PCA Articles

The best marketing tool is happy customers.

Reviews and feedback left by customers helps to build trust, brand reputation, and loyalty. They’re also great at driving conversions and can work wonders for your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.

While the incessant advertisements on social media may leave customers wary of product guarantees and expert recommendations, the one thing consumers will trust is authentic customer feedback.

So, it’s no surprise that research shows almost 9 out of 10 (89%) consumers worldwide take the time to read customer reviews before ordering a product or service.

Reviews have become the primary deciding factor behind all kinds of purchase choices.

Let’s first find out more about how customer reviews affect your painting business.

The Impact Of Customer Reviews On A Business

Customer reviews are often regarded as the most credible form of advertising. Whether you run a painting business or a production facility, prospective customers rely on consumer reviews to judge the kind of experience they are likely to have with your business.

As a result, reviews have a direct impact on the popularity and awareness of a product, conversion rates, and eventually on your sales and profits.

Let’s now separately consider the effects of positive and negative reviews.

• Impact of positive reviews: Positive reviews build confidence, lead to customer engagement, and boost your reputation in the market. They play a large role in a business’s local ranking in critical places like Google Maps. Positive reviews can help you understand what customers like about your company.
• Impact of negative reviews: Negative reviews might affect brand value and erode market reputation, however, they’re the best learning opportunity. They give you a chance to understand where you went wrong and make changes. When adequately addressed, negative reviews may help you build a relationship with customers as well.

Leveraging Customer Reviews To Help Your Business

Reviews are a prickly issue for some business owners, given how hard it can be to satisfy customers expectations. But, like it or not, there’s no way to avoid them. Rather, a proactive reputation marketing strategy can allow you to leverage reviews to your business advantage.

A Quality Logo Products study found that having just a few or even old reviews makes a business more trustworthy than having no reviews at all.

That should be reason enough for you to start using customer feedback to increase your competitive edge. Some of the best ways to do so are:

1. Ask your best customers to write a review: This will be easy if you have established a loyal customer base. Satisfied clients won’t mind sacrificing a few minutes to write a testimonial that will help you. For the best results, you need a system that ensures you ask after every job. This can be tedious if done manually, so Reputation Marketing Software like NiceJob proves popular with painting contractors that want to save time by automating the process.

2. Follow up with customers that forget: Even if they love you and your business, customers have busy lives that distract them from leaving that 5 star review. Sending reminder messages is a crucial part of any winning reviews strategy.
3. Get the timing right: Be smart about when you ask your customers to give you a review. As a painting contractor, in a highly visual industry, It is best practice to ask as soon as a customer has seen your amazing work rather than a month later.
4. Display reviews on your landing page: This is a great way to make positive first impressions. Instead of tucking them away in a link at the bottom, display a selection of reviews prominently on your landing page. Better still, use widgets that pull reviews directly from Google and other review sites onto your website. Besides giving your SEO efforts a boost, the added social proof will create trust and confidence, leading to a higher number of new leads.
5. Make it easy to leave reviews: Optimize the way you ask for reviews so that customers can easily write them on both desktop and mobile devices. No one likes a long feedback form, or needing to create a new account. A great review strategy takes as few clicks as possible. Painting business owners who actively seek out customer comments are likely to be perceived as more trustworthy. Make sure there’s a prominent ‘Reviews’ link on your website that customers can easily navigate to.
6. Share reviews through multiple channels: Don’t shy away from sharing reviews extensively. Include them on all social media channels, in marketing emails, and on your blogs. This is a cost-effective method of increasing the reach of your customer reviews and making them work for you. Reputation marketing software will help you do this automatically.

7. Turn reviews into success stories: Everyone enjoys a good story. Use customer reviews to create engaging content that talks about individual customer experiences. For example, you can highlight a review that compliments both the quality of work and the fact that your crew left the house spotless! Both prospective and existing clients find organic content like this appealing and relatable.
8. Learn from bad reviews: Bad reviews are nothing to cheer about, but they can have long-term benefits for your business. Use bad reviews to know more about genuine issues. Maybe someone didn’t like the behavior of one of your team members on a particular job. This is valuable information you can use to adjust sales strategies or customer service protocols. Responding to constructive feedback also allows you to repair a less than satisfactory customer experience: turning unhappy clients into satisfied ones. Meanwhile, you’ll have a chance to publicly display your high level of service.

Using reviews and feedback is not just about painting a pretty picture of your business. It is about creating an authentic and consistent brand experience.

Consumers are incredibly perceptive about genuineness and honesty in the marketplace. The Quality Logo Products study (see above link) shows that customers generally don’t fall for all 5-star reviews. 65.8% of participants found mixed review ratings to be more trustworthy.

Use positive reviews to strengthen your market presence while using negative feedback to build a better brand experience and achieve long-term customer loyalty.

How Customer Reviews Can Help Your Painting Business

The painting and decorating business is known to be fragmented, with no single player having more than a 5% share of the market and business being hyper-local.

Getting ahead of the competition in this highly populated market comes down to doing things consistently and managing your brand reputation.

Using customer reviews to build your business’s reputation and nurture strong brand recognition can be the game-changing tactic you’ve been looking for.

About NiceJob

NiceJob makes Reputation Marketing Software used by thousands of home service professionals, is a proud partner of the PCA, and the official reviews provider for the PCA Expo. PCA Members receive a 14 day free trial and 40% off their first 3 months with NiceJob.