Authentic Review Generator: Why You Need One

Never Fake Reviews!!!

Is that enough exclamation points?

No. Here are some more:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Faking reviews or buying fake reviews can be very harmful for your business.

Additionally, it’s harmful for the general idea and image of reviews.

Reviews are supposed to be something that we can trust more than the company’s own claims.

Who can we trust if not reviews from our peers?

Let’s take a closer look at how fake reviews can harm your business.

1. Ruin Your Reputation

If your customers notice your bluff (and they will), you have lost respect.

Fake reviews are actually quite easy to recognize from generic or SEO optimized language, anonymous comments, and made-up names.

Companies that sell fake reviews will use the same profiles to review various businesses around the world or leave the exact same reviews with different names. Easy to spot.

There are even tools out there that can identify fake reviews.

Any serious business would not want to risk their reputation this way.

2. Set Unrealistic Expectations

Let’s say your business has lots of positive reviews that are not based on reality. 

Someone will notice that they are not true after having a bad experience with your brand.

How do you think this would make them feel?

Be prepared for a counter-reaction and a flood of negative reviews.

3. Can Lead to Penalty

Don’t forget that faking reviews also has more tangible consequences.

For example, the U.K. government is preparing a law reform that would make faking reviews illegal.

There have also been cases where brands are challenged for censoring negative reviews, and Google has taken down reviews that were suspected as fake.

If nothing else, cases like this can at least cost you money. You might even get negative attention from the media…

4. Lose Valuable Feedback

A genuine business that is there to offer something for its customers would not voluntarily miss out on customer feedback.

Feedback is what makes your business improve and grow.

If you are worried about negative reviews and how they can affect your business, don’t be too worried.

When you respond to negative reviews, you have a chance to fix things and turn the unhappy customer into a happy one. 

And if not, at least you can show all others who might be reading the reviews that you were willing to help and listen to the customers.

Reasons to Get Authentic Reviews from Customers

On top of fake reviews being bad, there is the other side of things.

There are so many good reasons why you should get authentic reviews from customers and display them online.

1. It’s A Must

Consumers want to read reviews before making a purchase decision. That’s just how things are.

Statistics about reviews show that 93% of consumers read reviews.

This fact does not only go for consumer marketing or e-commerce stores. It’s the same in B2B marketing, or in any industry.

If a potential client has to choose between a business that has no reviews and a business that has reviews, which one do you think they would pick?

When you do business online, you must have reviews.

2. Social Proof

Reviews are a great way to leverage social proof.

It’s a psychological phenomenon that makes people follow each other’s lead in new situations.

When your potential customers see that you have positive reviews from other real people, they are more likely to trust your business as well.

The more reviews you have, the better. Wisdom of the crowds is effective.

Considering this fact, I get it why you would feel inclined to buy fake reviews. It must be a big task to collect enough reviews…

Well, not if you have the right tools! With Trustmary, you could collect as much as over 300 reviews in just a few months.

3. Higher Conversion Rate

Our clients have achieved incredible success with reviews on their website.

Through our customer cases we have learned that when you use reviews in marketing:

• Conversion rates in e-commerce can grow by 37%
• You can get 62% more contact request
• It’s possible to lower the marketing costs while doubling the sales

This goes to further prove that people view reviews from happy customers as a sign of a trustworthy business.

4. Google Loves Reviews

Did you know that reviews account for as much as 15% of the local search engine rankings?

If you are a local business, don’t forget to ask your customers to leave a Google review, and afterwards import the reviews to your own website.

There are other ways in which authentic reviews can aid your SEO efforts.

1. They include keywords that help Google index your page and rank with those keywords.

2. Reviews on third-party review sites generate backlinks for your site.

3. Reviews are fresh content produced by your audience.

These benefits only go for authentic reviews. As we learned above, Google removes reviews that are detected as fake.

5. Reviews Offer Honest Feedback

Customer feedback is the driving force of business growth. It offers you a chance to improve and become the best and most popular solution in your industry.

The positive reviews tell you what you are doing well, while negative reviews help you see what you are lacking.

6. They Teach Your Customers

Many consumers read reviews to find out more about the product or service they are about to purchase.

The potential customers might have questions like:

• “Is this clothing label true to size?”
• “Can this software be used for my purposes?”
• “Does this service include this detail?”

Oftentimes, customer reviews can answer those questions.

You can affect the way people write reviews and what they write about, when you take the review process into your own hands.

7. Build Relationships

How would you feel if one of your favorite brands featured your comment on their website?

I can say for myself that I would feel pretty damn appreciated.

My comments is so valuable that the brand decides to showcase it to all visitors!

Asking for reviews and using them publicly signals that you care about your customers and their opinions.

It’s a great tactic for building relationships and brand loyalty.

Don’t Be Passive: Ask for Reviews

When you don’t proactively ask for reviews, only the unhappy customers will go ahead and write negative comments on third-party review sites.

If you ask for reviews, you get both positive and negative reviews.

After that, you can manage them and use them accordingly: negative reviews as feedback for internal development and positive reviews as marketing material!

Don’t be afraid of not getting any good reviews. 71% of happy customers are willing to write reviews if they have an easy way to do so.

The key is to build a process that runs “in the background”, especially if you have lots of customers and no chance to ask for reviews personally.

It must be easy to use both for the customer and you.

Next, let’s see how Trustmary can help you with building such process. After that, we’ll look at tips for getting the best reviews!

Setting Up Your Review Generator

First things first: sign up to Trustmary for free to start the process👇

I’ll briefly cover the simple steps of creating a process for collecting and using reviews with Trustmary.

In case you want to know more about each step, check out the more in-depth articles.

Import

This is for you if you already have Google reviews, Facebook reviews, or reviews on any of these sites:

• Yelp
• Tripadvisor
• G2
• Capterra

By importing the existing reviews to Trustmary, you can easily use them on your own website!

If you regularly get reviews on these platforms, you don’t necessarily have to establish your own collection process.

Just import fresh reviews to your site regularly with a few clicks!

Here’s a more detailed guide on adding Google reviews to your website. It can be used on any other type of reviews as well.

Collect

When you want to start collecting reviews yourself, you can easily do it with Trustmary.

With the free forever plan, you can collect unlimited amount of reviews and video reviews.

Create a review form and distribute it with a URL link, QR code, or website embed.

In case you want to create automations and send the survey directly to a contact list, upgrade to a more advanced plan.

When you ask for reviews via Trustmary, you can always be sure that you have permission to use them online.

Read more about how to gather reviews and video reviews.

Display

Once you have your reviews (imported, collected, or both), you need to put them live on your website.

Choose the right widget from Trustmary’s extensive widget library. Just copy and paste the widget to where you want it.

I recommend a testimonial carousel on your front page or landing pages. It features many testimonials in a compact space and adds a dash of interactivity to your website.

All widgets are fully customizable, and you can make them match your brand.

If you want, you can choose to automatically add every new review to your widget. Trustmary uses automatic order that prioritizes: 

• Video reviews over text reviews
• Good reviews over bad reviews
• Longer reviews over shorter reviews

You can also hand-pick the reviews that you want to showcase on your website.

Take a look at all of our widgets and choose your favorite!

Manage

All reviews are stored in Trustmary where you can manage them easily.

You can publish or unpublish reviews, tag them for easier categorization, share them on social media, or refresh your memory about past feedback.

No more messy spreadsheets: all feedback and social proof in one place!

Blueprint of a Great Review

Let’s discuss what makes a great review, and what you can do to get such reviews.

Length Matters

Reviews are often short and concise. However, you should try and aim to get a bit longer reviews.

There is evidence that longer reviews generate better results on your website. 

You can help your customers to write longer reviews by offering questions and prompts that you wish them to answer.

However, there is a danger that customers won’t leave reviews at all if they think it requires too much effort.

Be thankful for any reviews you get, despite the length. 

Luckily, Trustmary automatically prioritizes longer reviews in the widgets, which means you can showcase your best assets first.

Keep Reviews as Fresh as Possible

73% of consumers don’t trust reviews if they were written more than a month ago.

Reflecting on this fact, make sure that you ask for reviews consistently and regularly.

This is where your review collection process is most important. When it’s continuous, smooth, and as automated as possible, you don’t have to worry about getting fresh reviews.

It’s a good idea to go through your widgets from time to time and unpublish or delete old reviews to make space for new ones.

Add Details

Generic reviews are not necessarily the most persuasive ones.

However, most people don’t spend too much time thinking about what to write in their reviews. As a result, many reviews are quite generic content-wise.

It would be much convincing if the review included some details that only an actual customer would know.

That would be things like:

• People’s names (“Mary was such a professional in our meeting!”)
• How the customer found this business (“After my friend recommended the service…”)
• Details about the experience (“At first I was lost with the new phone, but in the end I learned to use it and now I wouldn’t change it for anything!”)
• Details about the product or service (“I especially enjoyed the steam treatment at the spa.”)

Here, too, questions and prompts can help you get those statements from clients.

Identification

Anonymous reviews are not as convincing as reviews with someone’s name and face on it.

Perhaps this is part of the reason for why video reviews are so effective!

In Trustmary, you can choose to ask for some personal information about those who leave a review.

For example:

• Name
• Profession
• Location
• Company name
• Company size
• Profile picture

When reviews include personal details like this, they are far more credible, and help new potential customers relate to the previous customers. 

When that happens, social proof effects are amplified!

Authenticity

Even when there are “hacks” to get better reviews, authenticity is the most important aspect.

Let your customers say what they want and be how they are.

If the reviews include typos and grammatical errors, that’s alright. In video reviews, small gaps and stutters are alright.

They actually make the reviews appear more genuine and human!

Another thing to note it that the reviews should feature natural word choices. If the language is too branded, like including slogans or specific terminology, it might look seem like copy made by the company itself.

How you can achieve this?

Encourage your customers to be themselves. Make clear they don’t have to stress about perfect grammar, smooth sentences, or right word choices.

FAQ