So you partnered with a review platform to drive more reviews. Now what?

Honestly, most marketers stop there. They check the box for “having a presence on review sites” and move on. But they don’t realize there’s a lot more value to gain.

Reviews are often siloed away from the rest of the B2B marketing mix. But with the right strategy in place, you can use a decisioning or review platform for storytelling, sales enablement, and even ABM.

When you start using reviews as an entirely new marketing channel, you’ll get a much higher ROI from your partnership.

Here’s how to get the most of it.

Step 1: Customize your profile

Start by optimizing how you look to buyers.

Our decisioning platform, and every review site, has a profile page for your company and your product(s). Claim those pages now. Make sure to update all of the language that describes who you are and how you help buyers. 

Some sites also allow you to add pricing info—which is the top priority for B2B tech buyers. Research shows that when buyers are comparing products, they’re looking for pricing. If one of your prospects sees pricing info from you, and “no pricing available” from your competitors, that leaves a strong impression of transparency. 

If you want more help with your profile, check out How to Get Quality B2B Reviews.

Step 2: Tailor your reviews

At the end of the day, customizing your profile is table stakes. It’s the bare minimum. 

But did you know that you can also customize your review questionnaires? 

At TrustRadius, we partner with our vendors to design custom review questionnaires that help you tell your story. We help marketers highlight the use cases and features you want to be known for. That way, you end up with high-quality reviews that support your overall company and/or product narrative. 

Let’s say you just launched an industry-leading integration and you want new reviews that speak to its value. By working with our specialists, you can add an integration question to the review flow. That way, every new review speaks directly to that feature. 

Customized review questions are a serious level up and a quick way for you to get more value from your review site partners.

Step 3: Increase your review volume

Decisioning platforms and review sites make it easy to collect reviews for your products, but they require a little effort to make the partnership work smoothly. 

If this is your first time driving reviews, we recommend emailing a review invitation to all active customers. You can do this on a one-off basis, or on a regular schedule. Either way, this gives you a broad overview of customers at all stages.

Beyond that, here are some creative ways our partners drive reviews: 

• “Established customer” invitations. When new customers cross the six-month mark after onboarding, schedule a review invitation email. 
• Renewal invitations. Schedule another review invitation to go out three months before a customer’s renewal date. 
• Customer newsletters. Include a “write a review” banner in your monthly newsletters—with incentives clearly advertised.   
• Email signatures. Customer-facing roles can include a simple “leave us a review” link in their signature.
• Digital and live events. Make a clear ask for reviews during customer events—both digital and in-person. 

To make this process even easier, we give our partners a review growth kit. It’s full of tips and tricks to help drive high-quality content.

Step 4: Activate the voices of your customers

Once you’ve got some reviews, don’t just leave them sitting on the platform. Their real value comes from syndication. 

The quickest way to get value from customer voice is to syndicate review content directly on your website. 

For example, you can use our TrustQuotes for Web (TQW) tool to tag review content and then syndicate quotes on your landing pages, product pages, and anywhere else you want to increase SEO and conversion. 

According to search engines, long-form review content is rich content. A TrustRadius customer in the data center backup category saw a 28% boost in organic traffic after launching the TrustRadius dynamic review syndication widget on seven web pages, as well as seeing $650,000 CPC savings in one year. 

Also, by having high-quality customer voice content, your business can be propelled forward by buyers spending extra time on your website, reading in-depth reviews from your customers. It helps them become more familiar and confident in the idea of using your product to solve their needs.

Pro tip:

To take syndication to the next level, make sure you tag the most important reviews and keywords you want to be associated with. 

Let’s say your greatest strength is your customer service team. You can tag all reviews that highlight positive CS experiences, then configure your TQW tool to display those tagged reviews on your bottom-funnel landing pages. 

Now every warm lead you collect will (theoretically) see their peers raving about your awesome customer service before they ever talk to your sales team.  

You can also take these same quotes and incorporate them into your ad creative to improve engagement and click-through rates.

Step 5: Build an ABM strategy

Finally, it’s time to talk about the real game changer: building an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy. 

You may have heard that some review sites sell leads or ads directly in-platform. That’s actually a turnoff for most buyers (especially enterprises), so it’s not very effective. 

What’s more useful is when decisioning and review platforms gather intent data from buyers who explore the site researching your product and/or competitors. 

For example, an intent data partnership with TrustRadius can show you which accounts are: 

• Researching your products—reading reviews, pricing, and clicking links to your website
• Comparing you to alternatives in your category
• Researching your category’s and competitors’ products 

However, it’s simple to integrate TrustRadius’ intent data directly into your ABM platform, especially if you’re already taking advantage of our 6sense partnership. Doing this, you can build new segments for accounts that are actively researching you and your competitors. 

Then you can run targeted email and ad campaigns to those accounts using branded award badges or customer quotes from TrustRadius. That gives you instant brand recognition and third-party validation, all in one. Some of our customers saw a 300% increase in reach and account engagement. 

You can also sync those accounts to your CRM so it will alert your sales team any time they are researching you or your competitors. That way, both marketing and sales are collaborating to reach the same key accounts. 

This is a unicorn ABM strategy because most marketing teams haven’t tried it yet, giving you a competitive advantage.  

If you’re curious to learn more about how to use the TrustRadius decisioning platform for ABM and as a marketing channel, book a demo—you’ll see just how much we can do for you.