Top 5 Ways to Profit from a Positive Guest Review

by Josiah Mackenzie on May 25, 2009 4 Comments

Can you hear me?When a guest leaves you a positive review on a site like TripAdvisor, it’s not only more powerful than advertising – it can have multiple uses. I encourage you to “recycle” your positive guest reviews to get the most benefit:

1) Publish it on your website – Rather than just pontificating on how great your hotel is, get others to sing your praises. You may want to feature positive reviews directly on your home page, or create a separate page like the Inn at Bay Harbor did.

2) Include it in your reservations system – In my web booking system makeover, I talked about the importance of reassuring the guest if you want to improve conversions. You may want to put the positive review in the sidebar so it’s visible without being distracting. With a little piece of code, you can randomly draw from a list, and display a different review each time.

3) Feature it in your offline advertising – Electronics retailer Best Buy understands the role customer reviews play in influencing buying decisions. That’s why they use snippets of online reviews in their print advertising.

4) Use it in your marketing collateral – Take this beyond advertising: what other communications materials could you put positive feedback on or in? Newsletters? Press releases? Social networks?

5) Borrow it for your AdWords campaign – Frankly, I’m a little hesitant to share this tip because its effectiveness may diminish if a lot of people use it. :) In limited AdWords test campaigns for a few clients, I’ve experimented with using guest testimonials in the ad copy. Because this stands out from the self-praise most hotels publish, I’ve seen excellent results. You may want to give it a try:

Example of guest-written Adwords copy

Guest-written Adwords copy

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Article by Josiah Mackenzie // May 25, 2009 Josiah spends pretty much all day, every day looking for ways you can use new media and the social web to improve your business. To bring him on your team, you should look at our Insider's Circle program here.

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Comments

 
  • hhotelconsult // May 26, 2009 @ 3:14 pm Reply

    Funny Josiah… I know what you are talking about. You want to create discourse, conversation, collaboration… but you don’t always want to give away your peach of a trick. Thanks for sharing, and we appreciate it quite a bit, as always. Cheers, and be well!

    Michael @hhotelconsult, @thehotelshotel, @foodbevfeed

  • Josiah Mackenzie // May 26, 2009 @ 5:30 pm Reply

    Thanks, Michael! I once heard someone say “Always give away your best secrets” – and that’s sort of been my marketing mantra since :)

  • Nuno Valinhas // May 27, 2009 @ 7:36 am Reply

    Hi Josiah,

    As always, great tips, great posts!

    We, at Tiara Hotels & Resorts, are currently seeing more and more referals precisely because of positive guest reviews.

    For example, in the past 6 months, our ranking in TripAdvisor has been uptades almost every two weeks. One tool that TripAdvisor provides to the hotels is the chance to directly input a html code with updated reviews or ranking positioning of the hotel. This is definitely one of my “to do” next steps, both in our website, as well as in our booking page.

    Clients don’t want to know just how much it will cost. They want to get the idea, preferably from other clients, if the cost will match their expectations and they, of course, feel more secure when they’re going to book the hotel.

    Cheers!

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