When companies consider reviews (or, for you fancy folks, testimonials), they usually do so in the context of sales. Understandably so, since reviews are a large part of the sales puzzle. Think of your buying behaviors. Do you normally buy something new when it doesn’t have any reviews? Do you try a new restaurant without reading a single review or having a personal recommendation from someone that you know? I would imagine that your answer is “no” to these questions. Reviews are social proof. They are proof that other people have tried something new to you and found it pleasing, helpful, and worth value.
But reviews aren’t just about social proof. They are also a really good way to learn how your customers speak about your business.
“That’s what I said! You always contradict me…”
Often the way that business owners speak about their business is different than customers. Take what I do for example: often, customers will talk about the tabby things at the top of their websites. The first time I had a customer talking about this, I had no idea what they were talking about. They kept saying that the “tabs” on the top of their website were all wrong. I’m looking at the website and not really seeing what they meant. As a web developer, tabs look like this:
However, after going back and forth with the customer a few times, I realized that they were talking about the menu in their header.
Since then, I’ve had multiple customers refer to their menus as tabs. It’s gotten so that I just normally do a translation in my head and replace the word tabs with menu. Of course, that throws me off when I actually add tabs to their website…
The way that business owners talk about their business and the way that customers talk about the business are often two different ways. Customers don’t necessarily know industry jargon or understand the science of why things are happening in order to explain the problems that they are having. They put it out there in the best way that they know how to explain. My car is making a knocking noise. My water smells bad. My computer is slow. I can’t update my website. When a company solves that problem and the customer leaves a review, how they speak about the way that you solved the problem informs businesses the language that they should be using in their marketing.
“I’ve been saved by my Pinchers of Peril!”
Let’s use an example above: My computer is slow. As a guy who spends a lot of times on computers, I know what when your computer is running slow, it can mean a lot of different things. I also know that the terminology is lagging. That’s industry jargon. But customers, unless they are in the industry (and, in that case, they are probably solving their own problem) aren’t using the term lagging.
Same thing with smelly water. If they have their own well, they could have sulfur in their groundwater. They don’t know that until a water quality specialist comes out and checks their water. But if I’m doing marketing for a water quality company, I’m not posting about sulfur in their water but rotten-egg smelling water because that’s how people are describing it. For that computer repair company, I’m not posting about lagging but computers running slow.
You need to be talking about your business the way that your customers talk about it. Reviews are the best way to learn how your customers are talking about your services, products, and customer service. It’s how they are searching for businesses like yours online. Using your customers’ language can give you marketing advantage over your competitors because you can trend higher in keyword ranking using the keywords that they are already searching with.
Just start reading reviews and noting the phrases that are being used. Make a list of these phrases and see how they apply to your products and services. Then you can identify opportunities to add these phrases to your marketing and website to improve overall results.
“Hey you guys!”
One of my brother-in-laws is in sales. He told me that the way he dresses and the car he drives to a sales call depends on who he is meeting. If he’s going to the factory to meet a plant manager, he drives his truck and wears jeans. If he’s going to the headquarters to meet the VP of Production, he drives his sedan and wears a suit. He presents himself as a mirror to the person that he is meeting.
Companies should be presenting themselves as a mirror to their customers. The language that they use to speak to their customers should mirror the language that their customers speak about the business. I’m not talking about the phrases that they use but the tone and style of it. If your customers are working-class homeowners from Pottstown, PA, you shouldn’t be using language in your marketing like they are tech workers from Palo Alto, CA.
The tone of your marketing, the words that you chose, the images that you display should match your customers. Read the reviews and understand the colloquialisms that they use (or don’t use). Get a sense of the way that they speak and find ways to incorporate them into your marketing and website. I’m not saying that you should copy they verbatim but you should be speaking to them in a way that they can understand, relate, and engage with. You are presenting your business as a mirror to them so that they can relate with you. They have a problem. You have a solution. You get where they are coming from and you’ve solved their problem before. Speaking the same language only encourages them to hire you.
Next Blog Post
In the next blog post, we’ll dig into how negative or not-so-positive reviews can help your business. They are opportunities to improve customer service and add authenticity to your business.
Lastly, the section section titles were from the movie The Goonies. So here’s a gif for you:
