Did you know reviews are one of the most influential purchasing factors for consumers?
You might be able to come up with a clever marketing campaign, but if your reviews don’t match how awesome you make your brand appear in ads, you won’t make very many sales.
In this article, I discuss how important reviews will be for the future of marketing.
How Online Reviews Will Shape the Future of Marketing
- Consumers will continue relying on reviews to make purchasing decisions.
- Social proof will continue to be a powerful marketing tool.
- Local SEO, which uses reviews as a ranking factor, will continue to sustain major search engine changes.
- Short-form video reviews will continue to be accessible both in creation and consumption.
- AI will help strengthen the legitimacy of online reviews by detecting fake reviews more effectively. It’s also being used to provide review summaries, a feature that will continue to evolve as LLMs become more sophisticated.
- Blockchain technology will help provide credibility to online reviews by making it impossible to leave reviews without a confirmed purchase.
Let’s discuss each of these.
1. Consumers Will Continue to Favor Online Reviews
Marketing campaigns are important for exposing your brand to new eyes, but it’s actually rare for customers to go directly to your website to learn more about your business these days.
This is thanks to local search results in Google, which give customers instant access to reviews you’ve acquired on Google as well as reviews you’ve earned on sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Trustpilot.
A statistic we cited in our guide on mastering online reviews states that over 50% of American consumers rely on reviews to make purchasing decisions. This statistic came from a Pew Research Center study that was released in 2016.
Even now, 71% of customers read online reviews when they browse local businesses, according to a recent consumer survey by BrightLocal.
The same survey also states that 40% of consumers read reviews from at least two review sites before making purchases, and 42% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they trust personal recommendations from friends and family.
This data proves that no matter how strong your marketing strategy is, online reviews will always play a role in a customer’s final purchasing decision.
2. Social Proof Will Continue to Be Important for Marketing
A powerful marketing tool that’s popular among marketing campaigns will continue to have a lot of influence over purchasing decisions.
I’m, of course, talking about social proof.
Social proof is a phenomenon that describes the way we’re more likely to do something after witnessing others do the same.
Those “others” could be celebrities and influencers, but trendsetters exist in your own social circles as well. You may even influence other people in your life to do something.
Social proof plays a huge role in marketing where it’s primarily used in influencer marketing and user-generated content (UGC) campaigns. Marketers will pay influencers to feature certain products in their content in hopes that those influencers’ followers will purchase said products.
Similarly, marketers will encourage loyal customers to participate in UGC campaigns (like participating in a hashtag challenge) in hopes of spreading brand awareness to new customers on social media.
The idea is that by witnessing others enjoy a product, we’re more likely to try it ourselves.
The same can be true for online reviews. When potential customers read a lot of positive reviews on Google or read testimonials on your website, they’re more likely to purchase from you.
Because social proof and online reviews go hand in hand, this shows how prevalent online reviews will continue to be.
3. Local SEO Will Survive the Rise of AI-Powered Search
If you’ve conducted at least one Google search over the last few years, you’ve probably seen a new section of the platform’s search engine results page (SERP): the AI overview.
This overview is provided by Google’s artificial intelligence bot, a technology that uses what’s known as a language learning model (LLM) to provide an answer to your query.
Fortunately, understanding the technical side of what powers AI is not important for marketing. What’s important is that you realize that because of this technology, some consumers are going to leave Google without clicking a single link.
These searches, called “zero-click searches,” are changing the way consumers interact with search engines.
That, combined with the rise of additional AI chatbots (like ChatGPT) and several changes to Google’s algorithm, have made content marketing less predictable than it used to be.
But there’s one thing that remains mostly unscathed from these new developments: local SEO.
Local search queries don’t trigger AI overviews as much as normal queries do.
This means that as long as you rank in Google’s local pack, you should still receive quite a few clicks to your website from local search terms.
And what’s one of the biggest ranking factors in local search? Reviews!
The more positive reviews you receive and the more you respond to reviews, the easier you’ll find it to rank in local search.
4. Short-Form Video Reviews Will Continue to Be Influential
Short-form videos have been around for a while, but they became wildly popular as TikTok became more popular in 2020.
Because content that gets posted to TikTok was a lot more casual and laid back than content posted to other platforms at the time, this content was seen as being a lot more accessible than other types of content, such as long-form YouTube videos, which are often shot with DSLR cameras.
Short-form videos can be shot with any old smartphone, so they’re a lot easier for the average consumer to create.
This has allowed a new kind of review to emerge: short-form video reviews. Open any short-form video platform (works best on TikTok), and search for the word “review.”
You’ll find a number of different reviews posted by average consumers, not influencers.
Even ecommerce websites have sections for video reviews these days.
Clearly, short-form videos are here to stay, and because UGC content is such a powerful way to boost your social media marketing strategy, short-form videos have made reviews more relevant than ever.
Check out these stats BrightLocal uncovered about video reviews in their survey:
- 31% of consumers watch videos from ordinary people on social media when looking for information about local businesses.
- 26% watch videos from friends and people they know on social media.
- 20% watch focused video review content from relevant influencers.
5. AI Will Bring Efficiency to Review Marketing
Amazon, the largest company in the ecommerce industry, and Google, the most popular review platform on the web (BrightLocal’s survey revealed that 83% of consumers find reviews on Google), are using machine-learning technology to detect, block, and remove fake reviews from their platforms.
Amazon states that its platform uses AI to analyze reviews for “known indicators” of fake reviews.
If AI determines a review is fake, it blocks that review from being posted (or removes it if it’s already posted).
If AI suspects a review is fake but cannot verify its credibility on its own, it gets help from experts who are specifically trained to recognize “abusive behavior.”
Amazon said its system blocked over 200 million fake reviews from being posted to its platform in 2022.
Similarly, Google states this technology allows its systems to “detect questionable review patterns even faster.”
Suspicious patterns that may be a signal of a mass fake review campaign include a reviewer leaving the same review on multiple businesses or a business receiving numerous 1 or 5-star reviews in quick succession.
In 2023, this new system allowed Google to remove 45% more fake reviews from its platform than the previous year.
Although AI is being used to create fake review campaigns, it’s also providing credibility by detecting fake reviews as fast as they’re being published.
6. Blockchain Technology Will Make Reviews More Authentic
Blockchain is most often associated with cryptocurrency, but this technology actually has a lot of different applications it can be used for.
Investopedia defines blockchain as a…
“…decentralized digital database or ledger that securely stores records across a network of computers in a way that is transparent, immutable, and resistant to tampering. Each “block” contains data, and the blocks are linked in a chronological “chain.””
With that definition in mind, let’s discuss how this technology can be used to make reviews more authentic.
Currently, some companies use bot farms to mass produce reviews using AI and other automation tactics. These companies are mass producing reviews for their own products or dozens of 1-star reviews for competing products.
As WEPIN explains, blockchain technology can be used to create a cryptographic link between the blockchain record for a confirmed purchase of a product and a review for that product.
As WEPIN says, this will make it “impossible for anyone who has not actually purchased the product to leave a review” and that the system will be able to block reviews for fake purchases in which reviewers obtained refunds.
Because this system makes reviews more authentic and trustworthy as a whole, they’re more likely to be used as an important part of a brand’s marketing strategy.
How to Manage Online Reviews
Use these quick tips to supercharge your review marketing strategy:
- Use review platforms that are relevant to your industry. If you’re a local business, make sure you’re on Google, Yelp, and Facebook.
- Use review platforms your competitors are using.
- Ask customers to leave reviews for your business/products. Use follow-up email campaigns, and include inserts on product packaging, receipts, and delivery boxes.
- Respond to positive reviews with genuine, non-canned responses.
- Respond to negative reviews respectfully. Own up to mistakes, but don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself and your employees if a customer is in the wrong.
- Report suspected fake reviews to whichever platforms they’re left on.
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