In today’s every growing business landscape, it is important to leverage every advantage you have in order to keep your business at the top. Concrete Contractors have a unique challenge because they are competing not only with specialists in their field, but also many unlicensed contractors as well. Creating even more of a challenge is that willingness of these unlicensed contractors to lower the price and sacrifice quality for the job.
So, how can a concrete company in Honolulu get that competitive edge when there’s a seemingly endless amount of challenges? There is one type of strategy that can help catapult your business into the stratosphere and help you close more jobs with less effort.
Online reviews can sometimes be the bane of a contractor due to the fact that they take time and effort to get, have been known to be faked by your biggest competitor, and can sometimes make you the victim of lying customer who wants to exact revenge for an imagined slight or simply to get out of paying for the service.
Online profiles
With so many options for customers to provide feedback in public forums, it can be hard to keep track when you have reviews coming at you from many directions. I usually encourage contractors to focus on a few main online profiles where they can cultivate a bigger presence. Which profiles to build largely depends on your specific niche and where your customers are looking for information and recommendations before buying a service.
The big profiles I do recommend getting for all home services niches are Yelp, Next Door and Angie’s List. This is where customers go to do research and where they go to get recommendations from others. Obviously, having your Google My Business Listing up and optimized is also a must-do, since it targets your specific service area and is built specifically for local businesses.
Social Proof
Why are social profiles and reviews so important? They are the equivalent of a bunch of people telling their friends how great you are at providing your service. The difference is, online reviews are available to be seen and read 24/7 and reach a wider circle of people. Whether people admit it or not, they are risk-averse and prefer to do what everyone else is doing. So, if they see a bunch of great reviews for a concrete contractor while they’re researching businesses to build their patio or retaining wall or whatever home project they need, they are likely to call the business with high reviews versus one with bad ones.
Backed by Studies
There have been countless studies that show how heavily influenced consumers are by online review of a service, product or business. In fact 87{f99108daee625bf437cb70311edf914031c3bf9ab734e8116a5e4a8d0efdff29} of people surveyed indicated this.
In fact, trends show that a great majority of people look online to find their service providers and use reviews as part of their decision making process.
How to get more reviews
So, what does this mean for your business? Well, it means if you are not online, you definitely need to start cultivating your online presence, since that is where customers are looking more and more these days. Obviously, once you get online and optimize your profiles, it will be important to start getting reviews. If you are the type of business-owner that is not comfortable with self-promotion or with asking for reviews don’t fret because there are a few strategies you can use that will get you reviews without too much effort.
An easy way to get reviews that you can start right away is just including a link to your GMB (Google My Business) or Yelp profile as a signature on your email. You set this up once and it just stays as your signature at the bottom of every email. Include a call to action by simply saying, happy with our work? Leave us a review here.
Another strategy to use is to simply ask the customer while you’re doing your final walkthrough or inspection of the work. Ask them if they were happy with the way the project turned out and with the communication or customer service. If they say yes, ask if they’d be willing to leave a rating or review. Then just text them the link to your profile.
This works because you’re catching them while they are on high after seeing their new patio, or driveway, or whatever concrete work you provided for them and will likely be in a good mood. Plus, if you time this right, meaning ask them for the review while you still have a little bit of packing up to do , they will likely do it while you finish cleaning up.
Yet another method that I’ve seen work really well is to incentivize your employees. If you have multiple crews working on different projects. Let your employees know that you will give them a bonus of $20 for every 5 star review they get from customers they do work for.
If none of those ideas sound good to you, you can always invest in a reputation management software that creates an automated funnel for collecting reviews. These review tools can be set to follow up with customers 2 to 3 or more times asking for a review or feedback. The added benefit of these tools is that they also have a feature for diverting bad reviews by redirecting the customer to send you negative feedback directly so that you can call them and try to remedy the issue.