The Best Customer Review Strategy For Marketing Agencies

Do you run a marketing agency that delivers results but still can’t get your prospects to commit? Chances are, you aren’t using client reviews smartly. 

As a marketing agency, you don’t have a tangible product. So, why will your prospects trust you? 

The only way to win their trust is to show them your existing clients’ positive experiences. When they see you have impressed people facing similar marketing problems, they may find your services credible enough to invest. 

But leveraging social proof isn’t simply sharing a few reviews here and there. You need a proper strategy to see results. 

In today’s article, we show you how to create a customer review strategy that helps you build a positive reputation as a marketing agency. 

What is a customer review strategy?

A customer review strategy is a planned approach to encourage, gather, and leverage customer feedback for enhancing products, services, and the overall customer experience. 

It usually involves: 

• Identifying review platforms
• Requesting feedback from customers 
• Replying to the reviews
• Analyzing customer feedback and making improvements accordingly

Why marketing agencies need a customer review strategy 

Consumer opinions impact businesses — and marketing agencies are not an exception. Here’s why you need a customer review strategy to manage consumer feedback and drive tangible business results: 

1. Builds trust and credibility

The marketing industry is competitive. To build a strong presence there, you need to win your target market’s trust. 

While content marketing and social media ads can get you leads, they aren’t the best way to build credibility. Here, customer reviews are the best form of social proof as they demonstrate the effectiveness of your services. 

When potential leads see your previous customers praising your services, they trust your marketing expertise and may choose your agency. 

2. Influences decisions

Reports show online reviews affect the shopping choices of 93% of consumers. With an effective customer review strategy, you can harness the power of public opinion and use it to influence customer decisions.

When potential leads see praise from people with similar challenges, they relate to those experiences and view you as a credible solution. The emotional appeal of compelling reviews can also influence decisions and bring more clients to your marketing agency. 

With the right strategies, you can nudge your happy customers to submit more detailed testimonials with quantifiable results and make conversions easier. Reviews also validate your claims as a marketing agency, eliminate doubts, and encourage potential customers to give you a shot. 

3. Differentiates agency from competitors

A carefully crafted customer review strategy maintains customer feedback authenticity while also highlighting your unique selling proposition as a marketing agency. A review portraying your novel strengths can become a key part of your USP. It differentiates you from your competitors and builds a reputable agency brand.

Customer feedback strategies also let you track negative or critical reviews early on. Responding to unhappy clients with proactive resolutions showcases your customer-centric approach and makes you stand out among competitors.

4. Boosts client acquisition and retention

A well-executed customer review strategy can bring you more clients and help retain them. 

Marketing agencies often use reviews in ads and email newsletters since it leads to more potential clients discovering the business and exploring their services. When you share glowing testimonials from satisfied customers, prospects will better trust your business and potentially sign the contract.

Plus, requesting client feedback shows you care about their experience with your services. It makes them feel appreciated and boosts loyalty and retention. 

5. Provides valuable insights for service improvement

Customer reviews are a goldmine for marketing agencies to refine their offerings and services. They can give insights into areas of improvement and enhance customer journey. However, many agencies ignore the importance of customer feedback analysis until they start losing clients. 

With a proper customer review strategy, you can detect issues earlier by analyzing negative feedback. You can deep dive into the root cause of their dissatisfaction and take a data-driven approach to solve them. This way, you can improve your services and make them more client-oriented to generate more prospects in the future.

The best customer review strategy for marketing agencies

Now that we know the importance of a thorough customer review strategy, let’s discuss how you can frame one for your marketing agency:

1. Solicit customer feedback proactively

Actively encourage clients to leave reviews. Here, perfecting the timing is crucial. Once you complete a project, contact the client and ask about their experience with your agency. If their response is positive, ask them to leave a review. 

There are several ways to collect customer reviews. Here are some notable ones: 

Customer satisfaction score surveys

These are the quickest ways to measure client satisfaction. Since it doesn’t require much time or effort from the respondents, clients are more likely to review your services through these scales. 

Form-based surveys

You can embed review forms on your website or in the review request emails. Add pointed questions to get both qualitative and quantitative feedback. However, don’t get carried away and add too many questions. If it takes more than 1-2 minutes to finish your survey form, most clients will drop out midway. 

You can even create branded surveys using our tool.

Client interviews

Talk to your clients directly if you want to give your review collection process a personal touch. It generates the most authentic response and helps you understand what the client truly feels about your agency. 

Emails

You could also ask the client to describe their experience by replying to your feedback request email. It saves them the hassle of switching platforms or pages to leave testimonials. Such emails also let you create a feedback loop and understand the client’s issues in depth. Take a cue from Flowium:

Suggestion boards

Suggestion boards are excellent for collecting client feedback and getting ideas and suggestions to improve your services. It helps you discover what your clients need from your services. 

Add a suggestion board to your website. Make it easy to navigate and include categories for better CX. 

2. Make it easy for customers to leave testimonials

If the review submission process is complex, customers won’t invest their time to give feedback. So, simplify it for the customer to leave testimonials. It should be straightforward, non-intrusive, and convenient. 

Offer customers multiple ways to leave reviews. Add the different options in your feedback request email. The more choices you provide, the more likely they are to leave a testimonial through their preferred channel.

Provide clear instructions on how to leave a review. Include direct links to your agency’s profile on review platforms. You can also add review widgets in your email. Most clients prefer using their smartphones to provide feedback. So, ensure your forms are mobile-friendly.

3. Monitor and manage online reviews and rating

For a positive online reputation, tracking and managing online reviews and ratings regularly is crucial.

You can set up Google alerts for your marketing agency’s name, employees, and other relevant keywords. That way, you will get notifications whenever there’s new content or reviews mentioning your services. 

Monitor popular review platforms such as Yelp, Google My Business, Clutch, and other industry-specific review websites for new reviews and ratings. You can also use social listening tools to monitor social media mentions. 

Whenever you catch negative reviews, respond promptly. Address the specific concerns raised by the customer. Offer solutions or explanations, and show that you are committed to improving your services. 

Reach out to them personally to offer resolutions. Don’t be defensive and remember to keep your response professional. It can change the client’s negative perspective of your agency and even turn the negative feedback into a positive testimonial.

Lastly, whenever you come across fake or inappropriate reviews, report them immediately. 

4. Identify key platforms relevant to your audience for reviews

Understand your audience and identify their key demographics and preferences to detect key review platforms for your marketing agency. It lets you take a more systematic approach to client review management. 

Run competitor analysis to see which platforms they use to collect and showcase reviews. It helps you identify your audience’s preferred review platforms. 

For new marketing agencies, platforms like Upwork and Fiverr are excellent channels to collect reviews and get small projects. Clutch is also an outstanding platform for collecting reviews for agencies.

You may use Google Analytics to see which review platforms drive the most traffic to your website. It lets you detect channels most relevant to your clients. 

5. Encourage video testimonials

Video testimonials are the most authentic form of social proof you can get from happy clients. They appear more engaging and credible to your potential clients than text-based reviews. You can also repurpose them for your future marketing campaigns. 

However, only someone extremely happy with your services will agree to appear in a video testimonial. So, the first step here is to identify the right clients. 

Your video testimonial pitch shouldn’t be vague. It needs to include all significant details about the required time commitment, the structure of production, etc. Ensure it has the answers to usual queries. 

Prepare the questionnaire and share it with the client for review. Ask for their suggestions regarding the interview. Getting the right equipment to record the testimonial is also crucial. 

6. Showcase reviews on the agency website and marketing materials

Embed reviews on your website to convince potential clients to choose your services. You can add rating widgets or plugins from popular review platforms on your homepage. Creating a separate testimonial page or ‘Wall of Love’ is also an excellent way to showcase reviews. Keep it vibrant with both text-based and video testimonials. 

With tools like Trustmary, you can easily import testimonials from popular review platforms directly to your website. Moreover, you can add review widgets and identify your best testimonials with the help of AI.

7. Leverage customer reviews as social proof in marketing campaigns

Use your collected reviews to make your campaigns more authentic. Happy clients gushing about your services will add value to your claims and increase conversions. 

Add testimonials to your marketing materials. Feature them in social media ads and posts like Dunk Agency does. 

Testimonials paired with a strong social media strategy can bring brand visibility and lead to prospects choosing you over competitors. You can even add a CTA in the caption, urging brands to contact you or followers to comment about their experience with your company. 

You can also create case studies and share them on your social media handles and website. This is because case studies dive into the specific problems your client faced and how your agency helped them out.

For example, Grizzle — a content marketing agency, proudly displays their customer success stories for website visitors to get a glimpse of the results they can bring. Go a step further and collect video testimonials to make the experience more engaging. 

You can even list your business on review platforms such as — Clutch.co, GoodFirms, Yelp, Better Business Bureau, and Sortlist to earn badges or local directories to easily collect more reviews. 

Compile reviews from different platforms and host them on your website using Trustmary’s agency widget.

8. Encourage detailed reviews over generic ones

Generic reviews don’t do much to represent your capabilities as a marketing agency. That’s why your priority should be on getting detailed reviews. Ask pointed questions such as: 

• “What was it like to work with our agency?” 
• “What was the highlight of your experience with us?”
• “Were you satisfied with the results?”
• “How do you think we can improve our services?”

Questions like these will give you both qualitative and quantitative insights. It will nudge the clients to detail how your services solved their marketing problems and the subsequent results. 

To give you an example of how a detailed review should look like, here is one by one of Lyfe Marketing’s clients. 

The review details how Lyfe marketing solved the client’s problem and also mentions the positive results they got. 

Harnessing Trustmary for review management

Collecting, managing, and showcasing reviews can be time-consuming and difficult, especially if you are a scaling marketing agency. To streamline the process, Trustmary is a reliable testimonial tool worth your consideration. 

You can collect reviews from every relevant platform. You need no developer to embed testimonials on your website with Trustmary — only a simple copy-and-paste embed code does the job. Moreover, you get: 

• Customizable review widgets
• Trust badges
• Templates for review forms and surveys
• Feedback analytics
• A/B testing
• Conversion tracking

To leverage client reviews as social proof and build credibility, sign up for free with Trustmary.

Conclusion

To reiterate the points, here is a TL;DR version of today’s discussion: 

• Give your clients multiple options to leave reviews
• Identify the most relevant review platforms for your agency
• Make review submission easy with widgets and links
• Showcase reviews on your website and marketing materials
• Make your campaigns credible by using reviews as social proof
• Try to gather detailed reviews with pointed questions

With the right customer review strategies, you can attract more leads and boost the loyalty of your existing clientele. Diligently follow the above methods and build a positive reputation as an agency that delivers tangible marketing results.