Starting a successful online business is a substantial challenge. Not only do you need to charge competitive prices, but you also need a brand that differentiates you from your competitors. If you don’t, your enterprise will fall flat. 

Smart entrepreneurs, therefore, should leverage online reviews as something that sets them apart from the competition. 

Reviews are different from regular marketing. For one, you don’t have any control over them. Instead, they’re the product of your audience. And second, they’re perceived in a radically different way to conventional advertising. Customers know that reviews come from their peers which makes them more trustworthy and believable. 

Utilising reviews, however, is a challenge. While they can provide profound insights and the ability to respond to customer feedback, you need to be careful with how you use them, as the following infographic shows.

Ideally, you shouldn’t wade in the moment somebody posts a review, glean data from it and then use that to augment your operations. It is much better to wait for a “critical mass” of surveys before making any decisions. The more data you have, the more reliably and productively you can use feedback.

Big data is a vast opportunity. It gives you a chance to plumb the depths of your reviews and look for issues that continue to arise. You can then feed these data into your ROI modelling to work out whether making changes to your production processes will benefit your business overall. 

If you’re interested in the ins-and-outs of online reviews, check out the following infographic for more information. 

Infographic by University of Alabama Birmingham