How to Leverage Reviews and Social Proof for Business Growth

Word of mouth is still the best marketing channel there is. In fact, in the United States, it’s the single largest source of brand discovery on the internet. That means reviews and testimonials are worth their weight in gold. But many businesses don’t leverage social proof effectively enough to get the full benefits it can provide.

Reviews don’t appear out of thin air, and simply having them isn’t enough. You need to put work into getting them, filtering them and displaying them in the right places so they deliver maximum impact for your business.

Below, I’m going to share some of the strategies I’ve used to get nearly 19,000 glowing reviews for my home services company, Roof Maxx — and how you can do the same.

Related: 4 Things to Know About Online Reviews (and Why You Can’t Afford to Ignore Them)

The best way to conquer your fear of asking for reviews is to do it faster

A lot of business owners aren’t proactive about asking customers for reviews, and here’s why. They worry that making the request will be annoying and that annoyed customers won’t leave positive reviews. It’s a completely understandable concern. It just also happens to be untrue.

Yes, calling or emailing out of the blue to ask for a review can be a pain, especially when you’re contacting a customer after a sale that took place weeks or months ago. But that’s not an argument for not asking. When you don’t ask for reviews, you tend to get more negative ones than positive ones, no matter how good your products or services are — a phenomenon known as negativity bias.

What you should actually do is ask for a review immediately, the moment you finish each job.

At Roof Maxx, we made this process easy by automating it for every dealer in our network. Every time a warranty is issued, a request for a review is issued alongside it. That way, the customer’s experience is still fresh in their minds, and providing a review feels like the natural way for them to close the loop.

Bottom line: Requesting a review should never feel like a brand-new ask on your part. It should feel like the final step in the process that your customer already agreed to as part of the original sale you made.

Related: This Review Campaign Took My Company to Almost 5 Stars on Google — Here’s How You Can Replicate It.

How to get positive reviews that your prospective customers actually trust

You might be toying with the idea of offering incentives for customers to review your business. But I’m here to tell you that’s not always necessary. In fact, it can actually be counterproductive.

First of all, if you time your request correctly per my advice in the previous section, most of your customers won’t actually need an incentive. Remember: They’re not giving you something for nothing. They’re fulfilling the last step in the sales process. It’s only when you wait until they’ve already moved on before asking that they’ll start to feel like you owe them something in return.

Roof Maxx is a perfect example: To date, we have 18,917 customer reviews across Google, Hubspot and Facebook, with a 4.9-star average — and they cost us nothing. We didn’t have to offer an incentive for a single one of them.

That’s important for another reason, too: A review given freely is always more honest and trustworthy than one you had to coax out of someone with a reward or a discount. We can point to those thousands of reviews as a genuine signal of the trust people put in our brand, instead of it being a vanity metric.

When we call ourselves America’s number one rated roofer, we’re bringing compelling evidence to back up that claim. No other roofing business in the U.S. has this many slam-dunk reviews freely offered by their customers.

Related: 4 Ways to Leverage Social Proof to Grow Your Business Online

How you display your reviews directly impacts customer perceptions

Whatever you do, don’t count on other platforms to display your reviews for you. Waiting for customers to stumble across them on Google or Facebook is passive. It only offers a fraction of the visibility that you could achieve with a little more legwork, and it offers you no quality control whatsoever.

Every channel you use to reach your audience is a potential place to display a good review or testimonial. At Roof Maxx, we put our best reviews in social media graphics. We invite homeowners with glowing feedback to send us video testimonials, then upload them to YouTube. We also reach out to those customers for referrals so we can activate their brand advocacy and use it to directly drive new business.

You also want to pay close attention to how you’re displaying reviews on your website. Learning how to showcase the feedback that will be most relevant to your audience is much more valuable than pulling it all in without any kind of filter. You want people to find information that answers their questions and helps them make a decision about whether you’re right for their needs.

We solved that by adding a badge to our website that links dynamically to a review aggregator app we built in-house. Then those reviews get displayed prominently and beautifully on our site, where new prospective customers can find them.

I’ve written extensively about how important it is for growing businesses to embrace new technology and how it should supplement your team instead of posing a threat to them.

Word of mouth is still the best marketing channel there is. In fact, in the United States, it’s the single largest source of brand discovery on the internet. That means reviews and testimonials are worth their weight in gold. But many businesses don’t leverage social proof effectively enough to get the full benefits it can provide.

Reviews don’t appear out of thin air, and simply having them isn’t enough. You need to put work into getting them, filtering them and displaying them in the right places so they deliver maximum impact for your business.