As a seller, there are many benefits of online reviews for your business. Having ratings and customer feedback showcased on review sites, your website, and sales and marketing materials can boost buyer trust in your solutions.
In this blog post, we’ll look at the 19 benefits of online reviews for businesses so you can continue fostering relationships with new customers while delighting existing ones.
What are the benefits of online reviews for businesses?
To help you learn the benefits of online reviews for businesses, we asked business leaders and marketing professionals this question for their insight.
While most contributors are in the business software industry, the benefits highlighted in this article can apply to any business that customers review.
Here are the 19 benefits of online reviews for businesses.
19 Benefits of Online Reviews for Businesses
Generating Interest and Awareness
“Online reviews can play an important role in marketing your product by generating interest and awareness. Nothing helps establish faith in the workings of a product or service like the real and raw testimonials of its users. Reviews immediately establish a human connection with satisfied customers’ stories of how your product helped with their pain points. Making reviews SEO optimized, circulating them on social media, sending them out in newsletters, and putting them up on your website or landing pages will increase your audience’s interest in and awareness of your company.”
Developing Brand Trust
“Customers are more likely to believe in your product or service based on positive reviews posted online. If consumers can read about the great experiences of others with your brand, they will be more likely to give it a try themselves. Consumers are more likely to make a purchase after reading positive reviews of your company or product.”
Building Brand Awareness and Affinity
“As much as we believe in our product and can rave about why for hours and hours, buyer decisions will almost always be influenced by user reviews (as they should be – allowing users to share public feedback ensures we stay top of our game and helps companies make fair and accurate comparisons between us and our competitors). G2 is a trusted and well-known source, meaning the third-party validation we get from G2 badges essentially allow us to back our claims and show prospects and customers that we believe in our product for a reason – would be a sorely missed opportunity to not leverage that social proof, whether it’s in our digital marketing, during sales calls, or in customer meetings.”
Read Anna's Views on Reviews
Excerpt from the Views On Reviews interview with Anna. Check out how Reachdesk reviews led to a spot on G2’s Top 100 Fastest-Growing Products list.
See the InterviewCreating Social Proof
“You can hand-pick all the positive testimonials you want for your website or landing pages, but I’m still going to do my due diligence and check out review sites for unbiased reviews (along with asking my peers to hear about their own experiences with the tools I’m evaluating). Social proof is very important in B2B, but testimonials and quotes on a vendor’s website can sometimes get dismissed as biased. Review sites allow all types of users to leave reviews (good and bad). Reviews left on these sites can also be useful for gathering feedback on (your) product or support since not all customers want to communicate their concerns directly with a vendor.”
Read Tara's Views on Reviews
Excerpt from the Views On Reviews interview with Tara. Check out how Tara's sees reviews through the lens of demand generation.
See the InterviewShowing Benefits and Scale
“I run a company that sends handwritten notes for major brands. Instead of giving client references, we point prospective clients to our reviews. We also use our reviews to show our relative scale and customer rating. We are proud to be the number one offering in our space, as well as having seven times the number of reviews as the next player. This shows that not only are we bigger, but we’re also performing better.”
Encouraging Others to Try Your Product
“If a business has an excellent product, they should want to let people know about it. And nothing is more persuasive than a customer review. If a potential customer sees that people just like them have benefitted from a product, they’re much more likely to give it a try. And if they don’t like it, they’re likely to leave a review of their own. That’s why customer reviews are so important. Getting good reviews is important, but getting bad reviews is no reason to give up. If people didn’t like your product, there’s a chance that someone else will. You just have to find them.”
Receiving Honest Feedback
“Online reviews are a great way to get honest and raw feedback on your business from your customers without any bias or sugarcoating. These reviews can help you identify what works and what doesn’t so you can make changes to the way you operate. Sometimes, you may not have been aware of certain issues or problems. If you have a product or service that people love, it’s important to know that so you can keep doing more of it. If your customers are dissatisfied with something, you need to know so you can take steps to fix it, adjust your strategy accordingly, and make the most of your money, time, and energy.”
Showing Your Customers You Care By Listening To Reviews
“It shows you care about the customer if you respond directly to them on your site or on a review site. It baffles me how many companies don’t respond to what people post on review sites. Yes, it takes time, but at the end of the day, how can you be a customer-first company if you don’t at least acknowledge that you are listening and then demonstrate that you understand the other person’s pain point?”
Read Scott's Views on Reviews
Excerpt from the Views On Reviews interview with Scott. Check out how Scott sees how community and reviews go hand in hand.
See the InterviewIdentifying Blind Spots
“Once you learn how to look at customer reviews objectively, you’ll find that they have a wealth of information that can actually help you better your product or service. Blind spots are inevitable when you have so many details to focus on, which is why it’s important for leaders to leverage customer reviews and identify the most common challenges that the majority of your customers struggle with. From there, it’s all about implementing the feedback and making the lives of potential and current users easier.”
Improving Your Product
“My job as a product manager is to create experiences that help users make software decisions, to make them feel confident. User feedback about when the product (and not to make this about myself, but I) have failed is fuel, it is the lifeblood of how to improve to take good products to great.
Trends emerge in reviews on areas to improve. Our roadmap has been directly influenced by the trends we have codified from reviews. Here are some examples from both a buyer or reviewer (user of g2.com) and sellers (customers of G2):
- “Where is my gift card?” – Some of G2’s reviews have incentives attached. We live in a world where you can order something online and it shows up at your doorstep in an hour. This was an expectation that is immediate for our users, and that we were poorly communicating. We have a moderation process at G2 to ensure the authenticity of reviews, this process takes a few days based on both the attention and thoroughness of our processes and the volume of reviews we receive. By optimizing our thank you page to better set expectations on gift card delivery, we have already seen our NPS scores improve within one month of launch.
- “The review form is laborious” – Our review form included 37 questions and was about 7 years old. Despite the in-depth nature of our review form bringing helpful, authentic insights from real users, we frequently received feedback that it was sometimes difficult to complete. This led to an investment to completely overhaul our form, optimizing the user experience to help users leave meaningful feedback but also navigate quickly.
- “G2 offers so much, I’m not always sure where to start!” – Our sellers understand there are so many ways to take advantage of G2, from leads to buyer intent to responding to reviews! We have prioritized and are continuing to optimize our my.g2 dashboard to prioritize actions and notifications to support seller return on investment.
- “Why did G2 reject reviews?” – Our sellers are curious about why some reviews are accepted while others are rejected as part of our commitment to trust and thorough moderation processes. We have committed based on this feedback to create clarity around rejection reasons.
- “Collecting reviews is difficult” – Our sellers want more data and support in collecting reviews. We now have five teams at G2 dedicated to collecting reviews, from strategic outreach to engineering teams creating turnkey solutions to automate collection, we are always investing in supporting diversified collection methods to help customers collect MORE and support the buyer in finding the perfect software solution for their business.
Responding to reviews is fundamental to staying close to our customers and understanding how we can invest and improve our product. I will never stop listening, and replying to reviews is a keystone of that commitment.”
Beating the Competition
“Being able to access the internet instantly and from anywhere has had a huge impact on how we do business. Buyers are becoming savvier and are much more likely to shop around online to get the best deal. Their journey often includes price comparisons, browsing for the best deal, and vetting businesses for trustworthiness and quality. Buyers are increasingly likely to check out online reviews before making a purchase, and quite often what they read will be a deciding factor in whether or not they buy. Your online reviews could be what makes a customer choose between you and your biggest competitor.”
Refining Competitive Positioning
“I think a lot of marketers evangelize ‘talking to customers’ but very few actually do it. So in the absence of these 1:1 conversations, review sites play an important role in being able to get competitive intelligence that can help you chisel and refine your positioning.”
Read Dev's Views on Reviews
Excerpt from the Views On Reviews interview with Dev. Check out how a B2B SaaS Growth Strategist like Dev views reviews.
See the InterviewFinding Niche Markets
“Customers may use a product in ways your marketing or customer care team did not foresee. Online reviews help a company’s decision-makers find niche markets and tailor their products to boost sales by knowing how customers use their products. For example, our target audience is managers, and we assumed that the tool would only be used by managers or team leaders. However, once we started taking part in product reviews, we learned that in addition to managers, individuals and students also use our platform. This knowledge assisted us in revising our present marketing plan.”
Turning Testimonials Into Reviews (And Vice-Versa)
“I think one of the biggest learnings (which we also hit on in your blog post on reviews, testimonials, and case studies) was around how well they can play together. Both in terms of mining your reviews for great stories to actually follow up on and turn into video testimonials, and actually repurposing the transcript of a video testimonial into review content. When you transcribe a video testimonial interview—which we always do for all of our customers at Testimonial Hero—you can then clip out parts of that transcript and see if your customer is also willing to use that text to complete their review.”
Read Sam's Views on Reviews
Excerpt from the Views On Reviews interview with Sam. Check out Sam's interview to learn more about using video testimonials and user reviews.
See the InterviewProviding Another Channel For Your Customer Advocates
“Reviews are a positive byproduct of an effective and engaging customer marketing program. Customer marketing programs should keep customers engaged and happy throughout the customer lifecycle, from customer onboarding, product adoption and expansion, to advocacy, and, ultimately renewals. Engaged customers that are given the tools they need to succeed and become product experts will be happier and advocate for a company on their own. Acts of advocacy include writing reviews, serving as a reference, or sharing their success story in a case study or testimonial.”
Read Melody's Views on Reviews
Excerpt from the Views On Reviews interview with Melody. Check out Melody's interview to learn more about generating reviews through customer marketing programs.
See the InterviewTelling More Customer Stories
“Reviews are a fantastic resource when building your pipeline of customer stories. If you ask anyone who manages a storytelling program what their biggest challenge is, after building a pipeline, it’s securing the approvals necessary to publish a story. Customers who are open to publicly sharing a review are a great place to address both of these challenges. Take an inventory of your non-anonymous reviews and see how they align with your storytelling priorities–whether that’s by role, industry or product use case. From there, reach out directly to thank your customer and ask if they’d be open to sharing more about their experience. As a best practice, always ask if their organization has a policy about participating in case studies: even if your customer has publicly published a review as an individual, there may be rules for vendor or partner endorsements!“
Read Bianca's Views on Reviews
Excerpt from the Views On Reviews interview with Bianca. Check out Bianca's interview to learn more about how to tell more customer stories through customer marketing and advocacy (CMA) programs.
See the InterviewGenerating Leads
An obvious benefit of online reviews for businesses is lead generation. Since many buyers turn to online reviews to discover and decide which solutions to consider, reviews can be a good source of leads. The lead generation benefit is often underreported because buyers often turn to multiple sources, including review sites, before inquiring, so the review sites are usually not “the” attributed lead source. If you’re in SaaS, and a review site is one of your category’s top organic search results, review sites may be a strong lead generator. Try asking your leads how they heard about you. Ask on your first call with them, or add a question to your contact form. You may be pleasantly surprised by how many buyers mention reviews if you show up well on review sites.
Finding More In-Market Buyers
Another well-known benefit of online reviews for businesses is buyer intent data. With many B2B buyers delaying getting in touch with vendors, the vendor demand has risen for the third-party buyer intent data provided by review sites. Buyers’ time on vendor sites is declining while their time on third-party sites and communities is rising. While vendors may try to capture more of their buyers’ time on their site, there’s a clear benefit for vendors to have buyer intent data from a relevant review site to know which ICP accounts are in-market so they can proactively reach out to them.
Increasing Sales
Last but not least, reviews can increase your sales. A research study by Northwestern University found that online reviews impact buying conversion rates. They also saw that the higher the price point, the higher the conversion rate increase.
While Northwestern’s study was in the B2C consumer space, the finding can be presumed to extend to the B2B space. The more considered the purchase, i.e. the bigger and more important it is to the buyer, the more likely buyers will seek reviews as one of their information sources to make a purchase decision.
Summing Up The Benefits Of Online Reviews For Businesses
As a seller, the many benefits of online reviews can be extremely rewarding. You can benefit from developing trust between you and your customers, improving your product or service offering, finding new in-market buyers, building brand loyalty, and so much more. Online reviews can help add authenticity to a sales pitch and provide evidence that potential customers may not know beforehand. Moreover, engaging with people leveraging online reviews for their purchase decisions increases the likelihood of gaining leads and sales of your service or product.
Think about how your business can realize the 19 benefits of online reviews. Then your next step is to get more reviews.
