All Playbooks
A clear guide for SaaS and enterprise software to meet your customer at the precise moment they are looking for you.
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At the Imaginarium we have one foundational principle: any modern B2B brand needs to generate brand awareness and demand together. Focusing on demand alone, without equally generating brand awareness is an easy way to make growth very expensive over time. That said, brand awareness still needs to operate in service of customer acquisition and sales, so it’s crucial to focus your efforts on areas of the marketing ecosystem that are tailor-made for B2B marketers to engage their customers.
What began as a curiosity…
We use product review sites all the time at the Imaginarium. New CRM? Let’s check out G2. Building an analytics dashboard? What does Capterra have to say about the category? Rolling out a CMS to help generate organic content? Hmmm, let’s take a look at TrustRadius to get a sense of our options.
…has grown into a torrid love affair!
Product review sites allow brands to show up in their own distinct voice (yay brand!), while engaging and even generating rich data from future customers that are signaling their intent to buy. Not only that, but some of the best product review sites have built out partnerships with LinkedIn – bringing two B2B marketing superpowers together.
We’ve put together this playbook to help you understand and harness the incredible opportunity as a marketer to engage your future customer using product review sites. Many of these tactics are organic, but all of them take effort and strategy to maximize impact and drive transformational growth. When done right, the impact can be enormous for B2B brands that are ready to sell their solution.
Let’s face it, the advertising and media space can be deeply confusing and lack transparency. From channel choice, to martech stacks, yeesh! ABM vs. awareness. With all the available options, it’s nice when a solution stares you right in the face. If you’re a B2B marketer in the SaaS and enterprise software space, stay tuned, because this may just be that solution for you.
If you’d like to work with a team that lives and breathes product reviews, and particularly their powerful utility in partnership with LinkedIn and B2B-focused analytics tools like Octane11 – then get in touch with The Imaginarium. We’re so excited to meet you and help you grow!
So, what are product review sites? Product review sites are aggregators of customer opinions that are perfectly optimized for search. It’s that simple. They serve as a starting point for a vast majority of decision-makers when looking at SaaS and Enterprise software purchases. And it’s easy to see why. These sites don’t just show and compare capabilities, they offer validated customer reviews, and as marketers, we know there’s not much that is more powerful than social proof. (Well, maybe a deep emotional connection to a brand still takes the cake – but here at the Imaginarium, we like to have our cake and eat it too!)
The top three review platforms are TrustRadius, G2 Crowd, and Capterra. Later in this playbook, we will dedicate more time to examining some of these sites, and the unique opportunities they each present, in more depth.
If you’re a B2B brand, your customers are using product review sites. According to G2 and Heinz Marketing, up to 92% of B2B customers are more likely to purchase a product after reading a trusted review. 67% of B2B buyers admit that online reviews from peers are an important part of the buying process, and that they significantly impact their buying decisions. B2B buyers utilize reviews at all stages of their buying journey (71% of B2B buyers use reviews during the consideration stage, 47% use reviews during the awareness stage, and 42% during the decision stage). This gives you a picture of how vital product reviews are, given that they are needed at every stage of a funnel.
The fact that this media ecosystem has cropped up and is becoming increasingly powerful tracks with clear changes in B2B software and SaaS purchasing behavior. Product reviews are becoming particularly indispensable in the B2B software and tech industries. When purchasing software, the margin for error is smaller than for most products – the wrong software can cause irreparable damage to an entire organization, costing businesses millions. In fact, according to research by Northwestern’s Spiegel Institute, when higher-priced products display reviews, the conversion rate increases by up to 380%.
However, it’s not just the costs that are driving an upswing in B2B buyers' reliance on product reviews. There’s another trend at play – B2B buyers are increasingly looking for self-service resources (like free trials) to find software and products. In fact, studies have shown that up to 57% of B2B buyers today make buying decisions without ever talking with a sales representative. Among millennial buyers, that percentage rises to 87%. Reviews from other customers are one of the primary ways that buyers can verify if a product is as advertised without having to rely on sales representatives to get information.
A major reason that validated reviews are so impactful is due to the power of social proof. Product reviews are a strong form of social proof and leave a real impression on your prospects, letting them assess your product through the eyes of other users, not just your company’s marketing materials, guided demos, or salespeople. Customers want to be reassured that what they are buying works and that it will work for them specifically. Reviews help them get that reassurance from a source they trust, their B2B peers!
So, how can product review sites actually drive brand growth? To start, let’s define the most important metrics to judge a brand’s growth: brand visibility, reputation, workforce strength, and sales figures. Excitingly for you, the use of product reviews as a core part of a B2B brand’s marketing strategy can directly lead to an increase in all of those metrics and many more.
Here are some of the many ways that B2B product reviews can facilitate the growth of a brand:
Provides user generated content for your brand:
Delivers more in-market prospects with powerful intent data:
Improves product development by offering authentic feedback:
Helps to gain and retain clients, building brand reputation:
Increased trust through compelling social proof:
G2 – Arguably the biggest B2B SaaS product review website out there, G2 is very popular with buyers, attracting an average of five million monthly visitors perusing nearly 1.4 million user reviews on this website. Businesses are reviewed on a five-star rating scale, and reviews cover everything from setup and ease of use, to security and support.
Reviewers on G2 are given prompts like ‘What do you like best?’ ‘What do you dislike?’ ‘Recommendations to others,’ etc. G2 also provides an option for video reviews where users can record themselves leaving a review. The video aspect, combined with the feature that makes it possible to see if a customer is a verified user and how active they are on G2, helps increase the crucial authenticity factor. The site also allows companies to request reviews from users, which they can use to build a pool of customer reviews for use in their marketing campaigns.
TrustRadius – TrustRadius is another popular online software review platform with over 300,000 customer reviews. Reviews on TrustRadius tend to be more extensive and in-depth, with each review averaging more than 400 words. The best part of this site is that reviewers are authenticated via LinkedIn, which includes their names and professional details, to make sure they’re real people with real accounts (although the reviews themselves can still be anonymous). This authentication on LinkedIn adds a layer of credibility to the reviews and also allows users to easily see what their LinkedIn connections think about a particular piece of software.
TrustRadius does not sell leads or ad placement. This keeps reviews unbiased, as vendors can’t skew results in their favor. Each review is carefully vetted by TrustRadius’ research team and is evaluated for quality, depth, and detail. You can browse reviews of individual companies, or carry out comparisons of two companies side-by-side to compare their ratings, pricing details, and screenshots of their products from other users.
TrustRadius provides B2B decision-makers in the software industry with verified, peer-based guidance, research, and high value intent data to help them make better choices when it comes to buying software and technology for their business.
Capterra – Capterra is a review site that evaluates software sold by B2B and B2C companies that boasts over 1.5 million validated customer reviews. It features a simple on-site search engine which allows users to search for software based on industry, company, or software type. Once a search is done, the site displays a list of relevant companies with a brief overview of the company, its products, and its mission.
Capterra provides 800 software categories to choose from, as well as reviews for over fifty thousand products. The site has a “compare” feature which lets a user select up to four companies to examine side-by-side. This feature allows buyers to see everything about a set of companies, from ease of use to the quality of their customer support, all in one comprehensive slide. This makes it easy and efficient for users to find software that best fits their needs at a glance.
Capterra also provides a pros and cons list for each company’s profile, thus giving users a snapshot of the best and worst features of each one.
If you’re a B2B vendor, at this point you may be wondering, “What is the right product review website for me to concentrate my efforts on to optimize my sales and marketing?” The real answer is that although every review site has different characteristics that offer your brand distinct advantages, being on multiple review sites is the best approach. Using multiple sites exposes your brand to a broader and more diverse audience base, and each site offers unique review collation and deployment options that may suit different aspects of your business better. If being on just one of these review sites comes with the benefits we have mentioned so far in this playbook, then imagine the possibilities of having your products on all of them!
Here are just a few of the advantages of leveraging multiple review sites:
You’ll get more robust intent data.
The B2B companies that are killing it today are mining different types of intent data from various sites and integrating it into their audience-targeted and ABM efforts. This data enables personalized messages to convert in-market buyers. With an analytics tool like Octane11, you can track inbound leads from all review sites to compare the relative efficiency and performance of these leads on an apples to apples basis. That’s powerful!
You’ll get further reach
Being on multiple review sites also offers your brand a broader reach. According to data from SEMRush, only 20% of TrustRadius’ traffic overlaps with G2. Because this overlap is minimal, only focusing on one of these review sites means a large percent of your potential buyers would not even see your products. If you are only leveraging one review platform, you are failing to reach those who are researching products like yours elsewhere.
You’ll improve your SEO.
Being on multiple review sites will also improve your search engine optimization, as putting your keywords out on the web as frequently and in as many places as possible is a key SEO strategy. The more content that references your business, the better your SEO ranking. It’s also a bonus that review sites rate highly as SEO content.
You’ll see increased organic traffic.
When you showcase your products or brand in front of more viewers on multiple platforms, it inevitably leads to more clicks and visits to your site.
You’ll get more variety of content for your marketing.
Each review site collects reviews differently, giving you varied types of content to use across your marketing channels. For instance, TrustRadius allows you to create custom questionnaires to harvest reviews that can showcase specific features you want to be known for.
You’ll deliver more qualified leads to your sales team.
Typically prospects on review sites are in-market buyers who are already primed to buy. Adopting a multi-review site strategy helps you reach, engage, and ultimately convert lots more of these leads.
Get started putting product review sites to use for your B2B brand!
Take a minute to imagine that you can know exactly where, how, and for what your target market is searching for. This information can help you tailor your marketing strategy to perfectly suit a particular buyer’s stage in their journey, leading to higher conversions and better close rates. The good news is that you can have this information through mining buyer intent data.
Buyer intent data is a set of behavioral signals or data points that indicate what customers are currently looking to purchase and where they are in that process. The reason buyer intent data is useful is that it can help make the sales process more efficient and effective by targeting the right people with the right message at the right time.
The first and most important benefit of intent data is that it greatly reduces the risk of marketing to uninterested buyers. Because you know what people are searching for, you can streamline your prospecting and closing campaigns to qualified leads only. This leads to an increase in conversion rates, and can help remove the guesswork from your marketing campaigns.
Here are some examples of buyer intent signals that could be received and targeted for further marketing: product page visits, your profile visits, sponsored ads page visit, software category visit, product alternatives or comparison page visits, FAQs page visits, customer reviews page visits, etc. All these signals indicate that a buyer is interested in your product or a product like yours, and this knowledge enables you to create more effective outreach, lead nurturing, and conversion messaging.
Most B2B buyers are 67% done with their buying decision before they ever talk with a sales rep. By the time you get to talk to them, it may already be too late to sell them on your product. But with intent data, because you are aware of buyers’ needs and intentions right from when they begin their research, you have the opportunity to jump into your buyer’s journey ahead of the curve with personalized sales messaging and get ahead of your competitors.
And remember, intent data works best when you combine the signals across all of your data sources. Review sites are important, but you should also use an analytics tool like Octane11 to help incorporate information from 3rd party data providers like Bombora or Demandbase, social engagement on LinkedIn and Instagram, email and ad interactions.
Product review sites like G2 and TrustRadius have options to integrate with LinkedIn Matched Audiences. Check out our LinkedIn Performance Marketing Playbook to get a clear roadmap of how to develop and test audiences effectively. With buyer intent data from these sites, you can build dynamic segments of in-market buyers among LinkedIn’s users, who are actively researching your products, or that of your competitors, to target and convert. These segments can be labeled according to the message their data is sending to you. For example, you can have a segment for those who visited your profile or product page, one for those who viewed your software’s category page, another for those who compared your products to other products or searched for alternatives to your products, etc.
This segmentation makes it easier for you to create personalized sales messaging for the buyers in each segment, so you can address their current market stage or activity. Integrating your product review profile with LinkedIn can boost your return on investment, increase your conversion rate, lower customer acquisition costs, and accelerate your sales cycle. Brands who are already using this integration to increase their account-based marketing (ABM) marketing efforts have reported an increase in click-through rates (CTR) by as much as 35% and a decrease in their cost per lead by up to 20%.
Here are five tips to increase your success on LinkedIn using intent data:
1. Build a list of targeted accounts based on the signals from your intent data. The bigger the list, the better. In order to upload a list to LinkedIn, it must have at least 300 members, with a maximum of 300,000 allowed in one list. We recommend using lists with at least 10,000 personal or professional email contacts for the best results.
2. Map your content strategy to match the intent signal or market segment properly.
3. Use your intent data to provide more context for which leads might be high-quality prospects and which might not be worth targeting. This is especially effective when you cross-reference your intent data with your sales prospects.
4. Proactively reach out to your high-intent accounts with specific and carefully curated information that will move them further down the funnel. For instance, if an account compares your product with one of your competitors, you have the opportunity to give them information which points out your core differentiators.
5. Keep an eye on for the right metrics. Cost per lead (CPL) isn’t the only metric to track. It is important to look fully at all your campaign metrics to measure success. Remember that conversion rates, CAC, pipeline, and revenue are key metrics to keep an eye on.
The fact that up to 89% of consumers read business responses to online reviews means that handling and responding properly to product reviews is vital to a brand’s reputation and success online. In light of this, here are five principles to guide your handling of reviews of your products.
1. Address positive reviews with concise, conversational replies.
Thought and care needs to be taken even when responding to positive product reviews. While a simple “thank you” has little impact, more elaborately customized responses are perceived as promotional and insincere, which can negatively affect future reviews. The right balance feels like you’re joining an honest and natural conversation.
2. Respond to all negative reviews
Every negative review can impact purchases and dissuade people from doing business with you if they are not handled promptly and properly. A negative review is like an open sore; don’t let it fester, for everyone’s sake. Your response to a negative review can prevent similar reviews being repeated because a customer can use your response to address their problem instead of leaving a review.
3. Address a negative review by providing a detailed and tailored solution to that specific complaint.
Don’t be impatient or assume the customer should be able to figure it out; assume that they can’t, which is why they are complaining in the first place. By properly addressing a negative reviewer's issue, the brand can appease a dissatisfied customer and show subsequent customers that it cares about customer issues.
4. Respond quickly to all negative reviews
When it comes to negative reviews, delay is dangerous. Your response to a negative review should be quick so that it is visible to future reviewers. The faster a brand responds to a negative review, the faster the reviewer is appeased and other potential clients can see that the company is committed to resolving customer complaints.
Unlike the other review sites, Capterra advertising allows B2B SaaS brands to promote their products across relevant categories and appear at the top of the site’s search engine results. Just like Google ads, Capterra allows bidding for its available advertising inventory. Advertisers bid to show up higher on search results, so the more you spend, the more likely you are to place higher on search lists.
Capterra ads are worth investing in because they offer unique targeting capabilities that B2B software brands can leverage to generate high-quality leads that capitalize on high purchase intent.
Unlike the other review sites, Capterra advertising allows B2B SaaS brands to promote their products across relevant categories and appear at the top of the site’s search engine results. Just like Google ads, Capterra allows bidding for its available advertising inventory. Advertisers bid to show up higher on search results, so the more you spend, the more likely you are to place higher on search lists.
Capterra ads are worth investing in because they offer unique targeting capabilities that B2B software brands can leverage to generate high-quality leads that capitalize on high purchase intent.
Running ads on Capterra is quite easy. All you need to do is:
1. Upload screenshots and/or videos of your software.
2. Provide product listing information to tell people more about your product.
3. Select the software categories that you want to bid for.
4. Select the countries in which you want to show your ads.
5. Add a landing page.
6. Set your bid.
Note that the one step that should take some time and thought will be detailing the information about your product, as you want this information to be both accurate and compelling. But, if you already have a Capterra profile, you’ve likely already completed your product profile and described the product in detail which makes developing and implementing ad campaigns on Capterra much simple much simpler. Also, if you’re using a B2B analytics tool like Octane11, you can track the performance of ads on Capterra and compare and compare ads on other platforms to compare performance and overall account engagement across channels.
Setting up and optimizing your profile
Setting up profiles on Capterra, TrustRadius, and G2 is almost as easy as opening a Facebook page or an email account. First, sign up and create your listing. Your application will be submitted and within a next few business days, you will receive a follow-up email letting you know that your profile has been created and is ready to be optimized.
Return to the site, log in, and begin editing your profile. Your dashboard will display your account status, as well as every outstanding task you’ll need to do to complete your profile. Make sure to fill in each section as accurately and completely as possible, then save when you’re satisfied. Now that your profile is set up.with, here are a few tips to help you optimize your presence on the profile for maximum effect:
1. Consider putting certain keywords in your description in ALL CAPS
This can help attract people’s attention to the most important aspects of your brand’s premise, offering, or services that you want them to take note of.
2. Include the most important information about your brand and products in the first two or three lines of your description
Most customers don’t bother reading through an entire description, so you’ll want to start by putting your best foot forward. Leaving your strong suits until the middle or end of your description risks losing your reader’s interest before they find out what sets you apart from the competition.
3. Have a discussion/FAQ section on your page
It is a good idea to give potential customers the opportunity to ask questions as well as read your answers to some of the frequently asked questions about your business or products.
4. Your overview section is prime real estate space, don’t waste it
A arguably the most important part of your profile, the overview is your chance to make a killer pitch to intrigue, convince, and potentially convert your audience. Think of the unique way your software solves your audience’s problems and make sure to include that here.
5. Get user reviews and feature them prominently
Each of the product review sites we’ve discussed has tools to help you reach out to your customers to ask them to leave reviews about your product. You can prompt them with custom questions that will guide them to include details about your product use that they otherwise might not have thought to include.
6. Reply to leads as fast as possible (in five minutes or less)
When a lead comes in, reach out as quickly as possible. According to a study by The Harvard Business Review, anywhere from 35-50% of sales go to the vendor who responds fastest. To take advantage of the short window you have to respond within the five minutes or less goal, it’s a good idea to set up alerts with marketing automation tools or apps like Twilio so you don’t miss a beat.
7. Get buyer intent data
Marketing without intent data is like fighting with a blindfold on and one hand tied behind your back. Give yourself the advantage of really seeing your potential customers.
8. Set up retargeting ads to reach people who visited your landing page and checked out your products, but didn’t make a purchase
Sometimes, all people need to buy from you is a little extra nudge or a gentle soft reminder of why they considered purchasing your product in the first place.
9. Reach out to people who leave reviews on your competitor’s profile
Especially if those reviews were negative, you can take advantage of their discontent to sell them on your product.
10. Track conversion rates and attribution
Include UTMs and install Google Tag Manager on your destination pages so you can see what part of your marketing strategy is working and what could use some extra attention.
B2B buyers are turning more and more to self-research when making purchasinge decisions. They check out peer reviews from people and companies with similar interests to their own to make sure that whatever product, software, or technology they are considering for purchase is the best choice they can make. A multi-platform product review strategy is the best way to leverage existing resources to get the right eyes on your product.
Adding your products to several review sites not only increases your SEO rating and site traffic, it also exposes your brand to entirely new audiences who are on those sites to learn more about what people think about and to ultimately purchase products like yours. While managing all these sites may seem daunting, the benefits very much outweigh the effort. A lean team and the right analytics tools can make it easy to manage multiple sites effectively.
With the inclusion of metrics from buyer intent data and LinkedIn Matched Audience Segments in your marketing campaign strategys, you and your team can target more measured and precise marketing at prospects who are already looking for a product like yours to purchase. All you have to do is convince them to buy from you rather than your competitors.
Remember, growth doesn’t happen in a day, so be patient - but putting product review marketing strategy to work can help grow your brand exponentially. Helping brands develop and execute a product reviews strategy is one of the core capabilities at the Imaginarium – so if you really want to leverage this ecosystem give us a shout! Good luck and we hope to hear from you soon.