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A few years ago when we were conducting boot camps or speaking at Dealer Expo, when we talked about online reviews folks were a little skeptical as to their significance.

Fast forward to today, and it’s pretty clear that business (and product) reviews are to be taken very seriously, they have become a part of our culture.

I thought I’d share some key points of the results of the BrightLocal.com 2015 Local Consumer Review Survey that show just how important business reviews are in the minds of your customers.

BrightLocal reports that 92% of those surveyed indicated that they read online reviews for local businesses. That number is up from 88% last year, and 71% back in 2010 when we first started talking about them. The point here is that almost everyone who looks for a business looks to see what others experience with that business has been like. To quote Mr. Trump – “It’s Huge.”

Another interesting fact is that of those who read online reviews for businesses, 80% trust reviews as much as a personal recommendation. The stipulation for this was that the review needed to be perceived as authentic. Fake reviews are usually pretty easy to spot. That said, this statistic is a really big deal. 80% of the people that read reviews about your dealership trust them as much as if one of their friends said it. 

What is the biggest influence in getting someone involved in powersports? The influence of friends and family, according to the MIC. Reviews carry comparable weight in whether they do business with you or your competitor.

Quantity of reviews and star rating are the two things that will grab the attention of a searcher the fastest. Lots of reviews with a high star rating is always going to be a winner. Kind of a no brainer. Here’s another interesting stat that BrightLocal found – 73% of searchers will form an opinion after reading 6 reviews. I’ve never seen a review site of any kind anywhere that didn’t list reviews from the most recent to the oldest, so the 6 most recent reviews need to be good. If one or more of them isn’t, they need to be replaced with good ones in a hurry. That’s what I mean when I say you want to bury bad reviews with good ones. A large number of reviews and a good star rating can get stung if the most recent are not good.

Here’s another stat that is a real eye-opener: 69% of consumers believe that reviews older than three months are no longer relevant. What this means is that even if you have a lot of good reviews, if they are over 90 days old (specifically the last 6 reviews) you could miss out on an opportunity if your competitor has a much lower number of total reviews that are positive and current. 

These findings really highlight the importance of business reviews, and how important it is to properly manage them.

I encourage you to look at your year-end P&L statement and see how much you have spent on all forms of advertising in the past year. Think about how many potential customers you reached with that advertising. Get a round number in mind, and then Google your dealership and look at the reviews that come up. 92% of that number in your head did that too. What did they find? Did that money you spent lead them to a search that shows current reviews that shine a positive light on your dealership, or to old reviews no longer perceived as relevant, or worst case scenario was money spent only for searchers to find bad reviews? I’ve lost count of how many times dealers have spent significant amounts of money on advertising only to have searchers find terrible reviews.

One of the things we talk about in our boot camps (the next one is in March and you should be there, by the way) is annual/lifetime customer value. That number varies based on brands, but it’s safe to use $650/year in gross profit as an average annual customer value. Based on what we’ve looked at regarding reviews and the huge percentage of people that rely on them as much as a personal referral, it’s easy to see how not effectively managing them can cost your dealership dearly.

Very few reviews, bad reviews, and old reviews perceived as no longer relevant all equal lost opportunities and wasted marketing dollars.

So what do I mean when I say they need to be effectively managed? How do you do that?

First, it’s important to have positive reviews. Lots of them. Lots of positive reviews will cover a multitude of sins. If you’re constantly getting new, positive reviews, you will have solved two of the three big review challenges you face. The third is bad reviews. Unfortunately, studies show that unhappy customers are at least 11 times more likely than happy ones to leave you a bad review. In other words, if unmanaged, it’s a lot more likely that searchers are going to see something negative.

What if there was a program that automated the process of harvesting authentic reviews from your past customers? What if that program was able to take those customers that had a less than excellent experience, and rather than getting them to leave a review, had them tell you directly exactly why they thought their experience was less than excellent so that you could correct the problem and save them as a customer (retaining that annual client value)?

Simply looking at what you spent last year on advertising, combined with potential missed opportunities based on few, bad, or old, reviews, it’s pretty easy to see how valuable that program would be. At a few hundred bucks per month, it would easily be the cheapest, most valuable insurance you could buy. 

Can you think of a reason you wouldn’t want to have it, or why you would ever stop doing it? 

Me either. 

Give us a call to see how it works, or go to 

www.powersportsmarketing.com/local-web-dominator.

Talk Soon.