Page 327 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

What you should do: Think about how you could use podcasting to increase
your reach. You don’t need to create an elaborate thirty-minute podcast.
You could create a quick tip podcast that is five minutes long. The idea is
to provide content in the most popular formats.

Customer reviews

The most critical change you can make to product pages on your website is to
include customer reviews. Nothing sells a product better than actual customer
reviews and ratings of the products. The customer reviews provide the shopper
with the perspective of other customers. They give your customers the inside
scoop on your products — the ins and outs of them and why they’re good or bad.

You can be sure that customers will go online to look for your product reviews.
In fact, a 2017 study by the Speigel Research Center called, How Online Reviews
Influence Sales (https://spiegel.medill.northwestern.edu/online-reviews/),
found that a product with five reviews is 270 percent more likely to be purchased
than a product with no reviews. Reviews are critical to the success of a product.
Amazon is the most well-known example of a company that provides customer
reviews, as shown in Figure 21-4.

You’ll find that customer reviewers serve a couple of purposes. They:

» Help sell products, no matter the review.

Even though you may be worried that customer reviews may damn your
products, they invariably convince customers to purchase, and they lead
to more sales. Unflattering customer reviews may drive your customers
away from certain products, but they also drive customers to peruse other
products on your site, which could result in a purchase. Very few products
receive perfect scores, so some negative reviews demonstrate that the
system isn’t being gamed.
» Get feedback from customers about what does and doesn’t work.
The customer reviews also serve as a valuable feedback mechanism, telling
you what products are liked and why certain products are purchased more
than others. Many a marketer has learned valuable insights about missing
features of their products by reading the customer reviews on their websites.

A case study done by Bazaarvoice.com in conjunction with Petco.com found that
by adding Bazaarvoice ratings and reviews to its site, the conversion rate for dog
food products with one review was 20 percent higher than those with no
reviews (https://www.bazaarvoice.com/success-stories/petco/). That’s
quite a difference!

CHAPTER 21 Practicing SMM on Your Website 311