That’s according to the Medill Spiegel Research Center at Northwestern University in the US. If that sounds like the kind of boost your conversion rates could do with, stick around while we explain more about the link between reviews, revenue, and growing your marketing spend.
Innovation: The key ingredient to bake into your plans
There’s one thing that the most successful brands all have in common: they don’t stand still; they are always innovating, coming up with new ways to delight their customers.
Now, innovation is one of those words that often gets thrown around like confetti. When anything becomes a handy buzzword, it can help to stop and think about what it actually means. In our recent eBook, From reviews to revenue: Five ways customer feedback can drive business growth, we describe innovation as, “the most essential ingredient for sustaining momentum and keeping pace with change.”
It’s an ingredient – not an end goal.
There’s another really strong definition from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) – the organisation behind the 56000 Innovation Management standard.
According to the ISO, innovation means: “A new or changed entity, realising or redistributing value.”
There are two parts to that statement. The first is the one we are all familiar with. The key part of the definition, though, is: “realising or redistributing value.” The nation’s garden sheds have been home to an uncountable number of great ideas, innovations and inventions that never even made their way up the garden path. A successful innovation is one that drives sales and makes money; it’s something that customers want and are willing to buy.
It might seem like stating the obvious, but knowing what customers want makes it so much easier to sell it to them. Planning out a solid customer acquisition strategy will help you execute at a faster pace and get your teams fully aligned.
In praise of the empty chair
Part of the value of reviews is that they can be used to bring the voice of your customer into the boardroom when important decisions are being made – like which innovations the business ought to invest in.
Jeff Bezos of Amazon sometimes insists on leaving one empty chair at meetings – a symbolic gesture to remind everyone that the customer might not be in the room, but they are still the most important person. Innovation is at the heart of everything Amazon does; look at what it did to book retail. First, Amazon out-competed traditional booksellers, then – once it was the world’s biggest bookstore – it disrupted its own market with the launch of the Kindle.
Customer reviews can, and should, inform your product development strategy, as well as your sales and marketing efforts. They will help you find ways to improve the way you sell to and serve your customers. They can also open your business up to new revenue by helping you to innovate in ways that your customers will respond favourably to.
Analysing feedback data lets you understand what customers want from your business. If you’re pitching a new idea to your boss or your CEO, or outlining a business case for investment in a new initiative, what could be more compelling than having customers argue your case? When your argument is backed up by hard data like that, you can show your senior leadership team what they need to focus on and where they need to invest.
It does need to be hard data, though. By which we mean reliable and verifiable. Walking into the boardroom with flaky data when you’re asking for a large sum of money might get you laughed at. Or worse.
That’s why it is of the utmost importance that you are able to guarantee the integrity of your customer feedback data. Only verifiable purchases and interactions from genuine customers will suffice – anything else could be a noisy distraction.
You might find rave reviews of a completely new product. You might discover a lukewarm response to a new feature. Or perhaps you’ll hear customers calling for a loyalty programme. Whatever you learn, this is one of the most powerful ways you can hear about the likes and longings of the people your business depends on.
Whatever it is, this is the kind of intelligence that can shape investment decisions and inform the direction of your long-term strategies.
The idea of using customer reviews to help win increased marketing budget might be new to you. If so, now is definitely the time to start, because a solid reviews strategy will do a lot more than make you look good.
If you’d like to find out more about how to get started on driving growth through customer reviews, we’d love to hear from you.
