Customer reviews are a powerful thing. Of course, your own customer reviews help build your credibility, but here are 6 ways to use your competitors’ reviews to your advantage.
Discover Your Target Audience
Do you really know your audience? You might be surprised to find out from reviews that grandparents are buying products for grandkids, rather than the kids’ parents. Or, that more women are purchasing your product for their husbands than men are purchasing the products for themselves. These consumers are purchasing products or services like the ones you offer, despite advertising direction. Imagine the impact if you reach out to the untapped audience with effective marketing.
Improve Your Descriptions
Customer reviews can include a lot of helpful language and a perspective that might offer a surprising angle to the value of what you offer. You might see language in your competitors’ reviews that you can use within your own product descriptions. Synonyms, descriptions and terms that your audience is using may come as a surprise, but using that same language will make your content more reliable and achieve better SEO. Matching search terms with relevant content is one of the most important ways to advertise your business.
Crafting Valuable Content
Reviews can help you discover how your target audience is using the product and what problems they are having. If a competitor’s customers, for example, are lamenting over the complicated instructions for product set-up, then you could write a very helpful tutorial on set-up and potentially win some brand converts. You also may discover that the audience is using their products in some unforeseen way, which could give you marketing ideas for reaching a broader audience.
Cross-Sell Opportunities for Intelligent Advertising
Are you using intelligent advertising to better reach your audience? Using your competitors’ customer reviews, you may notice that certain purchases are warranting specific needs. A customer who bought a camera might comment on how she wished she had thought about a case, or how glad she was to add on the lens filters. You can use these product clues to cross-sell additional products for a bigger profit.
Product Warnings
You might not know there is any issue with quality at point of sale, but by staying on top of your competitors’ reviews, you can catch the issues plaguing their audience. This knowledge helps you create the right warning labels to help your audience avoid common pitfalls. As your brand becomes known for helping customers get what they really want, you will form loyal customers who come to you for the information they trust.
Product Policies
One-size-fits all return and exchange policies may not be best for your business. While you want to dissuade customers from simply changing their minds on a purchase after a few months have gone by, you also don’t want customers to feel hassled when something goes wrong with the product. If you notice reviewers telling your competitor there is a common issue, be sure to include a special note to your own audience as a heads-up and pair it with a super easy return policy if anything is, in fact, wrong after the order is received.
Consumer reviews are huge, but they are worth more than just boosting your business image. Use competitor reviews to write product copy and write new content. Better yet, point your writers to your competitors and let them work their magic!
Alethea M. is a writer at WriterAccess, covering topics that range from marketing and design to photography and chiropractic care. She loves pulling out interesting facts from her corporate blogging research to impress friends at dinner parties.
