Utilizing tech rating and review sites is an important step in achieving your long-term advocacy goals. As you progress through your marketing initiatives, you’ve realized the value of using technology business review sites, knowing that reviews influence tech buyer decisions. These reviews will raise your visibility in Google rankings, resulting in better click-through rates. Your company and product or service profiles are complete, and your targeted email and your embedded outreach campaigns are running smoothly. By now, you should have received some reviews on Gartner Peer Insights, and are currently working to increase their number by leveraging their content into emails, social media, and blog posting promotions.

But what’s next?

There are other benefits of using the platform and sourcing reviews consistently. These include access to readership analytics, and possible entry into well-known industry market guides and documents such as the Magic Quadrant, Voice of the Customer, and Peer Lessons Learned.

You’ve received your first reviews, now what? – Leverage and promote

Once you have received your first published reviews, you can leverage their content for marketing. You can showcase reviews in customized social media posts, use links to the reviews in your blog posts, and add links to your email signature. Email, social media, and blog campaigns can easily reach your broader client base.

Sharing a reviewer’s opinion through social media or blogs often drives others to submit their own experiences, and works towards achieving your long-term advocacy goals. Promoting review content is another good way of sourcing reviews. To further incentivize and play on competitive spirit, you can ask if they agree with the opinion. People want their voices heard!

Adding the Gartner Peer Insights widget to your website displays your current star rating and can contain extracts from the reviews. The widget is just another opportunity to source reviews, as it links directly to your pages on the Gartner Peer Insights platform.

First Goals: Access to analytics – The Customer First Program

Once you have sourced 25+ published reviews, you are eligible to join the Customer First Program. Joining the program demonstrates to customers that you are committed to listening to them, and that you value their feedback. Obtaining and displaying the award is a trust signal. When your application has been accepted, you will receive the following:

A Customer First badge on both your profile and product pages on the Gartner Peer Insights platform. *Tip: You can place the badge on your website, and it can link to your profile on Gartner Peer Insights.
Access to Readership Analytics to see how buyers spend their time looking at your products compared to the market.

To join the Customer First Program, you initially need to:

Host a Gartner Peer Insights widget on your website – turning your reviews into customized marketing assets. The widgets are dynamic, and show your company name, market name, rating, number of verified reviews, and the latest reviews. Your customers will be able to see the reviews with just one click, and just as important, there is also a link to submit a review. The widgets can be customized to match your website.

Submit a short online agreement form with proof of the displayed widget and participation details.

Source 25 reviews in a single market.

Further goalposts Entry into Gartner research documents

Reviews of your company on Gartner Peer Insights generate international visibility for your brand. Once you have set your long-term advocacy goals and your advocacy program is up and running, the next step is to monitor inclusion in Gartner research documents – those that leverage Gartner Peer Insights review data and insights and get the most visibility for any product/market. These market guides include:

The Gartner Magic Quadrant
Voice of the Customer, including Customer Distinctions
Lessons Learned
Technology Provider Consideration and Selection

To be considered for inclusion in these documents, 10 reviews per market per year must be completed.

A Customers’ Choice award requires 50 reviews per year per market in 12 months. The average rating must meet or exceed the market average, and all of your reviews must not be concentrated in one industry, deployment region, or company size.

How to keep buyers looking at your profile

Give end-users what they want to see. Completing your company and product profiles may have already raised your visibility by up to 80%. But how do you keep buyers looking at and returning to your profile when they are in-market? Use this quick checklist as a guide:

Consistency is the key – buyers want to see fresh, updated details and a consistent flow of fresh reviews.
Are your reviews current or recently published? According to G2, 85% of readers ignore reviews older than 3 months old.
Make sure you have a good volume of reviews in the past 12 months relative to the total number of reviews in the market.
Source reviews from various company sizes/job roles so that they can filter to see reviews from others just like them.

When things don’t go to plan, consider troubleshooting

Occasionally, problems will arise. Some individuals will not want to be contacted or may have been included on a data list when they should not have been, so it is essential to work compliantly in this regard and have a plan on how to address any problems.

The quality of the data for your targeted campaigns is paramount. You will get bounce-backs and occasionally disgruntled email recipients, but the better quality of data that you work with, the more smoothly the whole program runs. Always respond to any direct emails in a timely manner and with care.

Your sales team should be aware that you are running targeted campaigns, but are you prepared for re-sellers to come back to you potentially angry that you contacted their clients?

When an uncommitted, or negative review is submitted, you have the right to reply. Reviewers expect a response within seven days, so it’s important to address this. Your reply is then seen underneath the review published on the platform. This enables anyone reading the review to see that your company is attentive to addressing problems in a positive way.

Up to 35-40% of reviews submitted to Gartner Peer Insights get rejected. This is because they have a very strict moderation process, but they will provide the reviewer with reasons for rejection, and an opportunity to amend. A high quality in the data used to source reviews can often help to lower this rate.

Why Bora?

Partner with us to achieve your long-term advocacy goals! As part of our commitment to managing your advocacy campaigns with Gartner Peer Insights, we keep ahead of any changes with the Gartner Peer Insights platform to ensure that our clients always have the leading edge. By trusting our knowledge, you cut out the onboarding, meetings, outreach, and constant monitoring.

Our team of content experts and writers will help design your review site profiles, giving you customized email campaigns so that you get the best results. At Bora, we know the importance of incentivizing the reviewers with a small reward for writing a review, and we will keep your reviews coming in.

We can help you to clean your data and keep your rejection rates down, writing responses to any reviews that need attention, and following up with out-of-office responses, as we know this can produce positive results.

Enjoyed this blog on Long-term advocacy goals for tech rating and review sites? Interested in using a cybersecurity business review site to create a current and visible marketplace for prospective customers? Our resources can help you to learn Why and how to complete review platform landing pages, 4 Reasons Why Cybersecurity Marketers Should Invest in Customer Advocacy, and The Value of a Cybersecurity Customer Review Platform.

And please contact us here if you would like to talk to someone about our content marketing and advocacy services.