Do you want to get five-star ratings for your home care agency?
Do you anguish over a lack of good online reviews?
Reputation is everything.
You can run hundreds of dollars on ads. Have a website that looks like a million bucks.
But your home care prospects want to know what others think of you.
Customers know that any company can say anything they want about themselves. But what have your clients said about your service? That’s the proof of the pudding.
Don’t you do the same when you shop online?
This is why high ratings and comments from your clients are so important. And why Google displays your ratings on your Google My Business page. Google will not only do this, but they will even extract the ratings from other social media sites such as Facebook and put it on GMB. And Google and other search engines give a lot of weight to customer ratings. So if you want higher rankings, get good reviews.
How to get five-star ratings
Here’s a success story of a local business – an insurance company with whom we at Savvy Senior Marketing have been working for a while. They were able to garner 17 five-star ratings for their local Medicare, Marketplace and private health life insurance business.
We had been advising this company about the benefits of direct mail marketing – in other words, using the US Postal Service to reach out to current and future clients. I had explained to the owner that with all the rush to digital marketing in the past twenty years, people had more or less pushed aside direct mail as old hat, or something too expensive or out of date.
Not true.
In fact, many businesses have missed the opportunity to get more business with this highly personal, and high-tactile approach. There’s not that much direct mail sent as there used to be, and your business can stand out.
A number of months after our conversation, the insurance agent mailed personal letters to several hundred of his clients. He simply asked them, “If you’ve been happy with my service, would you be able to give me a five-star rating on my Google profile?”
And 17 of them did. There were none less than five-star.
Caution about soliciting ratings
But beware. Google does not like solicited ratings. They operate from a somewhat purist mentality and will even penalize you if they find that you have manipulated clients through digital means to give you positive reviews. Google says,
“Don’t discourage or prohibit negative reviews or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers.”
On the same page, it also says,
“Don’t solicit reviews from customers in bulk.”
Google wants honesty when it comes to reviews. You are just supposed to let the reviews come in, and thus get the most balanced response from the public.
But this approach seldom results in a balanced approach.
Human nature being what it is, a negative experience generates greater motivation to take action than a positive one. If you do nothing to ask for favorable responses and let the chips fall where they may, you will get more negative comments than positive ones.
The marketing industry has found ways to stay within Google’s limits, not violate their terms, and yet get good ratings. One of these ways is with personal letters sent through the post office. In this case it’s not bulk, since each letter is personalized and sent directly to your client. Of course since it’s paper it’s also under the radar as far as Google is concerned.
You might be saying, wait – direct mail is more time consuming and costs more.
But we think you’ll find that the results are very effective, and well worth it.
Do you want to get high ratings on Google My Business and social media sites? Think about a direct mail approach.
We have experience with direct mail. If you would like to talk about using direct mail to get positive ratings on your Google My Business page, make a calendar appointment for a Free 1:1 Home Care Marketing Session with me today. Or contact me by email.
