Oh No! You look on Yelp and your business just got a lousy review and two stars. Welcome to the age of consumer-generated content. This is not going away and that’s a great thing! As long as I’ve worked with businesses in the digital age, I’ve heard owners and managers speak with horror at the prospect of bad reviews. Some business owners even refuse to create social media pages, Google Plus pages, or Yelp listings because they’re terrified of their customers writing and reading negative reviews. Why I love bad reviews Every bad review is a great opportunity to engage your customers and to turn a bad experience into a happy return customer. It’s actually really easy to do. The review sites generally provide a way to respond to negative reviews and this is a powerful way to engage online customers and prospects. But you must do it without any rancor or defensiveness. Consider the fact that even if the person writing the review has poor social and writing skills, their experience with your business was not happy. They may not express that in a way that is very nice, but you don’t have to get yer back up about it. It’s NOT PERSONAL. Your identity may be all wrapped up in your business but they don’t think about that. They just had a bad experience and they want to tell the world. Take a deep breath, tell yourself you’re going to get them back, and follow these simple steps. 3 steps to getting an unhappy customer back They don’t have to be gone for good. You, as a business owner or operator, can get them back. Here’s how: Publicly acknowledge their bad experience without defensiveness. Assure them their business is important to you. Offer to make it right. Here’s an example: John and Susan, I’m truly sorry that you had a bad experience at our restaurant last Friday. Once in a while, despite our best efforts, we stumble. It’s not fair to you that we stumbled on your filet mignon. Let me make it up to you because I want your business for a long time. Please call at your convenience and ask for me personally. We’ll set this right. Doesn’t that seem so human and approachable? Even if John and Susan don’t come back, everyone else reading that bad review sees your response. If John and Susan do come back, I guarantee they’re going to write another review that is stellar. This accomplishes two things. It can turn that disgruntled customer into a truly loyal customer and it can impress future review readers with your professionalism....
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I’m always astonished to talk to business owners who really don’t know who they’re selling to. You know a business is off track when, in response to a question about who their customers are, they respond, “Pretty much everyone.” If you think your customer base is everyone, you’re unlikely to reach anyone in numbers that matter. Likewise, if you sell a product with tons of features and benefits but don’t segment your audience into interest groups, your marketing will be off target. Let’s say you’re running an airline and you haven’t segmented your audience to the point where you can see that the bulk of your revenue comes from weekday business travelers (I don’t even have an airline and I know this much, and don’t call me Shirley). If you proceed to spend lots of marketing efforts on promoting your great weekend fares, your main meal ticket is not going to be interested. They’ll look to someone else to fill their need who speaks their language and differentiates their offering based on something that matters to the business traveler. I was in a meeting today with a vendor to a large company. They were trying to describe a project they’re bidding on for Large Company but it was clear that Large Company was entirely unclear as to who their target audience really is. The deliverable is a set of documents for Large Company’s sales team. After listening and asking some questions, I said that for me to be able to help them, I needed to know a few things. Who is the intended audience? Who is the competitor for this product suite? What differentiates this product from the competitor? I’m not saying that these questions are easy to answer. But they’re the point from which the discussion must begin. In this case, it turns out there are multiple audiences. You can’t pitch the benefits of a highly-technical feature to the C-Suite occupants that may be the right benefit to pitch to the person operating the system once it’s installed. You have to know who the audience is. Since this product, like airline flights, is something that is not unique, there has to be something that differentiates it from competitors or else why would anyone care? It either has to differentiate on price or benefits; there is nothing else. I remember asking a web design company owner who their company’s competition was. He answered, “Really, no one.” Think about this. Every time someone does a search for “web design companies,” there are nine other competitors on the search-results page before the searcher ever sees a logo or a page design. If...
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What is it that appeals to us in advertising? We like to think the answer is…nothing. Not true. When we don’t feel pitched to, we respond with positive feelings towards advertising. Righters of Roadside Wrongs AAA has a new membership recruitment program that includes the following taglines: Righters of roadside wrongs Defenders of distressed drivers Sworn enemies of stalled engines Accompanying the lines (which I first saw on a Metro bus) are images of beer-bellied superheroes. There are a few things that appeal here. The alliteration in the lines The overblown importance of the role depicted The images of superheroes as regular guys or vice versa Alliteration, the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words, appeals to our auditory sense of balance and harmony. It makes things very easy to remember. Mnemonics often use alliteration. Our ears have fun with these sounds and the semblance of order they evoke. A sworn enemy is a very serious thing. But of course, the subject of the ad campaign is not terribly serious. Yes, we love having someone get us out of a jam but most of the time, it’s jumping a battery or changing a tire. The inflated importance suggested in the ad makes us smile, perhaps even chuckle. Anytime an advertiser can make us smile or laugh, they disarm our natural suspicion about them and we’re more open to the pitch. Occasionally, the men and women who show up for AAA are daily heroes. At least it feels that way when you’re on the receiving end of a rescue. In the image above, we see someone who could not be more ordinary. An ample waistline protrudes beneath his muscular arms. His stance implies, “Here and no further.” It’s a defenders stance. And finally, his international-orange highway vest streams out behind him like a cape. It’s a very clever bit of composition altogether. The words and images capture in shorthand a message that we understand immediately and makes us smile. This is very, very difficult to do. Its simplicity belies the effort behind the campaign. Undoubtedly the taglines preceded the images but the writers may have had concept images in mind (a virtual certainty). As a writer, I have a great appreciation for this...
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