TrustRadius 101: A Vendor’s Guide
Reviews on trusted customer review sites like TrustRadius grow your credibility, given that more than 54% of buyers across all ages, company sizes, and price points turn to them as a resource in their buying process. And this number continues to grow year-over-year.
When interested buyers see your product’s reviews, their trust in it grows if it provides useful information.
The best part? You can leverage your overall star rating from sites like TrustRadius and feature them on your homepage for a persuasive dose of social proof.
You can take inspiration from Monday.com and feature the awards you win with customer quotes:
But first, let’s cover TrustRadius and how to get the most out of using their platform.
Who does TrustRadius serve?
TrustRadius focuses on creating in-depth user reviews for software buyers. They “optimize for content quality and data integrity.” It takes an SEO-driven, 100% organic approach to drive traffic with buying intent to TrustRadius.
The primary audience for TrustRadius reviews are buyers at mid-sized and enterprise companies who are making more significant purchases and want more in-depth content.
TrustRadius has over 550 categories, 471,000 reviews, and more than one million site visitors monthly. 54% of those visitors come from companies with more than 1,000 employees, and 56% of buyers reported making a purchase decision within three months.
Now that you know TrustRadius serves many business software buyers at larger companies, you need to know why review quality matters more than usual with TrustRadius.
Why is review quality so important on TrustRadius?
TrustRadius preaches quality over quantity with reviews. But they don’t just talk about it, they make quality central to how it scores vendors in a category with its trScore.
trScore is an algorithm that evaluates a product’s scores based on a weighted average of reviews and ratings, instead of a simple average. TrustRadius provides a greater trScore to ratings from an in-depth review than single-click star ratings, as they provide more context and demonstrate a reviewer’s expertise.
TrustRadius prides itself on the average length of its reviews and it shows, with many users spending 18 minutes writing their reviews and writing an average of > 300 words. In short, the longer the review, the more important it will be on TrustRadius.
So how do you get your users to leave in-depth, high-quality reviews on TrustRadius? Let’s cover the tried-and-true tactics.
How to generate more reviews on TrustRadius
There are many ways to generate reviews on TrustRadius. In fact, TrustRadius has shared 12 Ways to Generate More Reviews.
Review requests are typically made in one of three ways: by email, in person, or in-app.
Let’s go through one of the most common tactics to generate high-quality reviews: using NPS surveys.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys are a great way to build an audience of review candidates that are already in the reviewing mindset. Build review prompts into your NPS survey and be sure not to cherry-pick customers when generating reviews on TrustRadius. This will negatively affect your trScore. Buyers what all customer feedback about your product so they can make the decision for their business needs.
For example, Otter sends an email to users asking for feedback after completing their first task using their tool. Here’s the email they send:
Note that the email is short, gets right to the point, and sets expectations by highlighting that it will only take a minute to share feedback. Then it’s easier to ask them for more time to complete a review. These traits of effective B2B review requests indicate respect for customers’ time.
Also important, make sure your automated email doesn’t sound robotic. Instead, make a personalized request that sounds human. Also, don’t forget to add a brief note explaining how their review will help you (create a better product, introduce the tool to peers, show their expertise and so on).
Want to learn more about using NPS surveys to generate reviews? Here’s the step-by-step playbook that ChurnZero used to increase their TrustRadius reviews by 49% in three months.
TrustRadius review request templates
TrustRadius has easy-to-use templates that will help you get more reviews.
How to Get Your First 10 Reviews (and Why It Matters) is the best place to start. In it, TrustRadius provides the five main steps in a review generation campaign, including a template in “Step 2: Write an email.”
The next place to learn how to get more reviews is the TrustRadius Review Growth Kit. Included are two email templates (one with an incentive and one without). It also provides tips on writing email review request messages like setting reasonable expectations, creating a sense of urgency, and keeping it short and to the point.
Here’s an example of a TrustRadius review request. It effectively communicates the request for a review, what they’re offering for submitting a review, and how it will help.
A review request sent by TrustRadius to users who wrote a review on an email-related software product asking them to write another review on a product in this space.
Showcase your TrustRadius reviews as content
Once you have reviews on TrustRadius, now comes the fun part: leveraging the voice of the customer from the reviews in your marketing.
For example, Monday.com swept the TrustRadius 2022 Best Project Management Awards, winning Best Relationship, Best Feature Set, and Best Value for Price. They shared the news in a Facebook post.
ScienceLogic used their badges in ad creative that increased engagement by 30%.
Get started with TrustRadius
TrustRadius is a valuable resource for vendors and buyers alike. Not only can vendors use the platform to connect with prospective customers and increase their visibility, buyers can access honest reviews from other users to make more informed decisions on the solutions they choose.
TrustRadius emphasizes review quality by utilizing rigorous review criteria, which helps to ensure accuracy and trustworthiness.
Vendors can generate more reviews by following the resources linked in this guide.
Getting listed as a vendor on TrustRadius is easy; just follow the step-by-step instructions on how to sign up and get started on your journey to generating more reviews on TrustRadius.
If you want to know more about the good, the bad, and the ugly of review sites, check out this LinkedIn Live where I discuss more with Allyson Havener, Vice President of Marketing at TrustRadius.