To overcome this, brands have been using social media to pull consumers toward their products. But when it comes to trust, many people prefer to turn to their friends rather than communicate with brands.

This presents a challenge for brands because they do not control the sentiment being expressed online which will then be used by consumers to make purchasing decisions.

When consumers give their opinion on a brand or past purchasing decision by leaving a review, we see a demonstration of the power of the crowd. Enabled by technology and information overload, consumers can decide how engaged they want to be across the different points on their path to purchase.

This has changed the traditional customer journey and helped to create a cycle where one consumer’s experience feeds into another consumer’s decision process for whether to buy a product or a service. Review marketing then becomes quite important to a brand.

Quantity of online reviews is another important aspect of review marketing. Most consumers need to read on average four reviews, but this number can extend to 20 depending on the customer type (demographics etc).

As well as quantity, the quality of the feedback is a major element to review marketing.  Some consumers will simply write “Great!” or write nothing at all and simply leave a star rating.  That is a waste because a positive review has no keywords and a negative review doesn’t explain to other customers why your brand was rated so badly.

The way to gain high-quality reviews is simply to increase the quantity (numbers will win out).

The initial enquiry stage of the customer life cycle is now dependent on how brands manage online sentiment in order to progress to become a lead and ultimately a customer (review marketing).

This is the power of the online review and why every brand needs a review strategy. Our Direct Response team manage business directory advertising (think Yelp) which is heavily review focused.  They are specialists in review marketing. It is no longer acceptable to only push brand messaging to consumers via above-the-line advertising. The age of the 5 gold stars review is here.

Follow the YouCom Media news posts to see the next developments.

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Data source:

Deloitte Consumer Review

Required reference:

YouCom Media News, Dec 2018, London, ‘Review Marketing.’

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Where will consumers be most receptive to advertising?

The face of local search engines has changed a lot over the last 18 years. The above infographic shows interesting patterns of websites that have come and gone but also patterns of the future. Twitter is now in the top ten and widely expected to supersede Facebook very soon. Ask Jeeves which became Ask.com is still in the top twenty and likely to future partner with the larger directory networks.

Brands must reach out to consumers wherever it is that consumers are now using. We publicised this changing face of local search article on our Twitter feed. Would we have done so a few years ago?

Certainly we see the struggle between Yahoo and Google playing out over the last dozen years. General consensus is that Google is all supreme and has won that battle, but 2013 was an odd year seeing many developments at Yahoo and popularity regained.

Many sites have come and gone, many we no longer remember, but the nature of the worldwide web is one of ever changing faces and we need only be concerned about where we should have presence now (and in the future).

In 2014, more consumers engaged with brands on social media than ever before and our own social media serves as an example with many re-tweets and favourites for posts.

In 2015, B2C advertisers should be looking to create a managed YouTube page whose videos can be used to drive calls and leads.

B2C advertisers should ensure they have a Facebook page because that is still the second most used platform in our infographic, but it is widely anticipated that Facebook’s dominance will decline and Twitter become more relevant to consumers.

Therefore B2C advertisers would do well to create Twitter feeds where they can promote their messages, create engagement with their consumers and manage brand sentiment. Generally the more the merrier, so multi-location brands ought to consider campaigns of multiple Twitter and Facebook pages.

B2B advertisers are seeing a trend towards LinkedIn and Slideshare for social media channels showing rapid growth.

To reference data from this article, please use: ‘YouCom Media Whitepaper, Jan 2015, London, The changing face of local search worldwide since 1996’

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