and your perspective, the way that the customer is perceiving your business online is crucial. All right, so some of the other things that I found on here, what platforms are important, which sites or apps have you used to evaluate local businesses in the last 12 months? You can see that Google has been growing from 2020 to 2022. And you can see that Yelp is, was up a lot in 2021, but it's pulled back a little bit. Facebook is back TripAdvisor. And so this just hits home the point that Google is where it's at. If you're not optimizing your Google profile, you need to do that because all these other platforms are good and like Yelp is an aggregator for Bing. But at the end of the day, people are using Google reviews to come up with decisions. All right, so let's dig in a little bit more about how consumers are actually using this data. Some of the things that I really found interesting was in how, how they're making their decisions based off what they see. So there were things on here that I think are going to be like this. What do consumers care about in reviews in 2022? So yeah, it's great to have reviews online, but what exactly do they care about? This is crucial for businesses. So 88% of people said that they are looking to see if the business owner responds to all customer reviews. Why are they doing this? Consumers want to know that businesses care about their reputation. If a job goes bad, they want to know that this, this business is going to do everything they can to make it right. And by responding to reviews and showing that you're acknowledging bad reviews, good reviews, whatever type of reviews, it shows that you care about customer service and that you care about the customer and that you, you want the outcome to be a good one for them. And so consumers are looking at that hard. And that's why we say even if you get a one star review, it's not the end of the world because this will allow your customer service to shine and this will allow you to resolve the issue. And new prospects are going to say, well, if this does go bad, what's going to happen? And so if you're not responding to reviews, all of your reviews, you're missing out on the opportunity to win more customers. Clearly you can see also that people care about Having recent reviews. Almost half of the people are saying the newest reviews, you can select that on Google. So 52% of people want to see that you have relevant reviews. This is why it's important to have a review strategy and a game plan which we made videos about that before. There's a bunch of different ideas on how to get reviews on a consistent basis. But if you're not doing that, you can see that you might be missing out on new prospects, new customers coming in. And then this is very interesting actually 38% of people, they want to see at least a four star rating. So your rating amount is not the end all be all. They want to see that you're engaged with your customers and that you have recent reviews. And yeah, we want a good rating, but if you have a 4.9, it's no different than a five star necessarily. So this is really important and some really big factors that I think are crucial. The most effective methods of requesting reviews in person, email and the one they don't have on here is text message, which in my opinion is one of the best ones. But you can see that email and in person and receipt invoice, they're all pretty much the same. Our favorite here is in person because once you've wowed them and they're like oh my gosh, you're amazing, why not take the opportunity to capitalize and get a review right on that emotion. And also a human to human experience like my name's Phil. If you have a chance, could you let my boss know I'm doing a good job and leave me a Google review. It's much different than like yeah, leave flash consulting a review. It's just humanizes the experience about me delivering a great service to you. And so it goes a long way. All right. And then the last thing is the key takeaways from this report that they provide, which is consumers are more than twice as likely to consider using your business if they can see you actively responding to positive and negative reviews. So ensure you take the time to craft authentic reviews. Consider how review keywords and snippets could work for your business. So this is important. This is why getting descriptions and people explaining the services. Is there something that your business is particularly well known for? Can you get customers talking about that? Like for us professional marketing services, when people hear Flash consulting, we want them to think of that. 65% of consumers will leave a review at least some of the time if asked. So consider how you can encourage your teams to ask for feedback and send timely requests via email. Don't ask, don't get. Very, very important to get reviews. So if you found this information interesting, be sure to hit like and subscribe. We post content about growing local service businesses and we'll see you in the next video.