Bringing in the Business: How Positive Reviews Can Help Your Real Estate Business
Like any other industry, innovative real estate marketing can generate leads and provide advantages over the competition. But building trust makes it easier to convert those leads into sales. Reviews are a good way to accomplish this; past customers praising your services are one of the best sales tools you can have. Here are some ways you can use to gain positive reviews and use them to your advantage.
Request Reviews
Set up a review form on your website. At the end of any transaction, sold or not, ask the client to submit a review. This should be done both verbally and printed on your sales materials and business cards. You can post the latest and most positive reviews as testimonials. Reviews bring both better search engine rankings and more conversions. As for the negative reviews, use them to learn from.
Make the Review Process Easy
Even happy clients aren’t going to go to great lengths to write out glowing reviews for you. Make your review page easy to find with prominent buttons, menu items, text links, and so forth. Create a simple form that just asks for a few basic pieces of information and a single textbox for customer reviews/comments. You could also include a few multiple-choice options for quick ratings. Now you include a link to your review page in outgoing emails and printed materials.
Join Review Sites
You should sign up with websites like Yelp, Facebook, and Bing to set up a business profile that accepts user reviews. It only takes a few minutes, but the payoffs can be big. These are sites frequented by millions of users looking for the right company to do business with, and a string of positive feedback will go a long way toward strengthening your reputation. All you have to do is check back periodically to see how you’re doing.
Manage Negative Reviews
If you do get a bad review, the first step is taking a deep breath. Firing back angry comments will only make things worse. Instead, make a brief apology and let the reviewer know that you’ll look into the matter. If possible, you can follow up and try to set things right when the client feels they were wronged. A show of concern helps to neutralize the negative impact and shows others you’re willing to take responsibility. There are also online PR services that can help manage reputations, should you feel the need for one.
Set up Social Pages
It’s almost essential to have a presence on the major social networks. There are millions of potential followers to take advantage of in referring traffic. These sites will have different policies, and some of them are quite strict when it comes to reviews. Google+, for instance, warns that they will delete reviews and testimonials that are not original, first-person statements.
Show It On Pinterest
You’ll find Pinterest to be one of the better social options for real estate marketing. Good photos do half the selling for you. You can create different boards for different property types/communities. On each, you can invite comments/reviews but also have the option of attaching Rich Pins to posts, which contain extra information. There are five types of Rich Pin: recipe, movie, place, product, and article. When you Pin photos of a new property, you include an Article Pin giving more details and one of your positive reviews. For ideas, you can look at Success Path reviews on Pinterest to see how you can help your real estate business.
Always make sure to include links to your social sites on the review page of your website. Building a greater social following will keep generating positive reviews you can use in your content marketing to create greater trust with prospective buyers.
