Why use advocacy strategy on tech review site Gartner Peer Insights?
What is Gartner Peer Insights?
A technology rating and review site
Gartner Peer Insights is a technology solution and service rating and review site. It fulfills the in-market buyer need for more than just industry analysis to learn about enterprise products and offers comprehensive, verified peer feedback.
According to Gartner, 85% of buyers use their peers for information and ask their friends and associates about their technology experiences. Most buyers use a technology business review site to look for well-informed feedback on their intended purchase, read unbiased, recent reviews, and look at product comparisons and vendor-provided details.
Why use Gartner Peer Insights?
Peer feedback drives purchasing decisions
Reviews include critical demographics, detailed ratings, and qualitative comments to help buyers understand the product from the perspective of a similar role or company size to guide their purchase. The reviews also provide end-user experience with a product, including the set-up and implementation.
Vendors are provided with free landing pages where they can highlight the value of their products to potential customers. All the vendor detail and review materials are available at no cost to the public. Gartner Peer Insights has 1M+ visitors per month viewing content from 500K+ markets and performing 3M+ product comparisons occur each year. And if that wasn’t enough, review sourcing is the gateway to entry into industry market guides such as the Magic Quadrant. Your company should be a part of all that!
Image: Gartner Magic Quadrant example
Educate Buyers using Gartner Peer Insights
Complete complimentary vendor profiles
If you are now keen to educate prospective buyers about your brand, use this free online real estate. A new vendor to the Gartner Peer Insights platform will need to sign up and go through the onboarding process to establish a company presence and determine relevant markets for products or services. Once the landing pages are created, the vendor and product profiles can be filled out using the backend vendor portal.
Profile content that can be uploaded includes:
- A company description of up to 1000 characters, describing your company’s overall focus and the main business problem(s) it helps solve.
- A company logo. Guidelines are as follows: Only .jpg, .png, or.jpeg files, an aspect ratio of 1:1 is recommended, and a file size of less than 200KB.
- Product or service description of up to 1000 characters describing what it does, its main features, and what business problems it helps solve.
- Screenshots of your product “in action” can be found on your Product Profile. Please ensure that these are actual screenshots of the product in use rather than marketing materials or images unrelated to your product. Adding screenshots for services is optional, but you can include service architecture diagrams.
Top tip: Ensure all your descriptions are unique and the copy does not appear anywhere else on the web to avoid messing with SEO.
Drive Reviews using Gartner Peer Insights
Setting up your gift card account
Once your company, product, or service pages are set up, it is best to know if you wish to source reviews company-wide or if the focus is to target a single product in a single market.
In your outreach campaigns, you can offer an incentive of $25 gift cards (awarded through a connected third party) to your contacts for completing an approved review. The gift cards are multi-incentive and can even be donated to charities by the reviewer. Alternatively, you can offer a complimentary 3-month Gartner Peer Insights Plus subscription, allowing access to their latest technology research and insights. However, with experience, we have found that money talks, and we get the highest response rate from reviewers when offered the $25! You will need to set up the gift card account with the approved third party, but then the distribution process is automatic. You will get an alert when the count reaches the point where you need to top-up to fulfill more card requests.
Image: Courtesy of Gartner
Image: Courtesy of Gartner
Top tip: If you are a newly onboarded vendor, take advantage of the 50 free gift cards available.
Review sourcing
There are many effective ways to source reviews, including embedding your outreach by leveraging customer touchpoints and by targeted outreach to your contacts. In the vendor portal, you can create tracking codes for all your campaigns to see the number of submitted, rejected, and published reviews. You will be shown how to do this during onboarding, and any further questions can be addressed with the Gartner Peer Insights Program Manager you are assigned.
Embedded Outreach
An embedded outreach strategy might include adding a “review ask” at specific touchpoints like email signatures and chatbot workflows. Your workforce can use this type of outreach after the following:
- Implementation, post-implementation follow-up, and annual follow-up
- Renewal or upgrade
Targeted Outreach
Targeted outreach can include email campaigns, personal outreach from CEOs, Sales, or Customer Service, and social media and events, to name a few. To begin an email campaign, you will need the following:
- A company email address, e.g., yourname@yourcompanyname.com
- Reliable data – Your company contact lists.
Partners, affiliates, distributors, or re-sellers can also be asked, but these reviews do not ultimately count in your ultimate star rating. Note that the Gartner review moderation process is strict, and up to 40% of all submitted reviews are rejected. This strict moderation process is one of the reasons why they are so trusted.
Top tip: Before you start, agree to collaborate with your Social Media Manager to showcase great review content, with the call-to-action being a review ask.
Image: Gartner Social Card Template
Gartner recommends that you source reviews over a continuous 12-month period rather than a massive effort once a year. They have observed that vendors who campaign steadily over the year are in a better position for their customers, competitive edge, and Gartner research documents that leverage Gartner Peer Insights review data and insights, i.e., Magic Quadrant, Voice of the Customer.
So much to do, too little time? We partner with you to get results!
Bora can help by doing the work for you. We have extensive knowledge of the Gartner Peer Insights platform and an ongoing relationship with their program managers. Our complete A-Z service includes:
- creating and updating your profile;
- regular management of the forum; and
- sourcing your reviews.
We produce unique, customized copy for your profiles, email campaigns, social media, and blog content, and we help with embedded campaigns.
With our guidance, you will soon receive peer reviews, 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 Lessons Learned. Do you already have an active profile? No problem, we can come in at any stage.
If you are interested in using a cybersecurity business review site to create a current and visible marketplace for prospective customers, read and learn more about Advocacy Marketing for the Cybersecurity Industry, 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.
