Customer reviews play a crucial role in the buying journey. 

According to our research, 41% of Gen Z and 29% of Millennials check review sites as the first step of their purchase journey. 

In the B2C world, products with five (or more) customer reviews can boost conversion rate by a whopping 270% than products with zero reviews. And we know that consumer habits transcend into B2B. 

Given the level of distrust in the market and a digitally naive generation, The majority of consumers, and now B2B technology buyers, read reviews of previous customers before making a buying decision. 

While marketing to professionals can be quite different from marketing to individual consumers, one thing is common between both — they always read customer reviews before making any purchase.

For example, just like an average consumer is more likely to purchase a well-received product on Amazon, B2B technology buyers also get influenced to buy your solutions when they see your existing clients praising your brand.

When it comes to leveraging your customer reviews, it is important that you display them effectively wherever your potential customers are experiencing your brand, not just on a traditional review site. Doing so has brought TrustRadius customers a 70% increase in conversions, in some cases.

Here are some of the most optimal ways you can leverage customer reviews in your marketing channels.

1. Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of the most powerful marketing strategies. It’s the life blood of any successful marketing campaign.

Content in any form (i.e. blog posts, landing pages, marketing emails, etc.) is all about engaging your target audience in a meaningful and educational way to build trust & credibility and eventually increase revenue.

One way to improve your content marketing ROI is by including customer reviews in your campaigns. 

For example, when you include customer reviews in your email marketing, it allows you to foster genuine credibility in a “show and tell” way.

Additionally, when you automate your email marketing efforts, you can make a huge impact on your sales. 

According to research by Salesforce, companies that utilize email marketing automation see a 451% increase in their qualified leads and a 77% increase in their conversion rates.

Another study by Campaign Monitor also discovered that automated email marketing campaigns tend to generate 320% more sales revenue compared to one-off and manual email marketing campaigns.

If your marketing team finds it difficult to get accustomed to your email automation tool, you can always invest in a digital adoption platform to simplify the learning curve and make it easier for your marketing team to leverage the tool to its full potential.

2. Interactive Product Demos

If you’re sharing customer reviews through just content, you’re not leveraging them to their fullest extent. 

To get the most out of your customer reviews, start showcasing them on multiple platforms and in different formats to realize its full potential.

For example, if you’re a B2B technology company, you can consider showing customer reviews in your interactive product demo sign up pages and increase conversion up to 50% (up to 70% when adding to trial sign-up pages). 

According to our B2B Buying Disconnect report, interactive product demos have been the most commonly used resource in the past six years. Buyers want that hands-on experience without having to engage with a salesperson.  

So by showing customer reviews in different parts of your interactive product demos, you can highlight exactly how your product or a specific feature of it has helped a fellow consumer in growing their business.

Now you can also add your interactive demo to your product profile on TrustRadius. If a buyer is already researching your product, and then can access your demo in one click you are giving them what they want. In turn, you are more likely to make it to their short list faster.

3. Social Media Marketing & Paid Ads

When people start researching a brand or business, social media is the default part of their research process.

A recent survey also revealed that 1 out of 3 consumers use social media to discover new products and brands. 

So if your customers have left positive reviews about your product or business, you need to start including them in your social media marketing & paid ads.

By sharing customer reviews on social media, not only can you showcase praises about your product or business, but you also show that you’re paying attention to what your customers are saying.

In the case of paid ads, make sure to use intent data of your potential buyers, and retarget them with social proof of happy customers. But not all intent data is the same. TrustRadius provides second-party, downstream intent data that shows in-market buyers that are actively researching your product or your competitors. 

When targeting this audience of in-market buyers and then adding social proof to your ad creative, you can boost ad conversion and ABM performance by 50-100%.

Plus, if you’re leveraging paid social, especially using LinkedIn Matched Audiences, you can make things a lot easier by utilizing TrustRadius vendor portal that automatically preloads audience segments and updates it daily based on buyers’ behavior.

4. Your Website

Highlighting customer reviews in different places throughout your website can have a massive impact on your revenue. 

This is because customer reviews are extremely powerful and can change a potential buyer’s perception of your product, drive more organic traffic , and increase your conversion rate (because we all know organic traffic converts at a higher rate).

For example, you can showcase customers reviews on your:

• Home page
• Product pages
• Landing pages
• About us page
• Contact us page
• Product demo pages
• Competitive knockout pages

Including customer reviews in these locations on your website can drastically improve the chances of potential customers being influenced to boost brand preference. 

The best part? — There are a plethora of tools like TrustRadius’ Embeddable Widget that make it easier to pull your favorite customer reviews and generate demand for your product. Through this type of review syndication being used on multiple pages and channels, TrustRadius vendors have seen a 15-30% boost in organic traffic and increased conversion 30%.

Important Tip: You can get more mileage out of your customer reviews if they are quality reviews that are keyword rich. Working with TrustRadius you can customize the questions you ask your customers to make sure the reviews tell your differentiated story and help you rank higher for the keywords you want. 

5. Google Rich Snippets

Apart from your website, you can also highlight your customer reviews on the Google SERPs (search engine results pages) through Google Rich Snippets. 

By showing ratings & reviews as a part of your search engine result, you can drastically increase your click-through rate & boost SEO performance even if it’s not ranking in the first position in SERP.

To show your customer reviews in Google SERP, you need to implement schema markup.

For the uninitiated, schema markup is a language that Google uses to read and comprehend the content on your website. 

To display the average ratings and reviews, you need to use the Google review schema.

Adding Google review schema to individual pages is a tedious task. Therefore, we suggest utilizing a solution like TrustQuotes for Web by TrustRadius that automatically pulls the total number of ratings and reviews to optimize every page on your website for Google rich snippets.

6. Call to Action

Call to actions deserve a lot of credit because they encourage potential customers to take the desired next step. 

And one way to make your call to action even more effective is by leveraging your customer reviews. 

By embedding a customer review directly above or below your call-to-action buttons, you can drastically improve the number of visitors to take the desired action.

A study by Bazaarvoice also discovered that product pages with customer reviews generate up to 3.5x more conversions compared to product pages with no reviews.

The reason behind this is simple — customer reviews work as a social proof to your potential customers and give credibility to your products or services being offered by your company. 

7. Customer Success Stories

If you run out of marketing channels to include your customer reviews, you can always repurpose them into customer success stories.

Your Turn!

As you can see, there are a variety of ways to leverage customer reviews in your marketing channels and boost your sales. 

Compared to other growth hack tactics, leveraging customer reviews in marketing channels is not just effective but also economical, especially when the majority of consumers base their purchasing decisions on them.

That said, hopefully these strategies will help you leverage customer reviews to their full potential.