Episode Summary
Customer reviews are a great way to get valuable customer insights. And they are the best way to improve your product offering.
Customer reviews are also a powerful form of social proof that can help you strengthen your brand image and better position yourself in the market.
In this episode of the Content Logistics podcast, our host Camille Trent welcomes Nick Bennett and Jay Desai. Nick is the director of evangelism and customer marketing at Alyce, and Jay is the head of marketing at Captivate Talent. They talk about leveraging customer reviews as social proof, why you should systemize your review processes, and why it’s important to have your own reviews page.
Guest Profile
- Name: Nick Bennett and Jay Desai
- What they do: Nick is the director of evangelism and customer marketing at Alyce, and Jay is the head of marketing at Captivate Talent.
- Company: Alyce
- Company: Captivate Talent
- Noteworthy: Nick is the go-to guy for field marketing, brand building, and B2B SaaS marketing. Jay is passionate about helping people get jobs at high-growth SaaS companies in sales, marketing, and customer success.
Key Insights
- Customer reviews can serve as great social proof. There are many benefits of generating customer reviews for your business. But one of the many perks is that they help you drive social proof for your brand. Jay says, "When you're having to be really scrappy and figure out a way to drive traffic, drive social proof, and all of those things, reviews are really obvious to do. You have customers using your product, and so it's great to amplify their voice. I go out, and I'm talking with my friends, my colleagues, like, 'Hey, are you using this product? What products are you using?' And things like that. And social proof speaks a lot more than if you just try and plug your own product; otherwise, it feels like that grimy salesperson who's just talking about themselves the whole time or that person you talk to at a bar who's just talking about themselves the whole time."
- There are many ways to repurpose customer reviews. If you have detailed and valuable reviews, you should repurpose them into more content. Jay explains, "Marketing's imperfect at times, but in an ideal world, you should be reusing your reviews everywhere. You can add them on the same page where you have your demo form or pricing form or sign up form; you can share them out on social. If you're doing these reviews, that’s great. I think G2 lets you capture video reviews as well." Nick adds, "I think ads are definitely a big piece. We run a lot of paid ads. And so, we need to have a huge chunk of them, and we mix up our customer stories with a lot of the reviews that we're getting. Those have been really successful."
- It's important to have your own reviews page. Even though platforms like Trustpilot and G2 can be of great help when you start your business, you should aim to have your own reviews page. Jay says, "There are a lot of great review sites out there, and I think it's great to get reviews on there, but I think it's also really great to own some of that review traffic. So one thing that we have on our website is a reviews page. And so, most of the time, you think, ‘I'm going to go to G2 or Capterra or Trustpilot or something like that.’ I think it's important to also have your own reviews page because you get to control what that page looks like and what kind of information you want to provide and things like that."
Episode Highlights
How to Leverage G2 Reviews
Nick says, “We’ve seen lots of success. We see a lot of inbounds that come from G2 that are mentioning us. Especially [when we ask], ‘How did you hear about us?’ when people submit demo forms, it’s like, ‘G2, saw you on G2 crowd,’ things like that, and it was worth it. We’re actually in the process of integrating Chili Piper, and we plan to take advantage of leveraging Chili Piper with that G2 piece that they announced a couple of weeks ago.”
First Get Reviews From Your Best Customers
Jay says, “At the beginning, you probably want to get reviews from your best customers. And so, if you have those relationships in place, find someone that’s talking to those customers and can probably ask them for that stuff.”
Systemize Your Customer Review Processes
Jay says, “G2 is a really great place to capture some of those reviews, but you can also keep capturing them in other places. You can capture them on your website and things like that. So yeah, when I think about systemizing, I think about having really good data, having good templates, and then, making sure that you’re owning that channel.”
