@tjrobertson52

The number one thing small businesses can do to get more customers is something that an agency cannot do for you. I've been doing digital marketing for small businesses for 16 years now. I've worked with hundreds of businesses, and almost none of them understand how important this is.

Therefore, if you understand the value and how to do it, it puts you at a huge advantage over your competitors.

If you haven't figured out what I'm talking about yet, it's getting customer reviews. Not only is this the primary metric people use when deciding what business to go with, it's also one of the most important ranking factors in Google. So let me explain what you can do as a business owner to get more reviews.

Because if your agency says they can do this for you, run away.

You don't want to work with that agency. Getting fake reviews on your listing is one of the easiest ways for it to get suspended. The most important thing for getting more reviews is just to understand how valuable they really are.

As a rule of thumb, take the profit you get from one customer and assume every review is worth about that much.

Meaning, if you get 100 reviews and your competition gets zero reviews, it's going to end up netting you an additional 100 customers in the future that your competitor will not get. Once you put that dollar amount on it, you can see that it's worth putting some effort or even some expense into getting more reviews. Now, the most important action you can take to get more reviews is just to ask for them.

My recommendation is to ask every single customer.

A lot of businesses are afraid to do this because they're afraid that the customer is going to leave them a negative review. But here's the thing. The customers who are going to leave you a negative review are going to do it whether or not you ask.

The people who forget are the ones who are going to leave you a positive review.

So when you start asking more customers, you just get more positive reviews. The second thing is to follow up. People forget.

They want to leave you a positive review, they just forget.

So find some way to send them a text, send them an email, reminding them to leave you a positive review. And make sure you're making it as easy as possible for the customer. Google will provide you a link and a QR code that goes straight to the page they leave a review on.

And finally, consider incentivizing the review.

Remember, each review is worth big money. My favorite idea for how to do this comes from Alex Formozi. You tell your staff that they'll get some dollar amount, $5, $50 for every review they get with their name mentioned.

Then, instead of having your staff member ask for review, once a customer is satisfied with your product or service, either you or a manager can let them know, hey, if you leave us a review on Google, such and such staff member gets 20 bucks.

They're much more likely to do it if they feel like they're helping out that staff member that just helped them.