The Review Game: Building Your Marine Business Reputation

Episode Transcript

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Hey, what’s up everybody? Welcome to the Marine Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Harry Casimir. This podcast is all about marketing your marine business, whether you are a boat dealer, boat builder, boat club, all in between. If you want to get more leads, more sales, and marketing that actually works you are in the right place.

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And every episode we break down what’s working right now in the marine marketing space. There is no fluff, no generic advice, just real tactics you can take home and grow your business. This podcast is brought to you by Boat Marketing Pros, where we help marine businesses grow through digital marketing. Learn more at boatmarketingpros.com. All right, let’s get into it.

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The review game: building your marine business reputation. Research shows 95% of consumers read reviews before visiting a business, trust the reviews that they have seen or read online about the business, and they put as much value on reviews online as much as they put on a personal recommendation. So on this episode, we cover exactly how to generate more positive reviews and how to handle the negative ones professionally and increase your business visibility. So let’s get started. We gonna go over and cover on this episode the numbers that should wake you up.

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We will talk about why marine businesses struggle with reviews and how to get more positive reviews. Handling negative reviews and behind Google. Those are the 5 key points we will cover. Let’s get started. So the numbers that should wake you up.

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Let me share some statistics. Research shows 95% of buyers use digital sources, including reviews, to determine who they will do business with and what they will buy from the businesses. And of that, 88% of the potential customers said that they use business that actually reply to reviews. So meaning that if there is a review about a business online, 98% of people say they will buy from a business that actually take time to answer reply to reviews. Very interesting, about half of that number, about 47% of people say they would not do business, they would do business with people that do not respond, which means you lose half of that consumer base that would do business for you.

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All of that, 93% of consumer base buying decision on online reviews And more importantly, of the same number, they even put more weight on reviews or equal weight on online review as if they would get a personal recommendation from their friends. So this is why reviews matters and this is why those numbers should wake you up. So why marine businesses struggle with reviews? Long sales cycles mean the purchase feels distant when asking. It feels like, man, I’ve been going through back and forth with you for the last 4 or 5 months.

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It’s a drag on me. I don’t even like you anymore because I just got too many texts and emails from you. So you want to make sure you check in and keeping a consistent messaging for the customer, but don’t be super pushy. Obviously you want the sale, but making sure because of the sales cycle is so long, you are aware of that. You want to make sure to almost gage your engagement to make sure you not overstep your boundaries.

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And service customers, people that buying very, very high ticket items are often frustrated. Out of nowhere, sometimes the frustration has nothing to do with you, but sometimes it’s not the best time to ask questions, to ask for a review. Sometimes you can almost see the writing on the wall. That person may not be mad at you and they probably will give you a good review. The timing is not right.

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So you want to make sure you almost time it on when to ask those reviews. And we’re gonna talk about how to get those reviews anyways in a second. No systematic process for requesting reviews. Again, as I said on many, many episodes, I have personally talked with hundreds, if not thousands of dealers, and most dealers I talked to, I would say close to 80%, this is not the statistic number I have, but I would say close to 80% of them do not have a systematic process in place to request reviews and follow up on review requests. Yes, many dealers do have reviews online and part of it is like, “Oh, can you give us a review?” It’s just random and they really leave it to chance.

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And that review, based on those numbers I shared with you a moment ago, If reviews are that important, why would anyone leave it to chance? The other piece dealers struggle to get reviews is that they fear of negative reviews and then that prevent them asking anyone. Do not fear the negative reviews. This is why sometimes you actually have to train your team and provide a better service. Because a negative review doesn’t mean that you are bad.

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It means that there are a piece that needs some improvement that need to be adjusted. And when people leave and they do not give a review and you did not ask them to give a review, and some people may not even give you a review on Google itself or any other platform. They will just tell you straight up, I really did not like how X, Y, and Z handle this or this happened. I don’t want to give you negative reviews. Therefore, I would not give you that review.

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And interestingly, some of those people would give that feedback to you straight up, like right in there. And that’s some of the best feedback you can get because once it’s not public, and if you really, really think about it from a leadership perspective, you can take that information and share it with your team and make adjustments right in there. So reviews is not always super negative, and we’re gonna talk about how to handle the negative one and how to make sure you get the system in place to ask those for those reviews very, very consistently. Let’s dive in how to get more positive reviews for your business. Number 1, timing.

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There is no way around this. Timing, timing, timing. I cannot say that enough. Ask at the moment of delight, not weeks later. When someone get a key from you, whether you’re a boat rental, they get the key to go for rental or go have fun, or you handing them the key to the brand new boats you just rigged for them, that is a moment that they’re very, very happy.

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As long as obviously you You have to read the room a bit, but most people are very, very happy when they get the key to what they have been waiting for, looking forward to. So don’t wait for weeks later to ask for that review. Right after the successful delivery, just put it in there. And of course, after resolving an issue or service for them, And of course, when they offer satisfaction, show satisfaction for either a service or product that they get from you, or say some of your team members or that team member was awesome or whatever that might be. Timing is so crucial.

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And this is why it’s important. If I can put that in there, it’s so crucial to train your team. The whole company would have to be on board. It should become a culture thing that review is important to the company, to us. Therefore, it’s everybody’s job, not everybody’s job to be asking for review, but it’s everybody’s job to make sure we are getting those reviews.

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Meaning is that when we see a customer is super happy or they’re not happy about specific things, well, let’s address that now and then so that way we can get positive reviews. Okay, so that’s timing in itself, how important it is. This next thing on how to get those positive reviews is make it easy. People don’t have time to go look for your company and figure out how to add a review on Google for you on your behalf. There will be people that do this, but I would say most customers will not go out of their way to do this for you unless you help them, provide them with the information directly.

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And this is why after the service, make sure you do 2 or 3 of those things. Send a direct link to Google review page via text message. Don’t miss that at all. It’s very easy to get your review link on Google. So just go to Google, search for your business, and when it shows up on the right-hand side, you will see there will be a share button.

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Then you can grab the URL from there. And that URL address is what you would share with the buyers so that they can add reviews to your Google Business Profile. Second, create on your service counter, create a QR code. There will be a QR code right up front that says, please review us on Google, and there’s the QR code. Of course, the URL right under the QR code, because some people, believe it or not, don’t want to use their phone to scan those QR codes.

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Give them the options, for example, yourcompanywebsite.com/reviews or something like that. So that way they can go to that URL by themselves if they don’t want to scan the QR code. The QR code would link them directly to that Google review we talk about on the text. The other piece is make sure you train your team members to follow that direction and ask for the reviews. Make sure they know the timing and how to ask it.

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The other piece you will want to do is inside your welcome package when the service is delivered. So whether it’s the key you’re giving to them for their new boats, or you taking the key from them when they just get out of the boat rental space, whatever that might be to you, make sure there is a little brochure or whatever you’re giving them after the completion of the service that has at least one little postcard or a flyer that’s just thank them for stopping by, for being a customer, love to work with them, and then let them know how important it is to you as a business to have a review from them and then give them the URL right inside that code. So you see, you give them all those options. You send a text message to remind them. You have a QR code on your service counter.

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You send an email with one-click link. So when, after the follow-up, so thank you for stopping by, for doing X, Y, and Z, please don’t forget to rate us, to give us a review on Google. And of course you train the team to do this and you also provide a physical postcard with its QR code for that review link. So there’s 5 different ways to do this. But that’s still not enough.

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People receive text, forget about it. They did not even see your QR code on the counter. That email you sent them, delete it. Team members, forget to mention that. The physical piece you gave them, threw it away.

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Well, what are some of the options you have? Well, you want to automate that process. That’s how you get more positive reviews. It’s very straightforward in a sense. You want to follow up, but not become an annoyance to them.

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Most people need a reminder. So your CRM should be able to handle basic follow-up. And when someone posts a review, Then you stop following them. They should automatically get out. This could be inside your CRM.

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When the customer service is all set, we let them know this customer is all set, the service is done, send review request. So in this case, they already had the text message, the all this email, but you have this automatic email that goes out, the email link I mentioned that would be coming from the CRM, let them know you would love to get a review from them. Now, your CRM should be able to track when that person submit a review for us. Until then, the sequence within the CRM automatic review request will continue to send that request every week or every 2 weeks or every month to say, hey, we would still love to have a review from you. We haven’t got one.

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You can set that up and you don’t want to keep it going forever. The longest I have seen a review reminder request goes out is up to 3 months. Sometimes people just forget, right? But what you want to do is make sure you’ve been consistent. So the first email would go out, the second email could go out in a week or two, and then you follow up based on that.

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And then when they give you a review, we remove them from that email sequence. Or when that time frame is over, the email automation stops going out to them as a reminder.

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That’s it. That’s how you set up and how you get more positive reviews for your business. Now How do you handle the negative reviews? Well, here’s how. So negative reviews are sometimes, it’s almost like a punch in the gut, right?

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Sometimes you know your team delivered, you did what was asked of you, you provide great service and you still get a negative review. What you do not want to do is ignore it. Always, always respond to a negative review. If you’re gonna ignore a review, it should not be a negative one. And when you respond, respond publicly and professionally.

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Don’t start a fight with the reviewer because Google doesn’t like that. Google actually wants you to respond but doesn’t want you to start a fight with that person, start talking about personal information that they shouldn’t do X, Y, and Z. Take it as professional as possible. So that way you get a mark, you have a say on that negative review because sometimes it’s not because you did something wrong, just that person had a bad day or that’s who they are. And many people can read between the lines.

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Right? So you want to make sure you respond publicly and professionally without going overboard. And try to respond within the 24-hour period. Don’t let more than 24 hours pass because you want to respond right away so that your response can have maximum effect based on the review they will have given you. And of course, within the review, acknowledge the concern without being defensive.

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You don’t have to be like, we never did this, we never did X, Y, and Z. Just acknowledge X, Y, and Z happened. Maybe you even apologize for it if needed, and then move on and say, here’s what you would like to do for them, or if they were willing to come back, you make this right or something like that. But Never go on, become very defensive without addressing their concern. Of course, you can always take the conversation offline to resolve it.

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Again, you could respond, make sure you respond publicly, but offer them to come to your shop, to your dealer, to the dock, and we will solve that problem. And a lot of it is just, hey, this is what happened, here’s how we solve it. ‘Come over, we take you up.’ And never, ever argue or make excuses publicly because when a potential buyer reads your comment, your reviews, it reflects on you as a business. And you do not want that to come negatively on top of that negative review. You want to show that you are a professional, you take care of your customers, this is a one-off kind of deal.

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One thing that you can do, and many businesses don’t know this, after you resolve an issue with a bad reviewer, he or she can go back and update their review on Google. Only them can do so. Remember, there is no such thing, if someone said they will take your money to fix Google review for you, that’s not true because Google actually doesn’t delete those reviews like 99% of the time. It’s very, very hard-pressed to get Google to delete the review. They can, but it’s not easy.

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So if someone said, well, there’s negative review, don’t worry about them, we’re gonna get them deleted. No, try to resolve the problem with the bad reviewer. Once you solve that problem that was nagging them, ask them if they could please update their review. And sometimes they may not want to, that’s fine, but at least do that. So there is Google where everybody goes now, and almost 80% of reviews all sit on Google at the moment.

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So, which is very, very powerful if you think about where Google is at from a search engine perspective, but there are a lot of things outside Google’s ecosystem. So there is Facebook recommendation, which is very, very important and matters a lot. So you would want to make sure you set up your Facebook page for your business and make sure to get noticed so that people can get you recommendation from there. If that matters to you a lot, you can actually set it up to get recommendation from your Facebook page. Industry-specific site, if applicable.

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So there are businesses that have very specific reviews. So many of the industries such as real estate and even cars, they have different directories and pages that you can get very, very specific reviews from. And you can get your customer to get you those reviews as some of those reviews as well. Some of them aggregate their reviews directly from Google, but some of them get the review directly from the customers. Those are usually more of a testimonial, but those are very powerful as well because those are signals outside your website, outside Google that also tells people that you exist, your business exists on a specific niche or industry.

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This is very important. And then of course there is Yelp. All of us, you guys know of Yelp. It’s not just for basic services, it’s for everybody, including marine businesses as well. It’s not as predominant in the marine space, depending on what services that you offer, but for the most part, you can use Yelp as well.

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Although most people go to Google nowadays, but Yelp is extremely popular and well optimized so that your reviews and Yelp can be showing on Google search results. And that’s how people end up on Yelp to review about you and then head to your site. So it’s crucial if you, depending on where you are, the industry and the location you are in, Yelp could be very important. So for example, if you are a boat rental business, then Yelp will be super crucial for you. Whereas in the order of priority, I would put Google, Yelp, and the rest of them.

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Whereas for a dealer, I would go Google first, industry-specific, and Yelp third. And then what you would want to do is also all those different positive reviews from all over the places, you can syndicate and publish them directly on your website. What that means is that Sometimes when you go to a website and you see they have 100, 200, 500 reviews on one page, the reason is because they pull all the positive reviews and they’re only showing positive reviews on their website. You can do that. There are filters you can apply.

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Say if a review is less than 5, don’t show it on my website, and then boom, you show those reviews on their website. You can actually aggregate all those different sources. So Facebook, industry-specific website reviewer, and Yelp, and all the places that you can get reviews from and then display them on your website. That’s it for behind Google. So you don’t need to always have your all your reviews from Google, although Google is extremely powerful and is important, is probably the most important one.

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I hope this podcast has been helpful. You get something out of it. What you need to do, your action plan now is to go ahead, look at and ready to use a simple review process. Put that in place for you, for your team, and make sure your team understand that. Make sure you answer all the unanswered reviews that you have on Google, Whether it’s positive, negative, we answer it, especially the negative one.

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And also train your team, make sure the team knows what they need. And last piece I want to mention is we have a system called NautiLead. It’s a lead management and reputation management that’s built for marine business specifically. So if you are interested, we will be more than happy to show you how you can automate your review process for your business. That’s it for this episode.

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Please don’t forget to subscribe and share it with anyone in the marine space that need to hear it. And we would love to hear from you, so drop us your questions or topics you would like us to cover in future episodes. And of course, if you need help implementing any of the tactics we talk about, head on to boatmarketingpros.com. We would love to help you grow. I’m Harry Casimir.

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Thanks for listening. Now let’s get out there and make some waves.