Reviews can make (or break) a business and it's true for the B2B industry too!
Most of us wouldn’t dream of booking a hotel without first consulting TripAdvisor. Yet when it comes to B2B businesses, there’s still a perception that a well designed website with a few good customer testimonials, is all you really need. Wrong. Attitudes in our personal lives are filtering into our professional days, and online reviews about B2B businesses have never been more important, especially if you are selling commoditized services.
Here are five reasons why reviews matter for B2B businesses too.
1. Personal and Professional lives are colliding
The B2B buying cycle is becoming longer and more complex and business buyers are placing an increasing importance upon independent research together with peer recommendations and reviews. In essence, they are applying their personal purchasing habits to their professional lives. While this can be discouraging for marketers who are accustomed to having more control over the buying cycle, there are also significant opportunities for vendors who are ready to embrace these trends.
In part, the trend is due to millennials who have grown up with reviews and ratings in their personal lives and are now in decision-making roles where there’s a natural tendency for them to make purchasing decisions just like they do in their personal lives. Millennials like fast, minimal human contact, purchasing experiences. In fact, 57% of business purchases now occur with no vendor contact and 85% of buyers read reviews before making a decision. In short, reviews have become an essential resource for B2B businesses to share with prospective customers.
2. Reviews matter
According to Demand Gen’s 2016 B2B buying report, reviews continue to gain influence in the B2B realm. When evaluating a product or service, 55% of B2B buyers said reviews were a very important point of consideration; and as far as external sources of validation were concerned, reviews were listed above case studies and analyst rankings, which is where B2B companies have traditionally focused their investment.
3. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search engines love reviews. This is because of their perceived authenticity and the way they are trusted by people searching. Google goes a step further and automatically adds Google stars to review-based search results, which is great for making them stand out. Better still, according to research by Google, people are not only more likely to click on search results with stars, but those that do click, are three times more likely to make a purchase.
4. Branding
In the past, you could create a brand by spending (a lot of) money creating an image of yourself that reflected the way you wanted to be perceived. But reviews and social media have changed that. Today, a brand is determined far more by the way you are seen to interact with your customers. Successful companies understand this and support environments where their customers can share their experiences and be heard by everyone.
As Joel Harrison, editor-in-chief of B2B Marketing puts it: “When it comes to business decisions, B2B buyers are increasingly cynical about claims made by brands on their own websites, and are increasing their reliance on third party sources to ascertain real-life experiences. With expectations of customer experience increasingly defined by Amazon, online reviews from reliable sources are fast becoming essential for most progressive businesses.”
5. Negative feedback
Since the purpose of showing off feedback is to provide reassurance to potential customers, you might think that publishing negative feedback would be counter-productive. But that is not the case. People understand that nobody’s perfect and online reviews are a great way to show you know how to put things right when you need to. In fact, showing how you responded in those situations can actually leave your customers with a better perception of you, than if the problem had never occurred in the first place.
Conclusion
Your B2B target customers are, first and foremost, people. And, if you know your customers generally say positive things about you, then you should make the most of this valuable asset. Handled correctly, reviews can be an extremely powerful marketing tool, helping you understand what’s going well and what’s not, and producing measurable business benefits.
Fundamentally, whether they are personal recommendations or online reviews, opinions help build trust. And trust is just as important for B2B as it is for B2C businesses.
Sources
- The 2016 B2B Buyer’s Survey Report by Demand Gen
- B2B’s Digital Revolution by Google
- Local Consumer Survey by Bright Local
