This guide is intended for restaurants, retailers, and similar storefront businesses. It offers some step-by-step instructions for getting your landing page and review campaign up and running.
1) Find your major review site listings across the web.
Once you’ve created your account and logged into your dashboard, automatically search and load in links for your business’ existing listings across the most important major review sites by clicking the Connect a Location button in Dashboard > Funnel > Links > Review Profile.
These review site listings (on sites like Google and Facebook) are arguably the most important to your business’ visibility and reputation on the internet, and are almost always the most worthwhile place to collect reviews. Not only are these major sites the most visited by your potential customers, but they also affect your visibility and presentation in search engines.
2) Find your industry-specific review site listings across the web.
While major review sites are the most important for your business’ SEO and overall reputation, smaller industry-specific review sites are still valuable channels for gathering new customers. You may want to consider creating or seeking out existing listings on the following review sites (we integrate with all of the sites mentioned):
- Restaurants/Foodservice
- Opentable
- Zomato (formerly UrbanSpoon)
- Zagat
- Restaurant.com
- Menupages
- Auto Dealerships
- Auto Repair
- Bridal Retail
As always, if there is a review site for your industry that you’d like to see included, please feel free to get in touch with us.
3) Engage customers at the point of sale
We offer several tools to drive customers to your landing page, but investing some time into training your staff to ask customers for a review at the point of sale can pay big dividends in a storefront business environment. Here are a few ideal times in the customer journey to ask for a review:
- When dropping off the bill at the end of a meal
- When handing off goods purchased in a retail environment
- When sending off a client or patient at the end of an appointment
You may additionally want to consider adding a callout to review (and your landing page URL) to your existing printed business materials, e.g.:
- Receipts
- Business cards
- Appointment cards
- Client paperwork
- Banners for your front desk or POS station
If you keep an email list, you might also consider using our drip campaigns or your email software to send a review invitation to your customers via email.
4) Optional: monitor your reviews across sites and keep tabs on what people are saying about you
It’s important to take a proactive approach to managing your online reputation. Our optional Review Monitoring add-on allows you to keep an eye on what’s being said about your business across the internet. You’ll receive email alerts whenever you receive a new review on any third-party site listing you’ve loaded into your account, so that you can take quick action if needed.
5) Adjust your campaign as needed
Review acquisition is a long-term commitment, and one worth doing above-board and authentically. You may find that the most important review sites for your business change over time. We encourage you to make adjustments as you go. You can re-order, hide, show, edit, and delete your review site links at any time (all of these actions can be performed in Dashboard > Funnel > Links > Your Review Site Links.