How reviews help in marketing

Looking at several online resources, US businesses spend anywhere 2% to 24% of their respective revenues for marketing. Neil Patel, on one of his blogs, cited some of the top spenders in marketing, ranging at least $2B to more than $5B. Take note, it’s in billions with a capital B!

Don’t worry, I understand that not all businesses have that capacity to spend huge sums of money for marketing. Here are some low-cost tips that you might find useful:

1. Offer an incentive for a 5-star review on Google, Yelp, Facebook or other platforms. This can be monetary, service or in-kind, really it’s up to you.
2. Hold contests for customers who left you a 4-star or 5-star reviews.
3. Feature the best customer review/s on your social media channels or blogs. This can be most effective in B2B setups. It’s free marketing for your customers, too!
4. Offer a freebie or a service upgrade for the next transaction.

Here are some benefits that businesses can get out of these ideas:

1. It encourages customers to give your real and organic reviews, which help push search rankings up on the list.
2. Reviews are a great way to interact with customers and a great source of business intelligence for improvements in processes and products/services.
3. Relatively lower cost to the business, but considerable positive impact on the marketing side. As we all know, reviews are a top source of research material for customers.
4. Long-term marketing benefit for the business as these reviews get indexed on the internet and no additional costs are involved.

Any other ideas out there that we can add to this list of creative marketing ideas? Let me know in the comments below.