Anytime you hear something negative about your business, it can take the wind right out of your sails. It is never fun to hear something less than stellar about something you worked hard to create. While negative reviews are never the end goal when you are trying to gather business reviews, they happen, and the truth is, a negative review is not actually a terrible thing. Take yourself away from reading and re-reading that last undesirable review, and let us help you understand how it is not really as dreadful as you think. We are going to take a look at if negative reviews are bad for your business, and how they can actually be good for your business.
Are Negative Reviews Bad for Your Business?
Like we said, no one likes to hear something negative about something they have worked hard to make special; however, it can happen. Negative reviews don’t have to be bad for our business, they can actually be positive. Do we have your attention? Great! We are going to review how your business can benefit from less than ideal reviews.
- Build Trust: Research from Edelman found that 81% of consumers say they must be able to trust a brand prior to making a purchase. And 70% indicate trusting a brand is more important now than in the past. Having some bumps in the road from time to time helps to build your business’s credibility and show that your positive reviews are actually real. Building trust means having full transparency and being authentic, and negative reviews show that you have nothing to hide.
- Increase Sales: Research has found that people are actually more likely to purchase a product or service if it has some less than perfect reviews. Consumers perceive products with perfect ratings as too good to be true. If there are no negative reviews, a person may even jump to the conclusion that a brand is hiding something. Customers understand that mishaps happen and that you can’t always please everyone, and they expect to see something about that to know that your brand is real and give some weight to the positive feedback.
- Provide Additional Information to Push the Buying Decision Forward: Have you ever filtered to the negative reviews on a product, service, or company, to really read what they are? Most people do. This helps them determine if the lower reviews apply to them or not. In a lot of cases a person can read a negative review that helps them decide that they are making the right buying decision. For example, say you are looking for a company who specializes in making meat sandwiches, and the negative reviews are all from people who say, “They only offer meat”, this can help you make the decision that you want to purchase from the company, as they have what you need.
- Uncover Areas of Opportunity: As a business, you may not always know what is happening in the field. Negative reviews aren’t bad for your business, because they can provide insight into areas that need fixing (without the review, you may not know a problem even exists). The key to negative reviews is handling them quickly and publicly, to show that customer satisfaction is your number one priority. Use the feedback you receive to make your business and the products and services better. A negative review is free consumer research.
No one likes to receive undesirable feedback, so in fear of getting a “bad” review, businesses sometimes shy away from asking for reviews at all. You shouldn’t. Negative reviews are not bad for your business and they can offer a lot of positive results. Around 90% of consumers look for and read online reviews before visiting a business, and of those people, over 90% of them trust those reviews (Search Engine Land). Gathering business reviews, good, bad, or indifferent are important for your brand.
At Water Bear Marketing, we can help you gather reviews for your business and manage them.
At Water Bear Marketing we believe that in today’s world, there is no room for guessing with your advertising dollars. We help our customers get a return on their online advertising dollars and prove the results. Our team has managed thousands of online marketing campaigns and has over a decade of digital marketing experience.
Contact us for a free consultation and to learn more about how you can grow your business with digital marketing.