Getting those vital reviews – for smaller hotels and estate agents

Being Proactive

Yesterday we received an email from one of our smaller hotel and restaurant clients. They asked how they might get more reviews to their Dialogue module and to TripAdvisor.

 

For some of our larger clients simply sending the email will get a steady flow of reviews, and a (small) percentage of those will go on to post to their chosen ‘final destination’ (usually TripAdvisor or Google Local). This alone will achieve their (and our) twin objectives: getting great reviews to show potential customers and heading off publicly visible negatives on other sites.

For the small hotel the answer was straightforward: ‘Be proactive’

It is a numbers game, unless you become proactive. Smaller hotels, and our clients with fewer ‘customers per week’ (estate agents, for example) need to engage with their guests or clients to ensure a good flow of reviews.

See how successful the Kempfield House in Brighton has been here. And they only joined in June! 

What does this mean?

Engage with your guest or client on a personal level.

For hotels: when your guest checks out, tell them they will be receiving the email inviting them to review and tell them how important their review is to you. If you want them to go on to post to Google or TripAdvisor, say so.

For estate agents: Send a personal email, signed by their main contact within the firm, and think about following that up with a phone call.

At the end of the day it’s not simply a case of getting great reviews, but of impressing your guests and clients that you take their feedback really seriously, and we have lost count of the number of reviews that mention how much this is appreciated.

Final note:

At HelpHound we are here to provide advice and support to all our clients, and  often that means passing on the experience of clients who are ‘getting it right’. Please don’t hesitate to call Karen Hutchings or your business member advisor if you would like to tap in to this valuable resource.

How does "Helpful' help our clients?

You will have noticed the "Helpful' button next to your reviews:

On the surface this is rightfully understood to be a way that visitors to your site can acknowledge that a review has been particularly helpful to them by 'voting' for it. The main question for our clients, though, is 'how can this be helpful to my business?'

Let's look at an example (click on the image below to enlarge):

 

How has this helped the hotel in question? 

To answer this we need to mine down into the thought process of the 'voter'. They first went to the hotel's website, they then saw that there were independent reviews from past guests and clients; they then selected 'Weddings', so we can be safe in assuming they were looking for a hotel to host a wedding! They then read this specific review, and afterwards voted it helpful. Helpful in what way? We're going to take a big leap into the dark here and make an assumption:

Helpful in influencing them to make contact with a view to booking a wedding!

The same applies to every review written about every service for every client - a helpful vote is a very positive indicator that great reviews attract business.