Instead than waiting for people to submit reviews on their own, a review generation plan allows you to actively grow evaluations on your website or anywhere else product or service reviews appear on the internet.
Strategy for Review Generation
Your review generating plan includes the strategies used to obtain (or attempt to obtain) reviews. Creating an effective approach is critical because it can be the difference between a successful review generating effort that improves your online reputation and one that is ultimately a waste of time, money, and effort.
Here are some things to think about when you begin to plan your strategy.
1. Your Current Public Reputation
It’s pointless to decide where you want to go if you don’t know where you’re going to begin. If you’re building a review creation plan from the bottom up, you should start by examining your present reputation and reviews across many platforms.
Making a list of the sites where you want reviews of your company or products to appear is an excellent place to start with this process. Your website is an obvious addition to this list, but you may also wish to establish a presence on Google, Yelp, or industry-specific databases such as Angie’s List or FindLaw.
You’ll know where you need to grow once you’ve assessed where you are today.
2. Goals and objectives
You began considering this in step 1 – where do you want reviews to appear? Setting realistic goals, on the other hand, goes beyond that. You’ll also need to consider some or all of the following questions:
- How many reviews do you want to get per month on a certain platform?
- What is your total rating goal?
- Which platform is the most important to you?
- In the retail industry, what percentage of total sales do you aim to convert into product reviews?
- What can we reasonably expect over the next three months? How long is it? Six months? What, a year?
When it comes time to evaluate the effectiveness of your review creation approach, the responses to these questions will serve as the yardstick.
3. Websites and Products
You’ve decided which review sites to focus on at this point. Now is the time to become more focused on certain goals. If you work in a service-based field, such as plumbing, you’ll have fewer options because recommendations of your company are effectively product reviews.
However, if you’re creating a plan for an eCommerce business, you’ll have a lot more to think about. Are you going to concentrate your efforts largely on increasing the number of reviews for your company, or will you try to collect evaluations for your core items first and let reviews for your brand gather naturally?
Tracking and Measuring
With review generation, as with other things, it’s critical to track results. Tracking and recording new reviews, as well as the money you invest in review generating, allows you to easily calculate ROI and determine whether your present strategy is viable in the long run.
It will be tough to decide when to change techniques to accomplish the goals you set for yourself early on if you don’t know how your review creation tactics are functioning.