Why B2b marketers must leverage ratings and reviews for growth

Leveraging reviews referrals

Prologue

In a ferociously competitive B2B landscape, admit stern competition, leveraging ratings & reviews are paramount for marketers to attract, engage, convert & retain the customers. Buying is more of an emotional decision & an implicit one & the marketers need to tap into the emotional quotient of the prospects before they can entice them to purchase from them. Learn more on Reasons to use Emotional Analytics in B2B Marketing According to research by Entrepreneur, Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM) helps in getting the right message delivered to the right audiences in today’s hi-tech & fast-paced world. How Leveraging Ratings & Reviews can help Brands Word-of-Mouth-Marketing (WOMM) marketing campaigns can be leveraged along with customer reviews helps marketers can optimize their sales revenues. As per a study by Nielsen 92% of the customers prioritize the recommendations from their friends & family over all forms of advertising. The following reasons substantiate why leveraging ratings & reviews is important for B2B marketers:

1. User-Generated Content (UGC) Helps in Bolstering Conversion Rates:

According to an article from Hootsuite:
“User-generated content is one of the most powerful tools in today’s marketing arsenal. It’s proof that you have dedicated fans, products worth talking about, and a social network that will appreciate great content.”
Leveraging ratings & reviews ensure that user-generated content (UGC) is boiled down to essence & makes sense to the readers. As customer reviews directly imply the pros & cons of a particular product or service, they give marketers an idea about the existing loopholes in their products or services so that they can work upon them & fix them. Furthermore, the pieces of content that have been tailored to meet the business requirements of the customers also generate greater conversions. While Word-of-Mouth-Marketing creates the buildup, its relevance is substantiated by the power of positive customer reviews. A study from Bazaar Voice showed that 64% of millennials and 53% of baby boomers prefer to discover new ways to share their opinions about brands.

2. Leveraging Ratings & Reviews as Social Attests helps in omnichannel Reputation Building:

Leveraging ratings & reviews across omnichannel are pre-requisites to online reputation building & management. Also, leveraging ratings & reviews on social platforms ensure that the customers have ample social testimonials at hand, to inspire them for purchase.

3. Improves Online Reach of the Brands & Promotes Brand Equity:

Leveraging ratings & reviews ensure that the stage is set for strengthening brand equity. While word of mouth marketing (WOMM) helps in driving better customer engagement, positive customer reviews spark trust in potential customers & drive them to sales conversions.

4. Leveraging Tools for Social Listening Helps Businesses Blossom:

Beyond just advertising brands’ products or services, social media is also a great way to keep a track record of the company’s’ reputation. Leveraging ratings & reviews helps marketers in optimizing their social media campaigns. Social listening helps to monitor the social platforms for elevating the level of customer success by tracking customers’ feedbacks, direct brand mentions, and indulging in discussions regarding related keywords, topics, competitors’ analysis & benchmarking, etc. Social listening has two parts:
  1. Social Monitoring for tracking social media mentions & conversions
  2. Analysis & actionable responses based on the data-driven insights
Leveraging social listening tools from Hootsuite, HubSpot, TweetReach, Buffer, BuzzSumo & SproutSocial can help marketers in optimizing their efforts for increased sales revenues.

5. Declutters Audiences Attention:

Leveraging ratings & reviews ensure that marketers don’t bombard their customers with unnecessary ads & promotional content. If ads or pieces of content being served to the marketers are not relevant, people commonly adopt what’s commonly called banner blindness. Thus, customer experience & conversions are adversely impacted. Creating user-generated content can boost the effectiveness of the ad campaigns. According to research by CrowdRiff, creating user-generated photos in ads fetched them thrice more Click-Through Rate (CTR) than normal ads. As is substantiated by numbers leveraging reviews & referrals helps the brands look beyond the clutter of the digitized era to create user-generated content as per the interests of their users. UGC content lures the audiences to gaze over the ads created, improving the impressions & the Click-Through Rates (CTRs). UGC helps in engaging the audiences as it is more genuine & isn’t purely a persuasive content strategy meant for promotions.

Wrapping It Up

Leveraging reviews & referrals as forms of user-generated content ensures that the two strategies that complement each other to help the brands architect omnichannel content strategies. According to a Chip Bell:
“Loyal customers, they don’t just back, they don’t recommend you, and they insist that their friends do business with you.” 
Leveraging referral marketing along with the good old fashioned word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) creates an essential progressive feedback mechanism to optimize the sales conversions & then, in turn, boost the quality & the quantity of the reviews & referrals. Referral marketing, word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) & customer engagement operate cyclically & the former two parameters acting as the causation of the optimized customers’ engagement & conversions also bear a positive correlation with the same. Valasys Media helps its B2B clients with an array of B2B services including lead generation, account-based marketing, lead nurturing, event promotion services, CRM services, list building services & content syndication services. Our custom-made services are created to talk to the pain-points of the customers & help them optimize their bottom-line endeavors such as improved sales conversions & better returns on marketing investment. For the furtherance of perennially healthy sales pipelines, get in touch with our team of experts.

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