Business Growth Tips for 2022: How Customers Can Help You Succeed

If you're looking for business growth tips for 2022, you need to know that, now more than ever, the customer is the most crucial part of your business growth plan.

In this brave new era of consumer freedom, previous customer-behaviour benchmarks, such as price or location, have become less important. Today, with so many options at their fingertips, customers are focused on finding businesses that their peers trust. After all, consumers trust customer reviews up to 12 times more than manufacturer reviews!

We share a couple of business growth tips on using customers and their reviews to help you succeed in 2022.

How customers can help you grow in 2022

1. Set the agenda

Paying due attention to what your review community is saying allows you to not only join the conversation but set the public narrative around your brand. Every brand has a 'story' – a perception held by current and potential customers. Whether that perception is accurate or not is almost irrelevant, as up to 97% of online consumers will research online reviews before visiting your site to complete a purchase.

Allow your customers to help you succeed. Change your brand's perception by setting yourself up to respond to complaints, questions and compliments timeously and accurately.

2. Product and service analysis

You may have invested heavily in product research and innovation. You may even have correctly identified that customer satisfaction should be driving this innovation. The key step you may be missing though, is integrating direct customer feedback into your product-innovation analysis.

After all, how can you work towards customer satisfaction, if you don’t have direct customer opinions to build on? Anyone who has spent significant time as a business owner or manager will attest to the fact that it is impossible to anticipate all of your customer base's needs, wants and complaints.

Plug directly into your customer base's opinions and experiences and allow your customers to help you succeed. Leverage your review community’s insights by upping your review analysis game to find out exactly what your customers want, in real-time, directly from the horse's mouth.

3. It’s all about ‘trust’

Consumer-created reviews are so effective in driving behaviour because they are trusted. Generally, customers who write reviews stem from honesty, reacting organically to their consumer experiences. 

To emphasise the point: this may seem counter-intuitive, but businesses who share or publicise both their positive and negative reviews are trusted even more, as consumers feel these businesses are fair and honest with how they represent themselves and their products.

Previously, the main driver of business 'trust' was proximity. According to Forbes, today 'trust' is built by offering secure shopping experiences, providing quality products and of course, sharing customer-written reviews that provide social proof from other satisfied customers.

4. Improve your brand’s search ranking

Search Engine Journal's review of ten thousand local businesses found that reviews are potentially the most crucial search-ranking influencer for local businesses, even if said businesses have low-quality link profiles. 

While online rankings are impacted and driven by a myriad of interconnected factors, consumer reviews send a message to search engines that your brand or site is trustworthy, and therefore deserving of a higher ranking. 

Allow your customers to help you succeed by leveraging your review community. This allows you to compete at scale with your larger competitors, as your brand's consumers and their reviews are what search engines rank for instead of your brands' size or prior success.

5. Let your customers do the work

As stated, the vast majority of your potential customers are reading reviews and consumer insights about your brand or industry. Provide them with the service they deserve and expect, as well as easy and direct access to your professionally managed review platform, then sit back and watch them do your marketing for you!

Remember that each interaction with a positive or negative review is an opportunity to create an evergreen, ever-public marketing connection that potential customers can track and refer to when making purchasing decisions.

Up to 88% of your customers are willing to review your business if the conditions and approach are right. Partner with a trusted, experienced review-management platform today to find out exactly how to create, nurture and leverage your very own customer-review community. 

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