How Can Review Sites Work?
Web Review sites are popping up all around the internet at a velocity which is hard to keep up with. How can this be the case? Is there lots of money to be gotten from them or are the owners making these sites up for altruistic reasons?
In a nutshell, there are a myriad of them because it’s very good for business. Whatever type of business you are involved with, these review websites are now an ever more important part of your marketing mix. We are now in a world which is becoming more and more distracting through a bewildering array of choices put forth to us all the time.
We as a consumer society just do not have enough time to methodically research the choices we want to make and therefore we need to take shortcuts in our decision making.
Think about the last big item you purchased. Did you pull out the credit card on the spur of the moment and go for it. I doubt it – I’m betting you probably asked around with friends and neighbours to get their advice and see if they had already purchased the item in question.
You were looking for their feedback and their opinions matter.
Like it or not, we are all very alike when it comes to this buying decision making activity. We are at heart a “marketing organism” and are swayed by other peoples outlook – even the opinions of total strangers!
There are review sites on pretty much every conceivable topic known to man, from cause-related marketing all the way through to the best types of plants you should purchase. You can conduct a fast search on any search engine and you are next to guaranteed to locate some useful reviews in next to no time.
Should you trust all the reviews you read? Definitely not. There are lots of of people out there submitting reviews with their own agenda. You cannot put faith chiefly on the word of a solitary review. Instead, you need to put the review in context, try to obtain a few more reviews (maybe put in some searches with phrases like “scam” for example to find some differing viewpoints.
Review websites work, have worked and will work because they give us the alluring promise of finding out useful information about things we are interested in and saving us the most valuaeable resource we have – time.
