Does Your Home Services Business Have Strong 5-Star Reviews? - Javier Lozano, Jr.

Business Reviews is 1 of the 4 critical Marketing Foundations your business needs to have established before jumping into Google Ads, Facebook Ads and more.

If your home services business is not getting regular 4 and 5 star business reviews on Google, Facebook, Yelp, Angie's List and more -- then you could be leaving money on the table.

85% of consumers take online reviews as a personal recommendations from a friend or family member.  That means that nearly 9 of 10 buyers are listening to complete strangers to influence their buying decisions.

If you operate an HVAC, pool building, handyman or other type of consumer services company -- getting regular and consistent online reviews can create more customer activity while increasing your bottom line.

In this episode, Javier shares some fundamental strategies to help increase your online reviews as well as some automated strategies that put this piece into auto pilot.

To learn more about The Trust Tipping Point Marketing Podcast, please visit us at:

www.TheTrustTippingPoint.com

Transcript

Intro: 0:01

Marketing in the home services industry has changed so much over the past few decades. Now an even more rapid pace these last few years almost to a point, it's impossible to keep up with what's trending. Have you ever felt like marketing in today's economy is like flushing money down the toilet. That's where we come in and help honest Home Services companies just like yours, learn and understand some of the most effective marketing strategies today, strategies used by some of the top home service companies around the world. My name is Javier Lozano Jr. and welcome to the trust tippingpoint Marketing Podcast.

Javier Lozano, Jr.: 0:36

What's up, guys, welcome to another episode of the trust tippingpoint Marketing Podcast. As you probably heard, I'm your host, here. And we're gonna continue talking about trust, we're gonna continue talking about this whole trust tippingpoint journey. Just previously, if you just been listening, we'd interviewed Lily, our CEO anchor wave. And we talked about how the name kind of came about this whole trust tipping point thing. She went over some really crazy stuff, but this whole mind stuff. Okay, and gave us a bunch of great tips on how to understand a buyer. All right. And then one of the other episodes I just did was where we discuss about your website, and why and how should your website look like what you need to have in your website to get more leads to get more business. Okay, that make your business stand out from everybody else. And then what I'll be covering today is reputation management. What is that? rep, it's a big, it's a I know I said this before, don't use technobabble but, you know, get with me here. reputation management basically means reviews, it's just a professional way of saying reviews. Okay. And so I won't go into detail about, you know, why is it called that? Whatever. But anyways, reputation management, your reviews, your business reviews, you know, what is it? Basically it's, it's just how consumers are reviewing your business. And we all if you're in the home service space, you already get reviews, you're getting them a lot, too. Okay? And if you're if you're getting these reviews, then you need to take action with it, you need to actually take the feedback, don't argue, don't be like, Oh, that was a bad customer. I don't like you don't act like that. Right. Don't act like you're for act like you're an adult, right? Because Trust me, I want to argue with some people do that give us not our company, they've given me bad reviews when I had my own business, but I didn't. Alright, so I understand that, but reputation management is managing how your reviews are getting done. Okay. And there should be different ways in how to do this. And this is something that this is something that's amazing, it, if you invest money in and managing your reviews correctly, you will be making hand over fist more money off of those reviews. Okay, so let me get a pull up this the slide here as I'm doing it, but let me explain more about this whole reputation management stuff. Okay. Let me find it. Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Sorry, guys, I should have had this already in front of me. But these stats are staggering, okay, about how people look at reviews, and why people look at reviews, and the importance of all that. So, you know, what I want to kind of do is explain to everybody that your reviews, people are going to be buying more often just because of your review. Okay, they're going to be more inclined to spending more money with you based off of your reviews. And trust me when I say this, okay, your reviews are going to essentially make or break your business. So when you understand that, there we go, you pull it up, try and pull up the slide, sorry, when you understand that your reviews are gonna make or break your business, it's gonna basically make you start thinking differently and start taking action differently. And so we have systems with an anchor wave that helps a lot of businesses like yours, like home service businesses, to improve their review process. Okay, so we're they're getting a lot of reviews because people are dropping reviews everywhere. They're dropping them on, on obviously on Google and on Facebook, on Yelp, on homeadvisor, on Angie's List, okay, they're they're putting them all and all these different places and and that's good. You want people to put reviews and all these places. Here's the slide. But these reviews, you don't understand the weight that the Carry. And so this was this was taken from a company called bright local calm, bright local is a SEO tool that a lot of marketing agencies use to help improve a person's brand and and help them improve their marketing. Okay, so listen to the stat 93% read online reviews about local businesses. Alright, 93% of people read reviews online about local businesses 93%. That's a lot. Okay. So people are looking at your reviews before they call you. So if you have poor reviews, guess what? They're not gonna probably call you. All right. Even if you're like, well, they were just bad reviews from someone that had a bad experience doesn't matter. This is not gonna call you. Okay. 97% of people search for local businesses online. 97%. Okay. Like, this is understand this, that 10 or 15 years ago, it wasn't that way. 10 or 15 years ago, it was, hey, john, who do you know that does landscaping? Hey, jack, who do you know that? Who did your h fac? Are you happy with that? Now does that saying that people don't do that anymore? No, I'm not saying that. But the search starts online and 97% of the people that go there first 85% of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation 85%, nearly 90% of people trust online reviews as though it was a personal recommendation. That's huge. Okay. And finally, 77% of consumers think that reviews older than three months aren't relevant. And I am guilty of that. Because I'll look at reviews. I'm like, oh, wow, 4.8, let's look at the most recent. And if it hasn't been in review for like three years, then I don't believe anything else. Because I'm like, whatever they've been doing for the past three years. Does that make sense? So what I'm saying here is, is that people are using the internet to find home service businesses, and they're allowing it to make their primary decision. They're getting all this data, they're capturing all this information. Okay? They're acting like little, little attorneys, little lawyers. All right, and then they're taking that information. And then they're going to be like, I'm not gonna call them because of their online reviews. Because of this. Because of that. Because of this, their website doesn't look good. They have stock photos in there. Their reviews are horrible, like, you see what's going on? Like, they're checking off things like nope, nope, nope. And then they move on to the next company. And that's exactly how people are buying today. Okay. And so, take your reviews very seriously, very, very seriously. All right, don't just sit there and act like well, they're not that big of a deal. That person was grumpy, it was a bad day, bad day or not, man, it still lives there. And this posted on the internet, it's there forever. So understand that that reputation management is your reviews on managing and all the social platforms that accept reviews of businesses. So that includes, as I mentioned, like, you know, Facebook and Google, Yelp, foursquare city search, Yellow Pages, Angie's List homeadvisor. Alright, here's a pro tip. If you're getting good reviews from your, from your, for your business, from your past employees, or the employees, from your past customers, or even current customers, if you're getting good or great reviews, take screenshots of them, screenshot those reviews, use them as marketing material. Okay? I'm serious, take screenshots of them. And then use them as marketing material. You can put them on your website, you can take their quotes, put them on the websites, you can send them to prospects be like, hey, here are 10 reviews from people that gave us on these three different websites on Facebook, Google and Yelp. Check them out, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Why? Because if you do that you're doing the legwork for your future customer. Okay, and I keep saying future customer, because isn't what is the goal, man, that's the goal is to get a future customer out of this. All right. So the reason that you want to make sure that you're also taking these screenshots is that you can use them on almost anything. If you're running, say, like Google ads, or I'm sorry, if you're on like I say, like Facebook ads, you can use those online reviews, and put them in the comments of the ad that you have. It's a great way of promoting your brand and expanding the trust. There's like so much stuff that you can do. Okay, so why is this important? I got a post right. It says why is it important to have a positive and current review? So the importance of having positive and current reviews is that a I've already told you about the positive the current one makes a huge difference because what that means is that let's say that you had a bunch of people that gave you a bunch of reviews and a certain time frame, that tells me that you ran some sort of promotion. And you basically give out some sort of $10 gift card to everyone that gave you a positive review. And then no more reviews after that. That's what it tells me. All right, that's the business person speaking to me. And then that's also the person that gets those kinds of emails as well to, hey, give us a positive review. And we'll send you a $10 gift card. And just, you know, notice, understand this. Google does not like when people do that. Okay, so Google, if they find out that you are paying for your five star reviews, they will and they find out they will, you will be punished for it. Okay, so just fair warning, I suggest not doing that. And plus, let's be honest here, man, it's not authentic, you want an authentic review? And so you're going to ask yourself, well, Javier, how do I get authentic reviews, there are different ways and how to do this, there's systems behind this. One of them is what we do at anchor wave, we have a product called review leads, okay. And the reason we call it review leads is because you'll get reviews and you get leads out of it. Okay. And so it's amazing. And understand that there is a system behind this whole thing. All right. So the best way to kind of have this thing work is if you're going to use a system, like what we have anchor wave, where you're getting these reviews, the way it works is that we put this, this piece, like this tag is the snippet of code on your emails, okay. And then in the bottom of the of the, like, after the signature, it says, How did we do, and then it has like a green thumbs up or a red thumbs down, okay. And then someone looks at that, like, one, they're awesome, they responded quickly, they give me great service, whatever, whatever, they click on the green. And then what that does is that you sit up on the back and you say, hey, anchor wave, I want my reviews to go to Google only. And we're like, Alright, cool, no worries. So then when they click on my green button, it then redirects them to Google to write a review, on their experience. Okay, and so it basically is like, and that green button says, like, you know, how do we do leave us so you know, leave us your feedback, whatever. And, and then when they do that, it has everything ready for them to go, instead of them having to like find your business. And then like, say, like, you ask them to leave a positive review, or like, instead of them doing all that stuff, it just prompts them to do it. And that goes on, and every single email, so every email that you correspond with them, it does that. And so go hit green, because it's a thumbs up. And they'll go to say, Google, if you want it there, or to Yelp or to, you know, Facebook, whatever, okay, and I'll type in their quick little review. And then they'll submit, and then boom, done. Now you're asking yourself, what if they hit the red one? This is what's really cool about this product. websites are dead, but a marketing hub is what will replace your currently outdated and underperforming websites. Ask yourself this question. Does my website have the five pillars of marketing? If you're not familiar with that term, let me explain. The five pillars of marketing are one, brain identity and movement to persona based conversion cost, three, new opportunity strategy for strategic calls to action and five supporting evidence. Each pillar is a foundational strategy to get more customer activity, which is what we all want as a business. So your current website is missing at least one of these pillars, which is making your business lose prospects, resulting in lost revenue. Ask yourself this, what's a customer worth? Okay, so your website should be like your top performing salesperson. If it's not, then you need a marketing hub to learn more about a marketing hub schedule a free playbook with our team at anchor wave.com/playbook. And this is something this is why you want to have a reputation management system. Okay? Because it's automated. Alright, it's easy, if hit the red button, and then it pops up a window. And it gives them an opportunity to essentially express your displeasure this fattest, this satisfaction, dissatisfaction that came and say that word, express their dissatisfaction of their experience with your company, and you're like, what does it post onto Google? It doesn't actually. And you're thinking, well, well, that's great. But isn't that wrong? No. Sometimes some people just want to just be heard. They leave a bad review, just to be heard. That's it. Like, have you ever noticed that like, you have hundreds of hundreds of happy customers, but they never leave a positive review. And then you have one, you know, like one person that's just like, super upset, okay? And they just leave a bad review and that and like that person, like, like trend is just they just leave battery is based on their bad expense, whatever things might be great, we see that but what we've experienced is that whenever you filter, and you give people the opportunity of expressing their dissatisfaction, then that that dissatisfied, they type, whatever they're not happy about, it gets sent to back to your team. And so maybe like the owner can address it, and they, they can call up, you know that this satisfied customer and say, Hey, I got your review. I really appreciate you sharing that with me. I'm really sorry, you experienced that? What can I do to make you feel better and gain your trust? Again? What would do you see what's happening here? So now you're having a chance to fix a wrong and make it right. It's amazing. And so that's kind of why you want to have a reputation management system that does this for you. Automated, okay, is you don't even have to ask people to review you. It just does it. Okay. It's like when you send an invoice to someone in the emails, you know, there's the invoice and hey, john, thanks for doing business with us, we really appreciate you, kid you know, and blah, blah, blah. And then on the bottom of that, email them a signature is gonna be like big green, big green button, thumbs up, positive review, boom, it's not not everyone's gonna fill it out. But if you're invoicing people on a regular basis, if you're emailing people on a regular basis, they're going to see it. And it's amazing. And that's why you want this kind of stuff. Because then now you're getting positive reviews, put onto your brand onto Google onto Facebook, onto on to Angie's List and homeadvisor onto all those, you know, those sites, and you pick whatever ones you want to be on, if homeadvisor is more valuable to you, then you can pick to have them put on there, if Google's more valuable to you, and you can pick to have them put on there. Okay. So where I'm getting to, though, guys, is that managing your reputation is going to add 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of dollars to your business, I promise you that is especially in this space, especially in this space. Okay, so invest in it. And if you're gonna ask yourself, or if you're asked me, have you How much does this whole reputation management thing cost? If I use it through you guys, it's actually really cheap, okay? It's, it's really cheap. Alright, so I won't go into pricing. Because to be quite honest, I even know what we charge for it. Because I do the marketing in our company. I don't do the sales, but it's cheap, okay, because I know that it's like, we have like a value ladder. And it's our lowest priced product that we sell. Okay. And so that's kind of how we start a lot of companies, we start them there. And then as they gain more trust with us, that man, you know, anchor you guys doing amazing stuff. I love what you're doing with this whole review leads, what else can you do for me now, and then we take them to the next thing. And we think the next thing, the next thing, that's exactly how you should be selling your people. Anyways, guys, you should have a base, you know, bottom, that gets everyone in the door. Yeah, this is fine. This is great. I'll pay for this. Like, if you're an HR company, you should have like maybe like, you know, two times a year kind of package where we come clean out your condenser coils are something okay? And it's like 200 bucks a year. I don't know, I'm just making the number up, because it can't take you that long to clean out condenser coils. All right, it's like literally take a hose, spray it out, whatever, right? And then guess what they're gonna call whenever something breaks you, okay, promote that sell that. Like, that's, that's a subscription package sell that. Okay. And that's what we do with our reputation management packages. And so the value behind that is that people are gonna continue to see these four and five star reviews about your business. your brand's gonna start growing, you can start taking, you know, screenshots of all these reviews, and people can start you know, seeing you know what you're doing and you can use as part of your marketing material. And so, these reviews are going to be pushing buyers are gonna be pushing your prospects into becoming future buyers, they will buy from you because they believe in what you're doing. And so don't discount that. So another pro tip on this is all reviews that you get, you should reply back to them every single one reply back to every single review that you get, whether it's a poor review, or positive review doesn't matter. Okay, we're doing that at anchor wave, we reply back to our reviews. And we you know, we like you know, hey jack, thanks for the great review. We love working with you. Simple and if you're thinking that's a lot of work here, it is a lot of work. Okay, cuz especially if you get if you're getting like a ton of reviews, I think Aykroyd has got like, I don't know how many we have a ton. But Google says hey, that's awesome. They appreciate that. You take the time to do that. And they it shows up in your search results. The other part of review Especially on Google, that if you have a lot of good reviews, and they're positive, you start showing up higher in the search results, and then you'll eventually start showing up into the three pack. If everything else on your Google My Business stuff is set up correctly, and all that stuff, right. And the reason this is imperative now understand, is that Google wants to have the best company is essentially taken up those top three spots organically on that map section, they want the best companies up there, they don't want just seeing, okay, we'll just put them up, they're not the best brands, because if people don't trust Google, to give them the best product or service that they're looking for on something, they're gonna go to a different search engine. So their search experience is very important to them. So that's why it's really, you got to understand that these reviews are huge, it can literally cost your business several 1000s of dollars, if not hundreds of 1000s of dollars, or can make your business several hundreds of 1000s of dollars. Okay, and some people don't, don't believe it, but the reviews are going to make your business completely different. And so when you're doing that, you're you're taking action, you're getting people to basically review you without you having to have a sign in the front door or asking them after the job's done, like, Hey, can you give us a review, please? Like it's just done. Alright. And then if it's a bad experience, you can address it, mitigate the situation, talk to the technician to the person that was you know, that that handled it wrongly, okay? And be like, Hey, we can't do this, alright, that sort of stuff. All right, you can then from there, get the reviews where you want them. And it's more valuable to you on certain specific sites that are review sites. And then you can start going from there, you can start, you know, answering these reviews, if they let you comment, which is Google that lets you do that. But it's gonna start increasing your bottom line, plain and simple. So if you get these two, if you get this, if you understand the importance of reviews, then like, start taking advantage of it. And again, like I've said this before, in the past, don't try to do this all yourself, okay? Because people can do this on their own. But there's a lot of work, like, it's a system that we've created that literally, it takes a few minutes on our end, to get it kind of situated, and we got to make sure it's the right product for you and not serves up. But it gets things kind of situated and then all of a sudden, it's just set on autopilot for you. And then you get to experience everything else. And the amount of income you'll be making off that, like, I promise you, it will start changing. Okay, so keep that in mind. If you have any questions about what we like what we have for what we use the anchor wave, which is called review leads, let us know, I said this before in one of the other podcasts. And I'll do it again, you'll hear like in the middle of this podcast, and also here at the end of this podcast, but you can get what's called a playbook for free. In this playbook. Essentially what it is, is that it gives you an opportunity to have like a game plan, like a roadmap of your entire digital marketing roadmap for 2021. And moving forward. And it's not a PDF. It's not like I'll just download this and it's just a generic PDF. It's not it's a custom playbook. Okay. And in that process, we we evaluate your business on reviews. So we'll actually find reviews from other websites that you didn't even know existed that has reviews about your business. Okay? And then we'll say, hey, you have like these four reviews that are a one stars on this one site, and you'd be like, what? One stars, and you're mad, and we found them, and then we'll show you how to fix it. Okay, but this playbook does all this, they basically gives you a just an unbiased opinion. I'm not gonna say opinion, but an unbiased approach on what's going on with your digital presence for your marketing, okay. And then we'll give you recommendations like, Hey, you know, ABC Company, you should do this, this and this. To start off, these are our recommendations. And if you're like, well, I can only budget, you know, this and this. Cool, that's fine. And if you're like, you know, we don't really have this all budgeted yet, that's fine, too. It doesn't matter. And then you could take that playbook and you can basically, you know, use it internally for your business. And you can start implementing this stuff yourself. And then you'll realize that like, you know what, this takes a lot of work. I'm just going to hire anchor to do that, then do that. So that's the beauty about why we're doing these playbooks is that we do these complimentary, they're free, like you're not going to get charged. It's just going to cost you time. Okay. And so when we do this, it gives us a chance to show you guys what we're capable of doing. Like these review leads. They're huge, like we're doing websites and other stuff. But the other part of it too, is that it's going to help you say, Okay, this year we're going to focus on just doing reviews. Next year, we're going to focus on doing Google ads and then the following year we're gonna invest on doing a website. Like do you see what I'm saying? So like what it does it gives you like a game plan for everything else. You know, every you you set up the game plan you can say, okay, for one year we're gonna focus on this and also you might be killing it six months later, like alright, agar, we need to get this other thing going. And because I'm killing it here, I got I have hired a ton of people that solve this problem, and we're doing a great job.

Unknown: 25:28

And so these playbooks

Javier Lozano, Jr.: 25:29

are really designed to do that. And so no one in our in your space is doing this kind of stuff, guys, where they're giving you custom made playbooks that helps you plan out the entire roadmap for your marketing. So if you want to learn more about our review leads, all you got to do is go to anchor wave.com slash playbook. That's it anchor wave comm slash playbook. And we'll do a live conversation where you learn more about your business, you can express that hey, I want to learn more about review lead. And then from there, we'll put together a playbook and then we'll present it to show it what it is. That's it. Pretty simple stuff. Hope you guys enjoyed this guys. I had a blast talking about this. But anyways, with that said, have a powerful day, and I will talk to you guys later. Thanks for joining me on this episode of the trust tipping point marketing podcast. I'm your host Javier Lozano Jr. A lot of home services companies come to us at anchor a meeting help with their overall marketing strategy in their digital presence. So what we ended up doing is creating a custom marketing playbook to help businesses just like yours in the Home Services space have a improved digital marketing roadmap for 2021. One of the highlights during this Home Services customer playbook is the importance of having a marketing hub, which we call a website killer. And I'll be honest here, today's websites are dead, outdated and ineffective. After 17 years in 1300 plus websites, we've discovered the best approach to increase customer activity and win more business is by having a marketing and marketing hub will help set your home services business apart from your competition in place you as a leader in your space. To learn more about what marketing hub is scheduling free Custom Home Services playbooks by going to anchor wave comm slash playbook. You're going to answer seven simple questions and we'll give you free access to this playbook. Again go to anchor wave.com slash playbook to get free access to our Home Services digital marketing playbook