The Importance of Peer-to-Peer Customer Advocacy Sites

Independent if you are a B2B, 'business to business,' or B2C, 'business to consumer, 'industry,' how you show up digitally will have a lasting impact on your business success.

With B2B e-commerce utilizing online platforms to sell products or services to other businesses, and B2C e-commerce targeting personal consumers, it is critical that your web presence and messaging are optimized across all platforms.

The main B2B review sites include G2, Capterra, Software Advice, and Trust Radius. Like more global analysts and reviews, customer advocacy reviews are an integral part of the software buying process, with two-thirds of software buyers reporting that reviews significantly impacted their purchasing decision. 82% of buyers find review sites valuable in their search.

When researching software options, buyers look for various reviews - presenting reviews that vary in length and content helps you gain buyers' trust and validate your services. Most of this research happens before any engagement with the vendors. 77% of B2B buyers conduct extensive research on software before talking to sales representatives.

For small and local businesses, optimizing profiles on Yelp, Google, FourSquare, and Trip Advisor can be vital to your long-term success. Roughly 12% of US Consumers use Yelp regularly—providing reviews and leveraging peer insights to make purchasing decisions. Depending on your business category or industry, there can be several business listing opportunities where your customers will learn about solutions. Customers often rely on these sites to help identify the right product or service because they don't already have a direct referral from a trusted source like a family member, friend, or colleague. So customers are turning to these peer review sites with their category or need in mind, but they have no preconceived vendor they are checking on. The playing field is mainly open; you need to ensure that you are optimizing your presence on these review sites by maintaining accurate business listings, sharing customer reviews, and building out fully build out your profile with content and images. For a small fee, many of these peer-to-peer and business listings sites will allow you to "sponsor" or advertise to your target audience. Yelp even will enable you to create Yelp Connect Posts that are promoted to new and existing customers through emails and pushed on the Yelp app. 

Now that you know the importance of showing up on the correct peer-to-peer review sites or business listing sites, what next? What sites are available for you to promote your business on? Which sites are your customers leveraging most? Which sites are your customers present on? How can you manage your profiles on all of these sites? It would help if you had a strategy for managing your presence on all directory and peer-to-peer review sites. It would be best if you also had a plan to generate customer reviews, regardless of how new your business is. And finally, you could benefit from a strategy and automated way to find what is being said about your business online and respond quickly to positive and negative reviews. To build a solid online presence and increase consistent traffic, it's essential to be present where your customers are and to take control of your brand sentiment.

At Red Panda Marketing, we offer our customers a free Business Toolkit to get you started with managing your online business listings, requesting and managing reviews, and keeping track of your overall reputation. Contact us today to get set up with your free Business Toolkit account.