Make sure Personal Recommendations are part of your Marketing Plan

personal recommendationsThere are many essential  marketing methods small businesses should be doing to promote themselves such as a good website, advertising & newsletters, but we find that many of our clients neglect one of the best ways,  personal recommendations.   Asking for testimonials & reviews from your clients should be part of your marketing plan.

Reviews

We’ve stressed the importance of your Google Business page in recent times.  You can read more about that here. Reviews can sway the reader that you are the right company for them, as opposed to your competitor.

Encourage clients (recent and long-standing ones) to write a review for you on your Google page. You can then share these on social media or in a newsletter.

Testimonials

Testimonials are a more professional approach for asking for feedback.  When we’ve undertaken a piece of work, we often email clients for a testimonial to add to our website. Take a look at ours here.

Feedback

How do you know if you have done a good job with a client?  If much of your work is project based as it ours,   it is a good idea to seek feedback (particularly if a colleague undertook the work) to find out how things went and if there is room for improvement. Create a feedback form on your website or a survey on Survey Monkey.

Asking for Reviews for Social Media

The food and hospitality industry are always being reviewed but as we mentioned previously all businesses need reviews to demonstrate how fabulous they are. 

If you are able to ask in person, do.  Just ask as a favour at the end of your meeting.

You can ask by email but do ask as a personal favour rather than sending a standard email template.  Make life easy for the reviewer and include the link to where they need to post the review.

Incentives work – offer entry into a monthly prize drawer if they leave a review.

Other Tips

If you are in an industry where you are prone to receiving a lot of reviews, do check the sites regularly. There are also tools out there for keeping track of reviews such as Review Trackers.

Don’t forget to thank your reviewers.  It’s only polite.

Set up Google Alerts so that if your company is mentioned online, you can be notified

If you receive a negative review or feedback, do take a look at our article here on our strategy to deal with this.

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