Smarter Marketing for Remodeling Firms - Continuum Marketing Group LLC

Tag: consumer rating

What to Do about a Bad Online Consumer Rating

August 12, 2011
by David Alpert

Remodeler Headache #52
Unless your company is near-perfect and lucky, one day you will have a dissatisfied client who will let the world know of their dissatisfaction with your remodeling company online via a bad or very poor rating. While in some ways this is worse than having someone bad mouth your company to their friends and coworkers, it is better than that in several respects:

1.   Once you know the homeowner is dissatisfied, you have the opportunity to contact them and see if there is something you can do to improve their satisfaction. Perhaps you didn’t even know they were unhappy and can easily remedy the problem. Once you have fixed the problem, you can ask them if they would consider adjusting their rating.

2.  Several good online consumer ratings will generally neutralize one bad online rating. Most people who see online ratings expect to see, even for the best companies, a small percentage of bad online ratings. In fact if you have only good ratings it can make your ratings look like they have been artificially influenced. So if you are lucky enough to have 10 online ratings with four and five stars, and one rating with one star or two stars, it’s not a big deal.

People will just assume that the bad review came from a malcontent. However, they may read the reason why the person was unhappy in the review and be concerned about that reason. In that case, you just want to make sure that you have a good explanation ready for why the problem occurred and how you tried to resolve the matter should any future prospect inquire.

If you have any questions about this post or other remodeler or contractor marketing questions, please contact us.

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: Online Marketing, Remodeler and Remodeling Contractor Marketing, Remodeling Contractor Marketing Strategies and Tactics
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Online Consumer Ratings Update

July 1, 2011
by David Alpert

Up until recently, Google Places would bring in consumer ratings from other search engines. So if someone looked you up and saw you had five reviews on Google Places, it could be that two of them came from a website like Yelp. This made it less important that homeowners provide you with good reviews on any particular consumer ratings website.

Now it is important for you to have a strategy for online consumer ratings relative to where people post their rating.
Since consumer ratings, both quantity and quality, help determine your ranking on rating websites such as Google Places, you may want to direct your satisfied clients to provide you a review on Google Places. Or, you may wish not to recommend where people review you, unless they have no idea where to provide a consumer rating. The theory behind not directing people to a specific ratings site is that your clients will go to the sites where they would normally go to seek other consumer ratings for other businesses. In some parts of the country, Google Places might be the dominant ratings destination, whereas in others it might be Yelp or Angie’s List or some other rating site.

Our suggestion is to simply ask people where they would likely rate you, and if they do not know, then you can suggest a source to them. Once you know you have good ratings at a particular site, you can suggest on your remodeling company website that people go to that source to find reviews about you.

If you have any questions about this post or other remodeler or contractor marketing questions contact us.

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: Online Marketing, Remodeler and Remodeling Contractor Marketing, Remodeling Contractor Marketing Strategies and Tactics
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Are Consumer Ratings Important?

June 2, 2011
by David Alpert

Does a bear…? You Bet! And, consumer ratings are extremely important in today’s remodeler marketing environment because homeowners who research remodelers on the web look for consumer ratings that other homeowners have given a remodeler they are considering. In today’s market, a four or five star consumer rating carries the same kind of weight as a good reference or referral. Consumer ratings are your online reputation.

So where are homeowners rating remodelers? Angie’s List, Google Places, Yelp, and a whole lot of other online local business directory and search engine places. If a homeowner is looking up a remodeler, let’s say on Google, and they find seven remodelers, three of which have four and five star ratings, but your listing has no consumer ratings, it might be that the homeowner will consider calling the other remodelers, or at least go to their websites first.

It is accepted wisdom that the people most likely to rate a business online are those who are happiest or the most dissatisfied. An unhappy experience with your firm can lead to a bad online review. While only a percentage of people who are unhappy will write an online review, you can expect it to be a poor one. I expect having a poor experience with a remodeler is more likely to result in a bad rating than a good or satisfactory experience will result in a positive review. That is unless you encourage happy customers to write positive reviews about their experience with you on specific sites where consumers rate businesses.

For the record, it is illegal to incentivize a homeowner to write a review about you unless they disclose that the review was a compensated review. However, if you have a satisfied homeowner as a client, you can explain to them how important reviews are to your business and suggest a few places they may share their positive experience with others. While not a lawyer, I am not aware of any federal regulation that would make it illegal or unethical to provide a homeowner who gave you a positive review with a token gift of your appreciation after they placed the review, as long as they didn’t know they would get anything before they provided the review. In short, there can be no quid pro quo.

If you have any questions about this post or other remodeler or contractor marketing questions, please contact us.

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: Remodeler and Remodeling Contractor Marketing, Remodeling Contractor Marketing Strategies and Tactics
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