Maven Marketing with Brandon Welch

How to Earn 5 Star Reviews (Without Begging)

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Getting 5-star reviews shouldn’t feel awkward, desperate, or hit-or-miss.

And yet… for most service businesses, it is.

In this Maven Monday, Brandon brings Kyle DeVries back to unpack a simple shift that turned one client’s stale review flow into a wave of fresh 5-stars — without begging, bribing, or hoping technicians “remember to ask.”

We’re talking small tweaks that create big confidence: better conversions, better leads, better performance across every marketing channel.

If you’ve ever wondered why your work is great… but your Google rating doesn’t show it, this episode opens the door.

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Host: Brandon Welch
Co-Host: Kyle DeVries
Executive Producer: Carter Breaux
Audio/Video Producer: Nate the Camera Guy

Do you have a marketing problem you'd like us to help solve? Send it to MavenMonday@FrankandMaven.com!

Get a copy of our Best-Selling Book, The Maven Marketer Here: https://a.co/d/1clpm8a

Brandon Welch:

Welcome to the Maven Marketing Podcast. Today is Maven Monday. I'm your host Brandon Welch and I'm here with Kyle the King DeVries.

Kyle DeVries:

Wow. What did I do to earn that?

Brandon Welch:

Uh you have done like at least 11,000 more podcasts than I'll ever do.

Kyle DeVries:

I don't know if that's true.

Brandon Welch:

The founder of the Missouri Sports Podcast. You should check them out. They're on a bit of a hiatus. A little bit defunct right now, but yeah, but we used to be a thing. They were a very big thing. If you are into uh Mizzou sports uh or anything of the sort, uh go check this guy out on uh Spotify, Apple. They're still up, yeah. They're still there. Yeah, he's coming back. I think he's coming. I'm still holding out for him. Maybe someday. Um citing um artistic differences. Is that what's going on? Busy lives. Busy lives, that's right. Okay. So hey, Kyle is our resident expert in all things Google. He's uh brilliant behind every knob you could possibly turn on those platforms. But not only that, he's a heck of a good guy, and it's been way too long since you've been on here. Uh normally it's because he's working his butt off, uh, making our clients all kinds of money. Um, but here we are, and it was just like time to talk about some Google review things. And I'm like, dude, come back. Happy, happy to. Plus, Caleb's off taking a nap somewhere. So um uh anyway, today is all about getting more reviews, and we've talked about this in the podcast before. Um, but uh because we are in the business of helping you eliminate waste in advertising, growing your business so you can achieve the big dream, we're always bringing you things from the front lines, and there are a lot of shiny objects that exist in the marketing world. We are here to help filter out the ones that are worth doing and eliminate the ones that are not worth doing. We found one that is extremely worth doing. Um, so there's a tool, and this is a pretty short episode, but we're just gonna do a quick overview of what happened um recently when we added this tool to a client's mix. Um, and we've used used this in uh a lot of times in the past, but this is just such a stellar result, we had to share it. So um it's all about how to increase Google reviews and basically your online reputation. Uh, everybody knows reviews are important, but did you know that 91% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations? As much as picking up the phone and saying, Hey, Kyle, would you go to this restaurant? If the online reviews say it, basically everybody is, you know, agreeing that that's uh a confident point of uh for you know for decision making.

Kyle DeVries:

So especially if you are a business with a higher ticket price, like people are gonna do their research on the front end. And Google Reviews is probably the first place they're gonna go. It's it's accessible, everybody knows where to find them. And what's the most valuable thing you can read about is other people's experiences with the very thing that you're looking at doing yourself. So people want to hear stories about you know what what product or service am I gonna experience? Yes.

Brandon Welch:

So it's like the biggest thing we could possibly encourage for our clients to get that because when you have good reviews, everything else works better. Your branding works better, your Google ads work better, your Facebook ads work better, your website works better. Uh, but what is the challenge? Why everybody wants the reviews, but why do we not get them?

Kyle DeVries:

Yeah, for well, for a lot of you know, the clients that we work with, especially. I mean, it's usually like a technician who's there to do, you know, a very difficult job or very specific job. They might not be trained to get reviews, and so you know, they're there to do the job and and you know, head off their net to their next thing. And so it might not be the most natural thing for for them to um to ask for the review, and it can be a little bit awkward for them and stuff like that.

Brandon Welch:

So a lot of companies don't have a process, yes, but even the ones that do kind of run into this maybe um talent or natural propensity for these, you know, more technical guys, it's not natural for them to want to influence or win over a person to say, hey, give us a review. So just there's just a lot of charm and charisma that you kind of have to have to get people to do that on the spot. For sure. And they've got bigger fish to fry a lot of times.

Kyle DeVries:

They're busy. Yeah. Uh but the data shows that 70% of customers will leave a review when prompted, uh, when only 20% will do it unprompted. And what happens when they're not prompted a lot of times is if they're going to leave a review, it's and they're not prompted, a lot of times it's a bad review. And so um going out of your way to make sure that you're asking for the review, you've got a much higher chance that you'll actually get a good review, not only a review in general, but a positive one.

Brandon Welch:

Yeah. It's a one of the most common questions we get is how do I eliminate this bad review? And the answer is always get 10 times more good reviews on top. So you need a process for that. And the tools that we're going to talk about today help you not only put a process in place, but they fill in for when human behavior doesn't come through for you, when your people are busy and you have inconsistent talent sets with people who would maybe, you know, have luck asking for that review and be naturally good at getting that. Uh, these systems send text-based reviews. And what they found, what the data says, is that uh 30 uh to 40 percent um greater chance of getting a review when it's sent uh via like a text message, an SMS text. And I think we've all got that. We've had a you know a an HVAC person or somebody out to our house and we get a text, and it's like when you have that instant gratification moment and they text you, I think we're so used to responding there. Yeah. Um what these services do is they automate sending a text message that says, Hey, Kyle was just here. What did you think of Kyle? And when they're worded like that, it makes us want to go, oh, Kyle was a nice guy. He did a great job. And we kind of want to help him in that moment. Um, and so we'll go ahead and click the thing, and then and then from there they make the steps so easy, like it's just almost an instant experience to get them straight to a Google review where they can leave that five star that we all want.

Kyle DeVries:

Yeah. And I don't know about you, Brandon, but texting has a lot higher priority in my mind than email. Like if I get a text from somebody, I'm taking it seriously. I know that most of the time it's somebody that actually needs to talk to me. And email, a lot of the times I'm I'm just expecting it to be junk or whatever. I'm deleting like 99% of my email. So text, I think, has a lot higher priority. It gets people's attention.

Brandon Welch:

Without a doubt. All the data shows that. Um, and I think we're just I think it's more of a friendly mechanism to do that with. So uh so the three services we want to talk about are Bird Eye, Podium, and then a third one that we actually haven't had personal experience here using, uh, but have heard a lot of good things with a service called Nice Job. So you've probably heard of Bird Eye, you probably heard of Podium. I'm gonna share a Bird Eye case study. We implemented this just over a month ago with a client, and uh this client has been in business literally 20 years. Uh, they had somewhere in the 150 um Google Review range, uh, which when you think of all of the tens of thousands of people they've served, that's actually a pretty low mark. It's an average mark, but it's low. Like, you know, you're getting way less than 1% of your customers naturally. Um, this service, Bird Eye, claims that they can get you to about a 5% response, right? So 5% of the customers uh that you work um work with, they think they can get them to uh respond and leave a review for you. Um and this so this client went to getting you know that 20% that you talked about, with most of those being on the negative side because that was the you know pushing factor for them to go do that. Uh they got seven new reviews in the first two days that we put this to use for them. And that was like amazing. That's like maybe what they got in four or five months before. Um 12 reviews in the last 30 days, and they were all five stars. We moved their star rating up a whole uh two-tenths of a point. So they went from like a four, a low four to like a mid-four.

Kyle DeVries:

Makes a huge difference.

Brandon Welch:

Yeah, and the the rate that this is going, uh, we're expecting with the number of clients they serve, tw uh 15 to 20 new client rankings or sorry, ratings per week. Um isn't that crazy? That's insane. Just just by just by putting this in their system.

Kyle DeVries:

Yeah, what's the catch? Oh, it seems too easy.

Brandon Welch:

Yeah, the catch is that it it is there is an investment factor to it. Um, but when you think about you know, a good review set, if you're in the low fours like this client was, uh, just by the way of humanity being not appreciative, that they do awesome work this client does, but they just had some knuckleheads over the years. And you know, the your conversion rate on your website goes down by multiple percentage points when people see that because the confidence or the lack of confidence has preceded their visit to your site. And so if you just raised your conversion rate by even a half a percent, um, most of these platforms cost a few hundred bucks a month, but one or two sales for the average service business would pay for that. Yeah. And when you're talking about a half a percent and conversion rate increase on you know thousands of visits a month, which most service-based websites get, it's an easy ROI. And we've already seen that. We've seen uh I think booked appointments, we we had a year over year increase of 10 or 15 the first month we did this. And for for this particular client in the legal space, that was uh that could easily be fifteen to twenty thousand dollars of the work.

Kyle DeVries:

Oh yeah. Even just um, you know, seeing a big number next to the reviews and uh you know, seeing 4.5 or higher or whatever, or reviews you know coming in regularly, it's just you almost can't even put a value on that because it's it's so it's so valuable and so important.

Brandon Welch:

Here's another added thing. Um employees, team members, when they see this happening and they start seeing their work celebrated, it just it has uh an internal effect to A, want to do more of that, B, they feel validated and just it just makes everybody want to do better because they're seeing it. Um and then you know, it also increases the referral factor, not just from you know, the outside world coming and seeing the reviews, but the person who left that review, that kind of programs them to already know how to talk good about the client just because they were prompted to do so. So that particular case study, if you've been looking at Bird Eye or if they've called you, I'm gonna tell you we talk to a lot of shiny object. Sometimes we put them in the category of weasels, like everybody's trying to sell something, and you get called every day. But bird eye is a really good company. Uh, we worked with them multiple times. They we don't get paid a dime to say this, we don't have a partnership with them, we don't even get a discount on their services. Uh, but bird eye is one you should definitely consider. The other one we have a lot of um success with is podium. We're gonna lay out some key differences, but um, podium takes that review uh automation and they add another component of text messaging. So if you're a business that's ever wanted to be able to text your customers back and forth, um, they basically give you a line that people can text in and it comes into a centralized computer, or you know, you could put the app on anybody's device and your employees can be texting people, which is in and of itself worth another episode to talk about why you should be texting your customers. But um, they do that on top of you know doing that automated text after the job is done and saying, Hey, would you like to leave a review? Uh so bird eye starts in like the 250-ish range. Uh Podium is more like the 300 range. The one bad thing I'll say about um podium is they kind of require you to get like a custom quote. So they they really do want to get you in their sales process, um, which it's usually a mark of somebody who wants isn't just trying to pressure you, but they have a really proprietary and good way of doing things. So can can highly vouch for both of those companies. Uh, what did you learn about nice job?

Kyle DeVries:

Yeah, so looking at nice job, um, it's a little bit simpler than some of these other some of these other options. Um, they mainly just do reviews, so it's a little cheaper as well. Um, but I think I saw they're like 75 to 100 bucks a month. Yeah, so considerably cheaper, but uh also a lot simpler. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles that some of the other ones have. But um, and like you said earlier, we haven't we haven't worked with this one directly as much as the as podium and bird eye, but we've heard really good things about it.

Brandon Welch:

So if you want to explore some of these, look into bird eye, look into podium, look into nice job. Um I think bird eye is gonna be more uh in line for like a service business, like a pure like professional service business, or maybe like HVAC or plumbing. Uh Podium is gonna be really, really good at like retail experiences. Maybe you're a restaurant, and it's gonna be good for like people who want to ask quick questions for either menus or items you have in stock. U nice job is probably gonna be a little bit more on the contractor side, and it's just gonna be for that review automation. The two more expensive ones we mentioned, Bird Eye and Podium, can both be integrated into most modern CRMs. Meaning, even if your sales guy completely forgets to leave the review, uh if he completely forgets to ask about it, or maybe he didn't even do that great of a job altogether, the review system is going to um, as soon as he leaves and it gets marked in the CRM, um, is gonna automatically fire. It's gonna say when the job is completed, it's gonna fire a text to Kyle and say, Hey Kyle, how did so-and-so do? If Kyle answers not that great, it's actually gonna direct them. These programs will direct them to a page that's like, okay, cool, let's put this in the customer service. And then it doesn't prompt him to go straight to leaving a review. But if he says they were awesome, it's gonna say, Cool, thank you so much for the feedback. Would you like to leave us a Google review? And so they kind of deter some bad reviews in that way and help you get some intelligence on what your folks are doing and improve your customer experience. And every company has a bad day. So whether you're an awesome company or not, you're gonna you're gonna get a bad review at some point. And this is maybe even a way to play a little bit of defense of that. Yeah. So um guys, this is a really simple concept. Just look into the platforms as you're planning your budget for 2026, or if you listen to this in the middle of 2028, uh, who knows if we'll all still be here. But if you are, you want to go ahead and definitely train, definitely talk weekly about the importance of reviews for your business because it is free marketing, and more importantly, it is like a real threat if you don't have some sort of thing in place. And these tools, I can't think of a business that it's not gonna pay off for, even if you've got, you know, five, six thousand dollars a year in this, because we've spent two customers gonna pay for that usually.

Kyle DeVries:

Yeah, we we have spent so much time you know over the years with our clients thinking of ways to incentivize incentivize reviews or you know, train their employees to do it. And um, you know, how do we how do we worry about the automatic the automation process and all this stuff? But these these platforms just take all of those hassles and worries out of your hands and kind of just do it all for you. Take takes all the all the the worries um out and kind of take the responsibility out of your technician's hands and they uh they handle it for you. So it's super nice.

Brandon Welch:

Fast forward a few months, you're gonna go, man, why is our website working so much better? Man, why are our ads paying off so much more? And it was all because you had a better process. So hope you guys are having an awesome holiday season. Hope you're gearing up for 2026. The next few episodes we're gonna be bringing you some really tangible advice about how to lay out your marketing budget, how to negotiate the best rates for 2026, what we see on the horizon for like trends and things you do need to pay attention to, uh, and then the things that maybe are shiny objects that you like, you know, don't put so much uh weight into them. Uh, but the reason we're doing that is because we are just unreasonably excited about small businesses, owner-operated companies, um, and just seeing you guys do more with less. Uh, it is a complicated world. There is an elephant sitting on the chest of the American economy right now, and it's not easy. Like it is, it is hard to make gains. You have to work twice as hard to make small gains. We're all about helping you stack those nickels. That's why we're here every week. That's why we wrote the Maven Marketer. That's why we have the Maven Marketing Mastermind. Um, if you want a little bit more help, and that's why Frank and Maven, uh the founding agency behind this podcast exists. Uh, we just want you to do well. We are here for you. We will be back here every Monday answering real life small business growth questions because marketers who can't teach you why are just a fancy lie. Have a great week.