Reputation is your most important business asset. It takes hard work to generate a good reputation, But how do you leverage your reputation to grow your business?

First, you need to understand Social Proof and how you can use it to enhance your reputation and accelerate your business.

When we talk about social proof, we’re talking about how the actions our friends, family, colleagues and neighbors influence our decisions about what’s cool, good, and trustworthy; and help us make similar choices.

The conversations that used to take place over the backyard fence or at the kid’s soccer game now takes place online as well. People use recommendation sites like Yelp, Trip Advisor and even reviews on Amazon before making a purchase. They regularly ask their friends and neighbors for recommendations about home service businesses on Facebook, in apps like Next Door Now, and on websites like Angie’s List and Home Advisor.

Before digital marketing, social proof didn't have quite the reach it enjoys today.

When I see my neighbor is getting a new roof and see the contractor’s sign in their yard, I make a few assumptions. I assume that my neighbor has done their homework and hired someone they can trust to do a great job. I assume they got a decent price, and since our homes are about the same age, I might even assume I should get my roof checked, because it might have problems I don’t know about. But if I live in a small cul de sac, the sign probably doesn’t get noticed by more than a few people- so as a contractor, how do you let more people know about your great work?

Now with social media and the growing numbers of online review and recommendation sites, people have access to even more opinions and recommendations at their fingertips than ever before. This makes it important for any business owner to participate in local Facebook groups and Next Door Now, if only to be able to offer your services when needed and monitor what customers may be saying about you to their friends and neighbors.

The first challenge of reputation management in the world of digital reviews is knowing what is being said about you and where- that’s reputation monitoring. But business growth will come from reputation enhancement, and that requires another level of engagement.

Leveraging Online Reviews

You do great work every day- but how do you let other people know about it? In the past, businesses would use selected quotes or testimonials on their website, but those often look like they are overly positive or biased. Now, customers leave reviews for you online, including on Google, and these reviews show up in search results.

One of the most important pieces of online reputation management involves setting up and managing a Google My Business listing for your company. This free tool can give your business a tremendous leg up in local search results, and it’s another reason why should should ask every customer to leave you a review on Google.

Google also has a free Small Thanks program, that lets you download graphics with quotes from your five star reviews that your can use for posters or share on social media. This is a simple way to leverage your already great reviews and share them out to a wider audience.

One of the graphics provided by Google of a customer review left for our client ECI Comfort in Bensalem, PA

But beyond asking for more reviews, what can you do today to help more people know about the great work you do? We help our HVAC contractors do this through a Case Study Platform.

One of the Best Tools to Help Convey Social Proof- The Case Study

At Comfort Media Group, we help our clients write case studies for the jobs they perform every day. Instead of hoping a simple quote or review will convince someone to pick up the phone, we demonstrate the expertise of the contractor by writing a short story about the different jobs they’ve done, illustrated with pictures from the job, to show and tell a potential customer what they can expect. It’s basically a slightly more formal version of the conversation the homeowner might have with their friends over a beer in the backyard.

The conversation might be:

“We just hated taking a full weekend every year to put in those stupid air conditioning units. They’re heavy, my kids hate to help, and the things are noisy as all heck, and expensive.  My bills are crazy. I needed to do something, and Joe said his friend Ron had helped him out, so I gave them a call. He came out and suggested we could use this ductless system to get AC all year and free up the windows. It can even act as a heater, which will make my wife happy- she’s always complaining. You gotta get one of these for your workshop!”

That gets translated into:

“Our homeowners were relying on window air conditioners to cool their house in the summer, but it just wasn’t working for them. Between the pain of installing and uninstalling the units twice a year, and having to guess what weekend would be the best while trying to predict the weather- they were over it and wanted a better solution. They heard about ECI Comfort from a friend, and asked us to come out and take a look.

When we looked at this split level home, we knew what the problem was right away. They were relying on baseboard heat and window units, and the house ended up having hot and cold spots, meaning the family wasn’t ever truly comfortable.”

We then talk about the problem and why the product and solution were a good fit and a good value for the home, along with information about any rebates and financing that help make the solution affordable.

The customer and the home are the centerpiece of the story, and we’re just the helpers making their problems go away. And this is more powerful than you might think.

Why Case Studies Work

Case studies work on several levels.

First of all, they provide a great opportunity for you to showcase the work you do for real people. Your potential customers can see themselves and their home in the story, and start to think about how this might be the perfect solution for them as well. This is the social proof working at its best.

We also add calls to action, to allow folks to click a button and find out more, making them great web pages for generating warm leads and educating customers about potential solutions to their problems.

The web pages are filled with keywords, making it a great way to generate additional hyper-local organic traffic through search engine optimization (SEO). All the long tail keywords you might consider for online advertising are incorporated, to get you the inbound leads you want, with customers who are already educated about what you can do.

In the video above, our own Don Lafferty explains the importance of publishing case studies for your HVAC business.

We then take the case studies and aggregate them onto additional pages based on service area neighborhoods and home type. This means customers can see jobs you've done in their town, but also jobs you've done with homes similar to theirs, again providing additional social proof that you are more than capable of solving their problem and have the experience to do it.

We also use case studies through email marketing and social media, to help educate a potential customer before they sit down with a salesperson. By the time the salesperson arrives, the customer already has an idea of what to expect and what kind of questions they need answered in order to make a final decision.

And best of all, we’ve seen conversion rates for people looking at the case studies go through the roof compared to other web pages.

Social Proof is one of the most powerful tools we have in our sales arsenal. All it requires is that you do a little more documentation in your day to day work to collect information, and then tell the stories about what you do to a wider audience on the web. Your work will speak for itself, your customers get to show off the great decisions they’ve made, and new customers will be able to get many of their questions answered before they ever pick up a phone- making for higher quality leads and improved conversion rates by simply letting the world know what you do.

There’s nothing better!

Dealing With Bad Reviews

Everyone gets a bad review sometime. Keeping an eye on your online reviews using tools like Google Alerts lets you respond to any negative reviews with a message that not only tries to address the problem with the unhappy customer, but provides additional social proof that your company is dedicated to solving problems that happen and are responsive to customer needs.

Research has actually showed that a few “bad” reviews, especially those with a response, can be beneficial. Customers often think if you only 5 star reviews, this is “too good to be true” and they may suspect the reviews aren’t all genuine. Customers sometimes seek out the lesser star reviews to specifically find out what happens if something does go wrong with a purchase (we do this- and oftentimes, the review gives you information about why this product didn’t work for this particular person, or they are making complaints that seem minor, immaterial or silly, giving us even more confidence in the seller!). That’s also why responding promptly and completely to unhappy customers and their online reviews is critical.

Overcoming a bad reputation

We once were working with a client who sold cars. A google review once referred to their business as “Satan Ford”- and the most recent review was luke warm, saying “Despite all the bad google reviews, we gave them a chance and they weren’t as horrible as the reviews said, but…”  This is clearly bad news for a business, and they were probably losing business they didn’t even know they had a chance to get. We put a plan in place for them that 1- looked at all the reviews and put plans in place to solve the problems, mostly in the service department. 2- after the improvements were in place, specifically asked customers for their online reviews, knowing that the most recent reviews (and hopefully positive ones) would start to “push down” the negative reviews.

Here’s the truth- your reputation is based on how your business and the people in your business perform.  If your office staff is rude to customers, or if the service guys don’t take the time to clean up after a job, thank the homeowner, etc. your customers now have the ability to put a dent in your reputation online. It will be there for everyone- not just their friends and family- to see. Likewise, by giving you a positive review, they can help enhance your reputation and earn additional business you might not have otherwise had access to. Don’t get angry at a bad review- Solve the underlying problem. That might mean talking to the office staff about how to treat customers, or reviewing how to double check to leave everything in good shape after finishing a job with your techs.

Once the underlying issue(s) are resolved, you can start actively asking for reviews from customers on relevant sites.  Most people are more than willing to give you are review, particularly when you’ve helped them get AC on the hottest day of the year, solved a heater problem in the snow, or helped them get a rebate and a decent deal.  They are grateful and happy. BUT you DO have to ask. Many people won’t think of taking the time to do a review on their own, so providing them links to sites where you’d like to see a review will help encourage them to take the time to do so.