How To Pitch Online Review Management To Your Clients

You already know that Shout About Us provides tools that empower your brand or agency to offer reputation management services to your clients, like our secure Review Navigator platform. The problem? Not all of your clients are 100% enthusiastic about getting on board with a review management service, which — from a small business owner’s perspective — might seem like an inefficient use of time or money.

Savvy business owners want to know: Why should they pay your agency to manage their online reviews, especially if they already enjoy good brand recognition or have a solid customer base? Isn’t responding to reviews just a courtesy, and aren’t there better ways they could allocate their resources? In short, why should they consider leveraging a review management service, and what sort of return can they expect for their investment?

Whether you’re pitching review management to your current clients as an additional service your agency can provide, or you’re more focused on targeting new prospects,  this article will help you communicate why a review reply service matters — and how your clients’ businesses can benefit from taking advantage of one. Keep reading for five tips on pitching review management to your clients, and be sure to check back in next week, when our response scribes will discuss how to handle duplicate reviews.

Pitching Reputation Management to Businesses: 5 Compelling Reasons Your Clients Need a Review Response Service

Your digital marketing agency most likely offers a broad suite of services, like SEO, competitor monitoring, content creation, and social media management. Your clients are eager to create Facebook pages, redesign their websites, optimize for mobile, and publish more blog posts — but when it comes to online review management, they aren’t always quite as enthusiastic.

So, how can you sell review management to your clients more successfully? How do they stand to benefit, and — what they’ll really want to know — will those benefits outweigh the costs of hiring your agency (or adding another service)?

Those are reasonable questions for business owners to ask — and we think the available data provides clear answers. Whether you’re reaching out to a new prospect, or you’re engaging with an existing client who is unfamiliar with (or uninterested in) a review response service, here are five selling points to emphasize when your agency is pitching online review management.  

1. The demand for reputation management is exploding — a trend that’s expected to continue. According to a report from Globe NewsWire, “The Global Online Reputation Management Services Market is expected to grow from USD 183.83 Million in 2019 to USD 410.71 Million by the end of 2025 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 14.33%.” Meanwhile, Market Research, Inc. (MRI) projects the online reputation management market to grow to almost $650 million by the end of the current decade. These numbers reflect a huge surge in the demand for reputation and review management (which makes perfect sense, considering the next point on our list). If your clients don’t utilize this sort of service, they’re in danger of falling behind the numerous competing brands that do.
2. Consumers are more likely to shop with businesses that reply to their reviews — plain and simple. As we covered in detail last month, a recent study from BrightLocal revealed that “89% of consumers are ‘highly’ or ‘fairly’ likely to use a business that responds to all of its online reviews.” The same survey found that, on the flipside, “57% say they would be ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ likely to use a business that doesn’t respond to reviews at all.” Responding to customers is more than simply polite — it’s also good business sense from a financial perspective.  
3. The potential for greater profits far outweighs the costs. Yes, it will cost your customers money to start using a review response service — but it’s a smart strategic investment in the brand’s future. Not only does responding to reviews significantly increase the percentage of consumers who are willing to shop at a business, as we mentioned a moment ago — it also boosts profits by improving customer retention. We’ve had clients whose retention rates have increased by as much as 43% after utilizing our response scribe service, while for context, an increase of just 5% in retention can boost profits anywhere from 25% to 95%. How much could your customers’ profits increase simply by improving their retention rates?    
4. Responding to reviews can help your clients rank better in local searches. Your clients already want to rank higher on Google. Responding to reviews will help them achieve that goal when it comes to local rankings. According to a Google support page, providing your reviewers with owner responses is a way that your business can achieve “better visibility,” “show up for relevant searches in your area,” and “increase the likelihood that a shopper will visit your location.”
5. Don’t forget to discuss the value of review generation, which helps boost conversion rates. Generating reviews is just as important as acknowledging them. After all, you can’t reply to comments that don’t exist — or use non-existent reviews to convert consumers into customers. According to some research, “50 or more reviews per product can mean a 4.6% increase in conversion rates” — and even more impressively, according to a report from the Spiegel Research Center, “The purchase likelihood for a product with five reviews is 270% greater than the purchase likelihood of a product with no reviews.”

Our 24-Hour Review Reply Service Makes Online Reputation Management Easy

Utilizing a review response service can help your clients:

1. Save time
2. Boost revenue
3. Rank in local searches
4. Acquire new customers
5. Retain current customers

It also provides crucial opportunities to control the damage when negative reviews crop up — a subject we covered here. If your clients aren’t taking advantage of an online review management service, they’re missing out on all of these benefits (and worse, falling behind competitors who aren’t).

Discover how our online reputation management services can help your brand or agency — and your customers — do more business and earn more revenue, in any vertical or industry. Through Shout About Us, your team can effortlessly provide all of your clients with custom responses to every review, no matter how many locations they operate or how many review platforms you need to monitor. Contact our team online to learn more, or schedule a demo today to see it in action.

‍