5 steps to starting your review management campaign

This guide is for restaurants, retailers and similar storefront businesses. It offers step-by-step instructions for getting your landing page and review campaign up and running.

1. Find your major review site listings across the web.

Once you’ve created your account and logged in to your dashboard, automatically search and load in links for your business’s existing listings across the most important major review sites by clicking the Connect a Location button in Dashboard > Funnel > Links > Review Profile.

These review site listings (on sites like Google+ and Facebook) are arguably the most important to your business’s visibility and reputation on the internet and are almost always the most worthwhile place to collect reviews. Not only are these major sites the most visited by your potential customers, they also affect your visibility and presentation in search engines.

2. Find your industry-specific review site listings across the web.

While major review sites are the most important for your business’s SEO and overall reputation, smaller industry-specific review sites are still valuable channels for gathering new customers. You may want to consider creating or seeking out existing listings on the following review sites (we integrate with all of the sites mentioned):

• Restaurants/food service.
• Opentable
• Zomato (formerly UrbanSpoon)
• Zagat
• Restaurant.com
• Menupages
• Auto dealerships.
• DealerRater
• Edmunds
• Cars.com
• Auto repair.
• AutoMD
• Repair Pal
• Bridal retail.
• WeddingWire
• The Knot

As always, if there’s a review site for your industry that you’d like to see included, please feel free to get in touch with us.

3. Hand out printed review invites at the point of sale.

We offer several tools to drive customers to your landing page, including printed invites. Printed invites are uniquely useful in a storefront business environment. Here are a few ideas for incorporating our printed invites into your workflow:

• Include with the bill at the end of a meal.
• Attach to a receipt.
• Leave in a business card holder at the cash register/host table.
• Place in the bag at checkout.
• Include in customer mailings.

Note that we offer the proofing and printing of these cards in-house and at cost; you may want to experiment with creating similar invitations with your existing printer or finding additional ways to incorporate your landing page URL into your business literature.

If you keep an email list, you might also consider using our drip campaigns or your email software to send a review invitation to your customers via email.

4. Optional: Monitor your reviews across sites and keep tabs on what people are saying about you.

It’s important to take a proactive approach to managing your online reputation. Our optional Review Monitoring add-on allows you to keep an eye on what people are saying about your business across the internet. You’ll receive email alerts whenever you receive a new review on any third-party site listing you’ve loaded into your account so that you can take quick action if needed.

5. Adjust your campaign as needed.

Review acquisition is a long-term commitment – and one worth doing aboveboard and authentically. You may find that the most important review sites for your business change over time. We encourage you to make adjustments as you go. You can reorder, hide, show, edit and delete your review site links at any time (you can perform all of these actions in Dashboard > Funnel > Links > Your Review Site Links).

With so many people trusting review sites to help them choose restaurants and other retailers, creating a strong reputation online is extremely important. It can be overwhelming trying to manage customer reviews. When you use software like ReviewMaxer to manage your reviews, it’s easy to protect and even improve your online reputation.

Photo credit: Pablo