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Reviews are essential to marketing, and their importance cannot be overstated.

Here are 5 reasons why:

Social Proof: Reviews act as social proof and provide credibility to your brand. When potential customers see positive reviews from other customers, they are more likely to trust your business and make a purchase.

Customer Engagement: Reviews provide an opportunity for customers to engage with your brand. When customers leave reviews, they are providing feedback that you can use to improve your products or services.

SEO Benefits: Reviews can help boost your search engine rankings. Search engines like Google take into account the number and quality of reviews when ranking websites.

Brand Reputation: Reviews can also impact your brand’s reputation. A high number of positive reviews can enhance your reputation, while negative reviews can damage it. Responding to both positive and negative reviews can help you build a strong brand reputation.

Sales: Reviews can also increase sales. According to a study by BrightLocal, 91% of consumers between the ages of 18 and 34 trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Positive reviews can lead to more sales, while negative reviews can lead to lost sales.

The most important review platforms are:

• First and foremost Google (with a Google Business Profile, previously called Google My Business) Google is the #1 search engine and a good, optimized Google business profile will pop up in most cases showing Google reviews
• Yelp if you are in the restaurant/hospitality business and some types of service businesses
• Travel sites if you are in the hospitality industry
• Major shopping sites if you sell products

Overall, reviews are a crucial part of marketing that can help you build trust, engage with customers, improve your search rankings, enhance your brand reputation, and increase sales.

Which social media channels have the best ROI?

As any marketer knows, social media is an undeniably powerful tool to reach new audiences and connect with existing customers.

In fact, as of 2021, social media is now the #1 channel used by marketers.

But with all that Tweeting, Liking, Posting, and scrolling, it can be difficult to know which platforms give you the most bang for your buck.

Sure, it’s important to ensure your brand interacts on whichever platforms are most popular with your audience, but it’s equally critical you take the time to determine which platforms provide the best ROI for your business. This information can help you determine where to invest in paid advertising, as well as which channels you should use for lead generation.

However, social media usage can shift overnight. The platforms that provided marketers with the highest ROI five years ago likely don’t deliver the same results anymore. That’s why we conducted research to find out where marketers saw the highest ROI in 2021.

Here, we’ll explore which channels provided marketers with the highest ROI in 2021. We also reached out to experts at Talkwalker, Socialinsider, Casted, Brandfolder, LiveChat, Sprout Social, MarketingLabs, and HubSpot to determine how marketers can leverage certain tactics within those channels to increase engagement and drive sales. Let’s dive in

Which social media channels have the best ROI?

 According to HubSpot’s 2021 State of Marketing report, Facebook is the social media channel that provides marketers with the highest ROI.

Over 40% of marketers cited Facebook as the most effective channel for their businesses, followed by the roughly 30% who saw the highest ROI from Instagram, which is another Facebook-owned social platform.

By comparison, the other social channels in the list — including LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and Snapchat — all ranked much lower, with less than 10% citing each platform as the best channel for ROI.

Let’s dive into each of these platforms to uncover why the top 3 social media sites perform better than others when it comes to ROI — and how you can leverage them.

For more information click here

When it comes to ethics, “Put your money where your mouth is”. Turns out many people do just that. They shop their values. When consumers believe a brand has a strong purpose, they’re four times more likely to purchase from that company and four and a half times more likely to recommend it to family and friends.

Consumers also have the power to punish unethical or noncompliant behavior — and that’s a genuine fear among risk managers. According to data from Willis Towers Watson, 86 percent of risk managers ranked loss of income or reduced customer base as the worst outcome from reputational damage. Many of them also feared loss of talent and becoming less attractive as an employer.

And that risk is more real than ever. Many workers seek an engaging, supportive and ethical workplace experience, and they are increasingly willing to walk if they don’t find it. Here’s how to cultivate a sense of ownership and pride over workplace ethics and compliance.

Click here to learn more 

The psychology of choice:

Ask any entrepreneur and they’ll probably tell you it’s getting harder to forge meaningful relationships with customers  Choices for just about everything multiply making emotional connection with the product or service critical.

A big part of an entrepreneur’s job is to notice things other people miss, understand the motivations behind the series of decisions that lead a customer to take action, hopefully being to buy your product. Understanding how users feel during that process is what differentiates your business. The better you know what turns them on or off, their emotional connector, the more likely your prospect will buy

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Facebook just announced that starting in January it will begin limiting the number of “promotional Page posts” in the news feed… unless they pay for it.  Facebook is now officially an advertising platform.

So, what is considered a “promotional” post?  In short, anything that looks or feels like an ad, that includes the reuse of advertising material brands may have paid for.  You probably think “a little vague”, well most terms with Facebook are rather vague and give them a lot of latitude to interpret.

Over the past few months, brand reach on Facebook as dwindled to about 2.73% according to Forrester Research, the new policy is likely to reduce that substantially and force brands to pay for play for more content, until they have to pay for every post to have any reach.

Facebook is now officially an advertising platform in the traditional sense of the term leveraging their massive user base to generate display advertising both in and off the feed and that after charging brands for ads to develop a follower base they cannot reach anymore.

What should brands do?  There is not much of a choice, they should consider Facebook as any other advertising platform and develop their communication in a way that they can pull their now paid audience away from Facebook and other social media platforms and towards platforms they own and use social media to attract traffic to their websites and use their website to build their database.

Yes, we have come full circle, the website is becoming what it should have always been, the center of the digital strategy and social media, a way to build traffic to the web properties owned by the brand.

Brands will still be able to build relationships and interact  on social media but email will take on a new dimension and allow brands to further build their database and/or drive consumers to owned communities versus communities owned by third parties

According to Bazaarvoice’s “The Conversation Index: Volume 6” study, shoppers who read helpful brand responses to reviews are 186% more likely to make a purchase and show 157% higher average product sentiment. Also, 41% of consumers see a brand’s response to an online review as a sign that the brand really cares about its customers.

Centering your digital strategy around social media or any other platform you do not control is not a good idea and akin to gambling with your online presence .  

Terms of service do change, so does their interpretation and social media companies  have been known for taking pages or accounts down without warning and without recourse (like in this story).

Your website is the only platform you have full control over, assuming you did not use a website “farm”, meaning a company selling you a template or canned site they host.  It should be the center of your digital strategy and your blog should be a part of it, not a separate entity hosted on a different url.

Use social media platform to create conversations and drive traffic to your site where you can convert visitors into customers.

How does that translate in real life? 

You post stories and blog post on your self hosted blog, part of your website, publish a teaser on your social media platforms with a link to the page on your website driving traffic to your website.  Each new visitor to your website, each new visit is an opportunity to convert.

You can lose your Facebook account and all the pages attached to it, you can lose your LinkedIn account or any other social media account, your website (meaning self hosted) is the safest place for your content and the safest place to build your online presence.

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In an environment in which consumers’ attention is increasingly fragmented, the idea of using content to capture interest and engagement is catching on among marketers.

Compelling content can help marketers tell a story, but it can also be cumbersome—and expensive—to create. So which content strategies are generating attractive return on investment (ROI) for marketers? The most cost-effective content types are articles, video and white papers, according to a January 2013 study of marketing decision-makers worldwide conducted by CopyPress, a software company specializing in content marketing tools.

In particular, marketers were most widely satisfied by the ROI from featured articles, with 62.2% saying they provided some of the best content ROI.

Video was also a content strategy cited by 51.9% of marketers for having among the best ROI. But the study highlighted some of the challenges marketers have faced working with it. Video was the content type the highest percentage of marketers (49.8%) described as “difficult to create.” (Other media types that challenged marketers included interactive media, infographics and motion graphics.) And despite the fact that many marketers are having success with video content, half believed that video was “over-priced.”

Publishing articles and white papers may seem like a less complex and less labor-intensive content solution, but these media bring challenges of their own. One question many marketers are asking is what role should authorship play in marketing content creation. Should articles come from specific individuals, or should the focus be on the brand as a whole?

The CopyPress study found that approximately two-thirds of respondents considered authorship to play an important role in their content marketing strategy, while one-third did not. Authorship generally refers to whether articles are bylined, and whether those bylines are from high-profile individuals.