Get More Reviews and Leverage Them In Your Marketing With Online Reputation Management Software – 013

Use Online Reputation Management To Drive More Traffic and Improve Your SEO!

Online reviews are very important, not only for helping to build trust with potential customers, but also as it relates to the overall SEO of your website. From Google, Facebook, and Yelp, to Angies List, the BBB, and many more…customers can leave their feedback an a number of places today. As a local service business, you need to take control of these review portals, so you can not only view and manage the customer reviews, but also to leverage them and take advantage of the praises in your marketing strategy!

YOU’LL LEARN

• Overview of automated review capturing systems
• At what point should you consider using an automated review capturing system
• How to get more customers to leave you a positive review
• How to remove the barriers for customers to leave a review for your business
• How asking for feedback instead of a review will increase your review rates
• How to get your customers onto the “leave a review” screen within Google (and others) within seconds
• How to get 2x or 3x more reviews from your customers
• How to get email alerts when customers leave a review, good or bad, on any review portal

Thanks for Listening!

Here is the transcription from Episode 13 – Get More Reviews and Leverage Them In Your Marketing With Online Reputation Management Software;

Jesse: Welcome to Local SEO Tactics, episode 13. We’re going to be talking reviews this week
and how to leverage some software solutions to get more reviews. I think everybody
understands the importance of reviews nowadays for SEO, for product selection and
service selection. We’re going to dive a little deeper into better ways to collect the
reviews, some automated solutions on how to better respond to and manage those
reviews, and how you can use them in your social marketing too. So, there’s some great
software out there. We’re going to dive into that today, and hopefully, it helps you out.
We want to talk about something really cool that we’re going to be launching. It’s going
to be a live review of your website, so we’ve had a lot of people emailing us, kind of
asking questions, and we used one of them in an example for last week’s podcast, from
Patrick. Tat went pretty good, and we really enjoyed that, and Patrick was happy with
the feedback. We want to turn that into something we can do on Facebook Live for
everybody. So we’re pretty excited about it, and hopefully, that gives us the chance to
connect with you guys in a live format and review your websites.

So if you do have some of these questions for, “How do I do this?” Or, “What do you
think of that?” Or, “What would you recommend?” We’d love to answer those live. If
you’re interested in doing this, let us know. Go to intrycks.com/live. There’s a real quick
form, you know, who you are? What’s your website? And kind of tell us if you’re having
a problem, or what exactly you want us to be looking at. And so, of course, this is going
to be on Facebook Live. If you’re not already following us on Facebook, go out to
facebook.com/intrycks.

Follow us even if you don’t want to submit your site to get reviewed, if you want to
jump onto the live session and watch what we’re doing and get that feedback in a live
format for other people’s websites. If you’re following us, you’re going to get alerted
when we’re live.

Bob: Yep.

Jesse: Otherwise we’ll make sure we send out an email and let you know when it’s going to be
for the first one, so everybody can tune, and if you’re not following us. But, obviously,
the easiest thing through Facebook, go to facebook.com/intrycks. Follow us. If you want
your site to be reviewed, go to intrycks.com/live and sign up. All right. So without
further ado, let’s jump right into today’s episode and get to talking about reviews.

Hey everyone, welcome back to Local SEO Tactics, Jesse Nolan with Bob Brennan here,
coming back at you this week. We’re going to dive back into our topic about reviews. A
few episodes back, we touched on reviews actually a couple times now, and it’s really
just that important of a topic, so we’re going to kind of get into an advanced version
here today. Something we’re going to talk about is automated reviews, right?

Bob: Yep.

Jesse: How to get them from your customers, how to turn them into social media posts, and
really, take advantage of the whole process front to back, and to do it in the most
automated and easy fashion possible, at least to date, for what we’ve uncovered at
least. So want to back up just for a quick second here. I think it’s been about probably
close to two months since we did our first episode about reviews, and during that time, I
don’t know if it’s been more, we’ve been more aware of reviews out there or if
businesses are just adopting these things more.

But Bob and I were just talking earlier today about some observations we’ve been
making out there for, really, how important are reviews? I mean, everybody knows that
you should get some. You should have them for your business. We’ve talked about it
before, but they’re out there in marketing, beyond just getting reviews and being stars
on your website. An example I was sharing with Bob is, my wife and I, we have a
Cabela’s credit card. They send us a catalog every three or four weeks, whatever, for
seasonality stuff. I thought it was super interesting. I opened it up this weekend, flipping
through pages. And on the catalog, in the print, on the text, they had the reviews, right?
Bob: Like right in the catalog?

Jesse: Right in the catalog. It was kind of like if you’re going to go online and view their page on
the website. That same kind of information, so, different products. This is a 4.2 average
rating. This is a 5.0 and so on and so forth. It kind of struck me. Like I said, I’m not sure if
I’m just hypersensitive, because we’re all about reviews and stuff right now. But I don’t
remember seeing that. I’m pretty sure it’s a new phenomenon for them that they’re
using it, and we’ve also noticed reviews on the back of U-Haul trucks.

Bob: Yeah, yeah.

Jesse: Just promoting their star rating and kind of getting that message across. We’ve also
heard radio commercials. You know, people talking about, “Check out our reviews.
We’re 5.0, 312 reviews,” and things of that nature. So, it’s kind of transcending. Just let
me check the reviews and let me check out what the rating is online. Businesses are
using it in their advertising, in their marketing, so it’s that important. If we rewind the
clock a few years ago, you’d want to get testimonials and case studies, right? Share
them on your website, put them in your sales fliers, on your pamphlets. What are
people saying about you?

This is kind of the same thing. Reviews are a manifestation of that same concept. What
is the public saying? What are my peers saying and things like that. And really, the fact
that in print and digital and in audio, visual, these reviews are becoming part of what we
use in our marketing, front to back. So, thought that was a curious thing to share.

Bob: Yeah, it’s just another visual cue, right?

Jesse: Yep.

Bob: I think we’re looking at a generation of people that are growing up. They’re internetsavvy. They don’t know what a phone book is, right?

Jesse: Right.

Bob: Which is a couple generations. So, you could throw a phone book at them, and they
won’t know what it is. It’s that seeing so many stars equates to quality or whatever the
deal is, and that’s kind of the standard. The product that we’re going to talk about is
pretty exciting, but it’s not for everybody, and I think one of those things too, is we talk
about it, all the bells and whistles and features that it has. It’s one of those deals that, if
you’re a very small business just starting out, I don’t think this is a good fit. And more
importantly, I think you have to get yourself and your team orientated in how to capture
reviews yourself.

I think you have to go back to … What episode was that? Was that episode number two
or whatever?

Jesse: That was episode three, was the first one.

Bob: Okay.

Jesse: The importance of getting Google reviews.

Bob: Yeah, so, I mean, go ahead and listen to this, but maybe go back to episode three. Is that
right? So, go back to that episode if you’re smaller, because I think there’s, again, basic
building blocks that you have to dig into, get your team engaged. If you’re a smaller
company, that’s more effective, and that’s really where you’re going to start, where this
is really going to be leveling up and taking it to the next level. This type of conversation
we’re having is really for, I’m guessing, a business that does between anything north of
five to 10 transactions a day that they can capture this information, or more
importantly, somebody that’s been established.

They know they’re a good business. It’s just their reviews aren’t really reflecting that.
And so, they have to have systems in place that help them assure that they have good
reviews, and that’s where this product and this concept that we’re talking about today is
definitely going to help.

Jesse: I was just checking there. It’s episode three. We talked about the importance of getting
Google reviews, and then in episode four, we talked about start getting Google reviews
for your business. And just to rewind, if people haven’t checked that outBob: So, three and four, right?

Jesse: Three and fourBob: Okay.

Jesse: … both kind of deal with reviews, and we talk about how to capture those from your
customers. You want to get it set up to be able to get them, how do you use them, and
then how do you get them from your customers. We talked about the Mr. Rogers’
approach, which is an excellent tried-and-true approach. And like Bob said, if you’re not
doing at least a few transactions a day, getting into the automated review system
probably isn’t going to be what you want to do, just because you’re not having enough
scale to really make it worth it, and your transactions are going to be more personal
with the customer, and you’re going to want to use that Mr. Rogers’ approach.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: So, if you’re not already doing something to get reviews whether that’s automated or
not, kind of take a look at that. Episode four I think is the one with the Mr. Rogers’
approach in there. Super, super good. Now, if you are doing more than a few
transactions a day, you want to look at using some kind of a product for the automated
reviews. We’re going to talk about a product called ReviewLead that we offer through
Intrycks. There’s going to be other products out there. If you just google, “Getting
reviews or things like that,” you’re going to bump into a ton of them. There’s going to be
prices from maybe 300 or 400 bucks a month all the way down to, I don’t know, $20,
$30, $40 a month.

You’re going to get what you pay for. So check out all the features, what does it do,
what doesn’t it do? We’re going to run through a bunch of features that our product
does here for you today, and it’s probably somewhere in the middle of that pricing is,
where it’s going to end up. But all of these features, I would say, if you’re a business,
again, doing more than a few transactions a day, you’re going to want to at least get
these things. You’re not going to want to pay for the cheap product out there that’s just
going to provide a link to get reviews, build automation, and some of the stuff Bob is
referring to that we’re going to talk about here is well worth it.

If you take a price point, even say, you know, $200 or $300 a month or whatever,
$2,500, $3,000 a year on an annual basis, think about what you’re selling. How many
transactions, how many customers would it take to get the ROI on that, right?

Bob: Right.

Jesse: The time savings that you’re going to get just from your labor force for your team or
yourself, to get the reviews, to manage them, to share them the things we’re going to
talk about. So, as we’re talking through this, just think about what is this worth to you
here. And when you’re going out there to find a product, if it’s ours, great. If it’s
something else, just make sure you’re not cheeping out, just trying to get the cheapest
product out there. You’re going to want to solve all these problems. Otherwise, you’re
really not taking advantage of the technology and the software that’s out there do this.
With that said, let’s kind of dive into it.

One of the most important things that a software product like this will do is automate
the review process, as in reminding your customers, making it easy for them to get a
review. How many reviews have you had last month, Bob?

Bob: None, but we’ve had that conversation.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: And a good way to look at it is, as people, we don’t compliment each other enough,
right?

Jesse: Yep.

Bob: That’s a fact. We need to be more generous with our compliments and in everything
that goes with it. Just ask my wife.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: So it’s one of those things we focus on the negative. That’s why we have news, right?

Jesse: Yep.

Bob: Everything on the news is pretty negative. So, as business owners, we have to be
proactive, and we have to be proactively probing people and saying, “Okay. We hope
you had a good experience. We need your help, and we need your help to leave that
review.” If we aren’t proactively doing that, we’re just going to default to the one out of,
hopefully, one out of 50 that that’s all it is. It has a negative, and they’re more than
happy to put that on the internet. So it’s imperative that we’re progressive about this.

Jesse: I think you bring up a good point too. People that have a negative situation are more
than happy to go out there. They want that vengeance. They want to make it known
that you screwed something up or whatnot, and they’re going to give you that one-star
review. They’re going to go out of their way to do that. You might impress, whatever, 50
people over the course of a week. You’re going to be lucky if they take your note that
you gave them the piece of paper, the receipt, whatever, and kind of follow the steps to
leave you the review. But the person that you made the mistake on, you’re going to
hear about it. They want to make everybody aware.

So unfortunately, you’re usually going to get this disproportion of, “Gosh. I served
thousands of customers and I screw one up, but I’ve got five good reviews and one
negative review online.” That percentage usually doesn’t match up for businesses.

Bob: The key is really to take the barriers away, right?

Jesse: Yep.

Bob: And that’s the purpose of this software or in the system that we’ve developed is, you’ve
got to take those barriers away. You got to make it easy for people who write review.
For those of us that haven’t done it enough, it can be complicated and everything else.
Heck, even leaving a review on iTunes for our own podcast is difficult, which is
something we should probably do, is have a link on how to do that, because, for me, it
can be a little complicated doing it. I’ve left reviews for other podcasts, and finally, I
think iTunes has made it simple. So, key is taking the barrier away, and that’s I believe
what this is doing.

Jesse: We’ve talked to lots of customers introducing this product, and through the course of
finding out how they’d handle their current reviews, a lot of times are printed off a piece
of paper. Maybe hand-typing an email to send to a customer and things like this. The
best thing is to just have it be completely automated, right?

Bob: Yep.

Jesse: So if you can collect your email addresses, and also, or mobile phone numbers, right?

Bob: Yeah, yeah.

Jesse: Everything we’re going to be talking about here, you can actively get your customer
engaged, whether it be with an email link or a link on their mobile device. It doesn’t
matter. Either way, it’s going to go to the same process here. So, the first step is going to
be capturing that information from your customers. Most businesses, you’re already
getting that, right? Maybe through a checkout process, an onboarding process,
whatever it is. If you’re not getting one of those two pieces of information right now,
there’s lots of ways to be able to do that. We’re not going to cover those today. Drop us
a note in the show notes page or send us an email if you want to get some tips on that.
And maybe if there’s enough demand, we’ll cover that in another podcast. But first
thing’s first, you want to collect that information. Now, this is where the power of this
automation comes into play. So right now, let’s take a typical scenario, even if you’re
doing awesome, using this Mr. Rogers’ approach like we preached. Somebody’s in your
store, or you’re on site at their location if you’re doing field service work, and you’re
telling them, “Please give me a review. Help me out.” Here’s the information, here’s
what you need to do, or here’s my iPad or whatever. They have to want to do it, you
know, write that in there.

It’s kind of a one-shot deal really, because if they take that piece of paper, if they’re not
going to do it quick-

Bob: It’s never going to get done.

Jesse: Yeah, the odds of them doing it decrease hour by hour, right?

Bob: Right.

Jesse: So the power of this automation on the software side comes into play just kind of like
any maybe email autoresponder, MailChimp, things like that. You can do the
technology. I’m sorry. You can use the power of the technology to say, “Look, Bob got
my email yesterday, but he didn’t open it. He didn’t click through to leave me a review.”
I’m going to remind him in two days or five days or seven days. Keep sending Bob those
reminders that, “Please, give me some feedback,” until he does it. Now you don’t want
to do it 17 times. Probably three is the most. We usually have ours on a one-day, threeday, and seven-day reminder system, and then again the same to be true of text.
So, the software is going to track that. So if I send Bob an email or a text, it knows if he’s
followed through, and if he has, we’re not going to keep bugging him, right?

Bob: Right.

Jesse: If he does follow through, also we’re not going to keep bugging him. It ends either way,
but it’s not just a one-and-done deal. So that’s the first thing that’s really, really slick. So
now, everybody that you’ve done business with, you’re sending them not a link to give
you a review. Actually, this is kind of a little trick here. You’re wanting their feedback.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: I’m going to pull something up on the screen here for those of you watching on video.
This is an example of one of our customers for Helpertech. This is what you’re going to
send them to. So if you send them an email or a text, you’re going to send a link to this
landing page. All we’re asking here is, how did we do? Thumbs up or thumbs down? Not
as intimidating as maybe, “Can you give me a review?” or things like that, right?

Bob: Right.

Jesse: You’re going for that quick little victory. So if somebody clicks the thumbs down, you can
see here it doesn’t take them right to Google or Facebook or Yelp or whatever it’s going
to be to leave a review. It actually pops up an internal form. Basically, “Hey, tell us what
your gripe is. Where did we screw up?” And then hit Send Message.

Bob: I mean, the real goal here is to develop better customer service.

Jesse: Exactly.

Bob: Better service in general, right? So it isn’t like you take this information and you throw it
away. You go back to your team, and say, “Okay,” we have to do better. This is what we
have to change. You do that, and it’s all going to work out in everybody’s best interest.

Jesse: Yeah, because this would be a real thing that happened. Usually, the customer is not
going to make it up. Between your team and the customer, there’s always going to be
an argument on he said, she said, but at the end of the day, they felt so inclined to leave
the negative feedback that they’re going to do it. It’s like Bob said, this doesn’t go out to
the review sites. They hit Send on this; it’s going to loop back to you. This can go to
anybody you want. It’s an email that gets forwarded on, right?

And so, if you want one people or 10 people on the team to be able to get this kind of
feedback completely within your control, from there, we would recommend, if we can
give you any coaching on it, definitely review those and handle them, because for every
customer that leaves this kind of feedback, there’s somebody else that that didn’t,
right?

Bob: Right.

Jesse: You’re going to want to win those customers. A really cool goal would be to, every time
you get a negative feedback like this, address the situation and see if you can get it to a
point where they leave you a four or a five-star review.

Bob: Your negative customers can definitely help you change.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: If you need to change something in your lobby, if you need to change something with
the way your pricing is and all kinds of things. So it’s definitely a game-changer. What’s
also nice too about this is this … We’re talking about a review software just for Google
review. At least that’s the way it’s been slated. This does what? 40 different
organizations.

Jesse: Yeah, let’s jump into that.

Bob: Hopefully I didn’t mean to steal your thunder, but you want to tell us a little bit about
those? And I’ll just say this strategy real quick. Me, as a business owner, the number one
thing I want to do to get reviews is Google reviews. Once I’ve got that at a point where
I’m comfortable with, and I want to go after, let’s say, others, then maybe I will change
that, and you can go into detail on how we do that.

Jesse: Yeah, absolutely. So, kind of the flip side, which is what we’re going to want here is,
when somebody is happy with your service, getting back to our screen here. We’re not
asking them to leave reviews again. This initial contact. Just give us a rating, thumbs up
or thumbs down. Thumbs up, they’re going to be presented with a second screen, and
this is what Bob’s talking about here. For those of you that are watching on video, you
can see there’s three buttons once they click the thumbs up. That’s basically saying, “Oh
you thought we did a good job? Cool. Could you please leave us a review and let
everybody else know how good we did?”

On here, we have Google, Yelp and Facebook. For Helpertech, Google. The button is big.
You can see here, and you can customize the size to make some more prominent than
others. Right now, we’re trying to get positive five-star reviews for on Google for
Helpertech. So, Google is the most prominent. Now, if somebody doesn’t have a Google
account, even if we want to get Google reviews, maybe they have a Facebook account,
so they’re going to leave a review on Facebook. Okay, great. Better than nothing, right?

Bob: Right.

Jesse: Whereas before, if we were just handing them a piece of paper saying, “Please leave us
a review. Here’s the steps,” they might throw it in the trash. They’re like, “I don’t have a
Google account,” right? So this way, there’s only three on the screen here, but you can
have as many as you want. You know, if you’re on Angie’s List. A lot of car dealers,
they’ll use something called DealerRate. I mean, there’s a lot of industry-specific review
sites. At the end of the day, there’s a portal out there, and you can get reviews on it.
This software will automatically hook into it, whether it comes up as one of the default
options, or you have to plug in the address yourself.

Bob: So we can put a custom review site for-

Jesse: Anything you want.

Bob: Bricklayers association or whatever the deal is, right?

Jesse: Yep. All the big national and regional ones are going to be in here automatically. If it
doesn’t pull up on the list automatically, you can still plug it in. That’s completely
customizable. So the moral of the story there is, yeah, you want to get reviews on
Google for all the SEO benefits that we’ve talked about in the past, and we’ll talk about
more in the future. But reviews on any site is good for your SEO. Google is still going to
take into account how many Yelp and Facebook five-star reviews or what your average
rating is and things like that. So you’re still going to want to get out there and get those.

And like Bob said, if you’ve got enough Google reviews, and you want to move on to,
“Let’s pump up our facebook stats,” you can change it around. You can have Facebook
be the one. That’s the big button. Bring Google down onto the side. So you can have
three, seven, five, whatever you want up there. If you don’t want to try to influence
them, you can have all the buttons be the same dang size. I mean, doesn’t matter what
you do. The point here is you can do whatever you want. So now, I’m going to go ahead
and click on Google, and what we’re going to see here it’s going to take us to another
quick screen that basically has instructions.

That’s kind of like, if you’ve never used Google before, here’s what’s going to happen.
You got to login with your Google account. Click the number of stars and then type your
text and hit Send, and then that’s going to be review. Then there’s a big red button.
Basically, it says, “Click here to proceed.” Once the customer does that, you’ll see here
on the screen it doesn’t just bring you to the Helpertech page or to where the reviews
are. It’s going to pop up the screen to just start typing your review. All the customer has
to do at this point is click the number of stars they want to rate you for and then type in
the message.

So, just to rewind, I got an email, I clicked on it. I said, “Yeah, thumbs up. These guys
rock.” And within a matter of three or four seconds, I’m actually now on the spot to go
ahead and leave the number of stars rating and type in my review. It doesn’t get any
easier than that.

Bob: Right, and that’s really making it easier, taking away the barriers. Whether it’s Google,
whether you want to do it on Facebook, same thing. In this situation, do they have to
have a Gmail account or anything? Or is it just take you right to the review deal?

Jesse: Yeah, the end-user customer, they’re still going to get to this spot right here, but they’ll
be prompted to sign in.

Bob: Okay.
Jesse: So if you don’t have an account, or if you’re not already signed in your Google account,
you’re going to have that process as well. But otherwise, it’s pretty easy.

Bob: A lot of people have Gmail accounts. Would you say what? 70%, 60% of the people out
there, or what percentage?

Jesse: I don’t have a stat. You don’t have to have a Gmail account. Just a Google account. For
everybody listening to the podcast, you should already have a Google My Business page.

Bob: Oh okay.

Jesse: You probably already signed up for AdWords and used that research tool, like we’ve
been talking. So in that case, even if you’re not using Gmail, if you’re not doing Bob at
Gmail, if you’re doing Bob at Intrycks, but that’s what you use to sign up with a Google
service, that’s all they have to have here.

Bob: Oh wow.

Jesse: So yeah.

Bob: They know everything now.

Jesse: Absolutely. If thought Facebook was bad, just wait till the Google News breaks. But no,
on a serious note, it really doesn’t get any easier. If you guys listen in here on the
podcast or having a hard time visualizing this, and even if you’re not, go to the show
page, intrycks.com/show. Check out the episode and watch the link to the YouTube
video or the Facebook video just to check out this part. You’ll kind of see how easy it
was when we were going through it. That’s what your customers are going to see. The
percentage of reviews that you’re going to get, I would say probably double if not triple,
almost immediately, just for the ease of use for this with the customer.

That’s what we even see in … pretty standard across industries. You guys should see the
same thing. So, in doing this … And we’re going to get into in a second here all the
features and benefits of you as the company, providing this review service to your
customers. Right now, we’re focusing on how easy it is as a consumer to leave reviews.
You’re going to find your customers are going to leave reviews at a clip a two to three
times what they were before on this, and you as a business, obviously, that’s great. This
is a quick way to overwhelm yourself, if you will, with five-star reviews to kind of get
that rating jacked up as soon as you can.

And a little side note, when you first get engaged with the service here, you can send up
to 100 emails or 200 text messages, kind of in the queue, at any given time. But that’s a
great way if maybe you’re lacking in reviews, or even if you want to make a big push
right out of the gates here. Dump all your most recent customers into it or some of your
best customers, if you have those, you know, kind of cherry-picked. Then you send this
our and you’re going to get a lot of reviews right off the bat. Within a matter of days,
you should see a little bit of movement in your rankings. Unless somebody else is
completely dominant in your market, that’s really going to help you move the needle.
So, now, we’re going to jump over to, as a business, what are some of the features and
benefits that you’re going to get out of this in addition to just making it super easy for
your customers? So the first thing we kind of already talked about a little bit. That’s that
automation where you’re going to keep getting reminded. Your customers, I should say,
are going to keep getting reminded to leave a review. You can customize that message.
It can be as friendly or as pushy as you want. And again, you can set the intervals and
the timing for that Either way, once they’re done with that interval, or if they leave
review, they’re out of that system. You’re not going to bug them to the nth degree.

Now, at any given time, you can jump in and you can see the queue, right? How many
people have I entered into the system to send off these automated review messages?
How many people have actually left reviews? You can see the progress through it, kind
of the pipeline of it, and you can also see what portals that they’ve left those reviews
on. So that’s something I personally really like. If you have … Let’s just take those three,
Yelp, Google and Facebook, if that’s the three places you want to get reviews from.
Something that’s really good as a business, as you want to respond to those, right? So
every time somebody leaves you review, you want to say, “Hey, thanks,” or, “Hey, good
to see you again,” or you know, whatever it is.

It shows that customer that you’re important and it shows everybody else is reading
that that your customers are important to you. This is super cool because it kind of
centralizes everything. You’re going to get an email alert every time somebody leaves
you review. Right now, I don’t know if you set up like that or not. Usually, everybody’s
not set up across the board, or maybe this manager or that manager is in charge of Yelp
or Facebook, whatever. This allows some kind of a centralized reporting on it. So you’re
going to get an email alert and/or a summary. You can set up however you want who’s
giving you reviews and where those reviews are happening.

From there, you can just click on it to read it, or if you want to reply to it, boom, you’re
right out to that portal, and you can reply to those as well in a very, very timely fashion.
So both of those things are absolutely great. You just get that visibility. The other end of
the spectrum is if somebody gives you a negative review, right?

Bob: What’s nice about this tool is we’ve had customers that have had, let’s say, a bad
reputation … not necessary a bad reputation, but they’re coming into this. They’ve got
one or two-star reviews. They’re not sure what to do. They’re kind of wringing their
hands with the whole thing. And basically, the way to look at reviews is a lot like arsenic.
You can’t get rid of arsenic. It’s always going to be there, so to speak. The best you can
do is dilute it. So, you have to overpower those negative reviews with positive, and
that’s what this system does.

So especially if you’re an existing business, you’ve been around for a while, you’ve got to
have an email list of some sort, and that’s where this comes in, and you can load 50 a
day, 50 emails a day and fire those off, and you know you’ve got existing customers that
are going to leave a review for you, especially if you’re in a repeat situation. So, this is a
way to help recover your reputation over time. It usually takes anywhere from a month
to 60 days to get you into what I call the 4.0-plus type area. And ideally, you want to be
above 4.5 in terms of reviews, because-

Jesse: That’s the elite’s base, yeah?

Bob: Yeah, especially when you get into higher numbers north of, let’s say, 100 actual reviews
that are left. So that’s what’s nice about this software. You have to ask yourself what’s
the price on negative or positive reviews in terms of conversion, and we really haven’t
even crossed that bridge. So, in my mind, if you show up in the map pack, and you’re in
the top three, and you’ve got no reviews, you’re out of the game essentially. And
depending on your industry, if you’re let’s say a truck repairer, well each repair is
typically $1,600 to $1,800. I don’t know what your profit is, but let’s say it’s at least 30%.
Well you just do the numbers backwards. If you’re not getting the calls, and you don’t
get let’s say 12 extra calls a month that you should be getting, and you’re in the close
30% of those, well you just lost $1,200. So it’s fairly obvious that you got to do
something if you’re in that position, and this an easy solution, a relatively easy solution. I
still think you got to have a point person, like you said, to review the status of those

reviews. So whether it’s you the owner or you delegate that to a manager or sales
manager or what have you, those are all good things, but you still get to stay on top of
it. You’re not hand-holding every review, because then it becomes cost effective.

Jesse: So one of our customers, The Finance Guy had a car dealership, just spends a lot of time
basically hand-delivering a review. You know, here’s a … leave a review and everything
else to every customer. Probably spend about half hour a day, 20 minutes a day, which
doesn’t seem like a ton of time. It’s scattered out here and there.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: But you add that up, it’s actually quite a bit of time. Throw a few hundred bucks a
month at that, right there, you’ve already paid just for your own labor. Let alone the fact
that you’re getting more reviews. You’re overwhelming your system to where for you to
have some negative reviews, it’s much better to have one out of 500 versus one out of
five, right? On the negative side, you’re really diluting that, and just that whole value
proposition really become such an easy ROI. Now, you add to the fact … I wanted to
jump back real quick before I forget my train of thought here.

You were mentioning kind of overwhelm in the system. You can also use this to increase
those reviews of somebody to increase the negative reviews.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: Again, you’re going to get that email alert within a short order that they just left to
review. Before a lot of people see it, before all the damage is made, quickly get on the
phone with them, on the email. Put your team on it, whatever it is, and say, “Hey sorry,
Bob. We had a very bad situation with you. That is not the norm. I think you can see that
in dealing with us. We want to make this right. What do I got to do to make it right for
you? And then if I can do that, can you change your rating to somewhere north of three
or four? Five would be great if we can get there.”

And a lot of times customers are very receptive. I mean, it’s amazing. When somebody
has a negative situation, I don’t say it’s like a cry for help. They just want to know, like,
“I’m so pissed. I just want to let you know,” and if you can address that and meet them
somewhere in the middle, they’re usually happy to change it. They’re not here to leave
you bad reviews. They’re here to get good service.

Bob: And I think what I like about this podcast is we’re trying to help small business, right?

Jesse: Right.

Bob: I think that’s the beauty of small business. We’re very light on our feet. Most of us are
our customer-oriented. We want to help our customers. I challenge all you guys to go
out and take a look at some larger corporations that are publicly traded and go see what
their reviews are. It’s shocking. The majority of them, their reviews are well under 4.0. I
mean, they’re in the mid-to-low threes, which in my mind is just not acceptable. So this
is definitely a great advantage and a great way to, again, just improve things across the
board and in put out better service, because that’s what we’re known for as small
business owners.

I mean, we’re light on our feet and get this done and provide a higher level of service.
So, this tool is definitely a great tool for that. I think one of the things I think you wanted
to cover … I don’t know if we’re jumping around here too much, but basically, how do
you know how you’re faring out there? One of the blind spots for us I think was Yelp.
This tool kind of helped us expose that and show that, hey, we need needed help in that
area and what have you. So I don’t know if you can speak to that at all.

Jesse: Yeah, absolutely. There’s lots of other little features and benefits that kind of come with
this. That was the main guts of it. We just want to make sure we communicate all those.
If you really want to know, will this going to benefit me or any solution going to benefit
me, we can help you out with that too. If you go to reviews.intrycks.com, it’s going to
take you to our page. There’s a blue button there. See How Does My Business Compare?
Click that, we’re going to run you an audit. It’s going to go out. It’s going to find where
are you currently getting reviews, and it’ll basically give you a one-page report card.
Here’s the kind of reviews you’re getting. Here’s the average star ratings you’re getting.
And just like with our free SEO audit, it’s basically what’s the good, bad and the ugly
here? You know, what’s going on? From there, if you want to work with us to implement
a software solution like this and get it rolling, or if you just want to take it and run with it
somewhere else, completely up to you. But definitely go there, reviews.intrycks.com
and understand at least what’s happening, because you don’t know what you don’t
know.

Sometimes your business, you might be out there, and multiple portals you were not
even aware that even existed. And, You might say to yourself, “Well I don’t have any
reviews there.” No big deal. That’s kind of what we’re trying to convey is that is a big
deal. You want to get some reviews on there. Just purely from an SEO standpoint, most
of what we’re talking about here is kind of in customer service, reputation,
management, things like that. Pulling it back into the SEO side of things. If your business
is listed on, let’s say, 10 portals out there, and that can get reviews. If you’re only having
reviews on, let’s say, again, Google, Yelp and Facebook, the big three.

Those other seven portals that are out there, they’re not giving you the social credibility
that Google is going to see and make a difference on your SEO. Now, if you had reviews
on all 10 of those portals, and hopefully, you’re getting four or five stars on all 10 of
those portals, it’s going to carry some weight with Google. That’s going to track back to
your website, back to your Google My Business listing, and it’s going to bump your
rankings up. So this report is going to show you again what’s happening, what’s not
happening, and where the dead spots are, and it’s just something you’re going to take
advantage of.

There’s just no other way to say it without belaboring the point. So, check it out,
reviews.intrycks.com.

Bob: Yeah, great tool. We’ve got a lot of people that are really happy with that. Some people
take it, and they say, “We’re too small, so we’re going to work on it ourselves,” which is
a great type of deal. Hopefully, they’ll get big enough that this becomes a tool that they
can justify at that point, but it’s good information regardless the size of your business.

Jesse: One other point I wanted to make, too. You talk about size of your business. It’s multilocation businesses.

Bob: Oh yeah, yeah.

Jesse: What we showed you there was kind of a single-location example. If you’re in a business
that has multiple locations, or if you’re an agency, and you want to resell this out there,
it’s completely fine, and you want to talk to a business with multiple locations. There’s
really two ways to handle it. One, each location can handle the reviews independently,
which makes them de facto single locations. So if you have a customer that comes into
store A, maybe store A is asking them for review and using this kind of software to solicit
those reviews from those customers, say, of store B and store C.

Now, on the other scenario, maybe the corporate headquarters is in charge of all this
kind of stuff. So stores A, B and C all report back. “Here’s all of our new customers,” for
today or this week or whatever it’s going to be. The corporate headquarters is in charge
of contacting those customers and get the reviews. That’s where the software is even
more spectacular, in my opinion. All those customers are going to get that link that says,
“Would you please rate us?” Before that, they’re going to be have to choose which
location. You can show the address. You can show a picture of the customer service
team, a picture of the outside of the building.

Whatever you want to do, but you want to make identifiers, so the customer can pick,
“Yep, that’s where I was right there.” So they picked their location, and then they give
you a thumbs up or thumbs down. And we should say too, again, we’re really hitting on
the highlights here, but that thumbs up or thumbs down, you can have it be smiley faces
or you can have it be a scale of one to 10, one to five stars, whatever you want. We
prefer the thumbs up and thumbs down, again, to breaking down the barriers, making it
as easy as possible, not only to execute, but just to understand, right? Making it simple.
But all that being said, again, for multiple locations, this is just great. It all comes into
one single database.

You, as the business, you can upload this yourself. I should make that clear as well. You
can go to an Excel spreadsheet, or you can go to the secure portal and just manually
copy-paste in these customer information and whatever you want to do, whatever is
easier. But really, it’s going to take … I’d say, if you put it on a weekly basis, depending
on the system you’re using for your CRM, it might take you five minutes maybe to
export all your contacts. It’s going to take you about another 60 seconds to put them
into the system. So, five minutes. Maybe if you’re a little more challenged, 15 minutes a
week. You know what I mean? Or a day, if you’re doing it daily.

You’re going to get all the benefits. You’re going to get the rankings increases. You’re
going to get that social credibility out there. And again, we’re not even hitting on it for
this, because we talked other episodes, but you want them to take those reviews, use
them in your marketing. Like we said at the beginning here, put them on your
commercials, put them on your flyers, put them on your billboards, on your trucks and
your vans, your cars, whatever. The more reviews you get. It’s not just cool to have
them for everything it does online but use them. Everybody is loving to see them, and
we’re seeing it in a marketing all over the place.

You shouldn’t be any different. I think that’s about it. Is there any other points you want
to add, Bob, to that?

Bob: No. I think that about covers it. I think it’s a great product. I know it’s going to help a lot
of businesses. It’s definitely helped ours and our customers, and it’s just a matter of
whether or not it’s the right fit for that size company.

Jesse: Yeah. So again, if you’re not sure, check it out at reviews.intrycks.com. If you’re curious,
click the blue button. We’ll do an audit for you. You can run with that information. If you
choose a different product that fits your needs, great. Otherwise, if you choose the
product that we’re pushing here, that’s great as well. At the end of the day, do
something. This technology is out there. You got to run with it.

Bob: Yeah, you can’t ignore it anymore.

Jesse: Nope. Take advantage because you don’t want to be the last one on the block that
doesn’t have any reviews. You’re going to feel that in a negative way pretty quick. All
right. That about does it for this week. As always, go out to intrycks.com/show. Drop us
a line on the show page for any feedback, any questions that you have. We’re happy to
answer them. We’d love for you to leave us a review on iTunes. Intrycks.com/itunes,
which we had an automated version for that. We don’t yet.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: But the reviews keep rolling in. We keep reading them at the end of each episode.
Absolutely love it. This is what we’re here doing is to help people, hopefully, make
people happy, and kind of put some positive impact on your business, and we just love
to hear it. So, intrycks.com/itunes. Leave us a review.

Bob: Have a good week.

Jesse: Have a good week.

So, speaking of reviews, it’s time to share a review that we got. I’d like to share today
another five-star review. This one here is from … hope I’m saying your last name right,
Andrew … Andrew [Whyimbiz 00:38:07]. Andrew gives us a five-star review saying, “So
many ways to improve your SEO. As a former tech/web guy, I already knew quite a bit
about SEO. But after listening to Local SEO Tactics, I realize how much I didn’t know.
These guys have so many different ways to improve your searchability. Plus they make it
easy to implement. Great for local businesses.” Thanks, Andrew. That’s exactly what
we’re trying to do.

Everybody else out there, if you like what we’re doing, we’d love to hear about it.
Intrycks.com/itunes will take you to iTunes, and you can leave a review. We’d love to
hear from you, and let us know how we’re doing.

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