Web reviews enjoy a huge popularity today among masses and have a powerful impact on the decision-making process when one thinks to acquire a specific product or service. This trend is boosted by low trust in marketing campaigns that often say something and do another thing, while buyers can provide to each other authentic information based on real experience with honest images and videos about a delivered product or service.
Moreover, reviews and reviewers have turned this process into a branch of marketing industry, that follow different purposes like attracting traffic, promoting another similar product than the one that has already been reviewed or simply to make spoiler alerts of a new & of public interest product, or service that has not yet reached a specific market or market in general.
For more than 4 years Mobiteam has followed this topic with high interest and completed enough number of researches by gathering data and information from all markets, and now we can share why reviews count, but not always and anywhere:
Some reviews count more than others
It’s all about someone’s status, that usually provides credibility to other potential customers. In other words, e-commerce platforms, like AliExpress, Amazon, Facebook, Google have developed the user ranking system.
It works easy and is based on the theory “the more you buy – the higher the rank”. But this is just one side of the coin: even if this feature offers credibility to potential clients, it also convinces users to create at least the account with full information, so that the company can implement specific marketing strategies and target more accurately the users.
In the web industry, we have a number of companies that give others the opportunity to review web design, web development, media and marketing agencies, like Mobiteam. We talk here about Digital Agency Network, TechBehemoths.com or Clutch.co. As for reviews – they count the same, and all have equal statuses, which offer different web agencies the same chance to get a better ranking and let others decide if one review is more relevant than another.
It is important where you find the review
As mentioned earlier in the article, you can find a lot of places where companies can be found and reviewed, and the review process itself has been turned into a branch of the marketing industry. For sure a review on Google will have a wider audience than other review-based websites, but that may not be what you wish.
While Google is the almighty search engine, it may not capture the audience that you focus your services on, and thus, it doesn’t provide a company the much needed high-quality leads. Or, if it is to look from a different angle, you may not find the information you need about a company or so. For specific info, the websites that focus their activity on reviews are probably the best answer. Mobiteam researches had shown that in almost all fields there are ranking websites, articles, videos, and even books that list best companies in their field of activity, and give users the opportunity to rate and review the quality of products and services.
Time is Also Important
If you want to check an agency’s activity, then you may want to take a closer look at when the last review was published. Up to 5% of agencies that are still listed on Google and ranking websites are dumped agencies. These were either sold, fused or broke.
What’s interesting is that their position is not a bad one, and the reason for which are still there may be the traffic they still have. A top traffic bringer can be used for many purposes, out of which I will outline the biggest two:
- Redirects for other websites – it can be to their new website or “rented” to other companies
- Sale – the agency sold the domain, with all its traffic for really nice money
But, in case the agency is still alive and the review is older than 1 year or so, you may not want to take them into consideration as partners from various reasons: lack of projects, possible bad marketing team or even worse – poor executed projects. All these are logical deductions, and there may be more reasons behind this.
Impact of Web Reviews over ORM
ORM or Online Reputation Management is a hot topic, marketers fight each other to get their hands on the market. Reviews are just a part of ORM but score high enough to get the full attention including investments of companies to scare the competition or to simply bring them down.
This is much related to exaggerated positive or negative reviews for a business, but professionals use moderate with high credibility reviews in order to achieve their goals, so, for instance, if you want to review a business and have a successful negative impact on it, there has to be a well-modified fact check, on the strongest point the business counts on. In this case, if a business pays attention to reviews, it will handle negative feedback with the same moderate arguments and turn the tables around, this way or another the ultimate goal is to convince the audience and usually debates on quality product or services in reviews are more attractive than 100% happy customers. In other words, there is always something you have to question, in order to achieve popularity.
