How can B2B marketers leverage online review platforms or third-party directories as as part of an effective digital channel mix?

B2B marketers should pay close attention to third-party directories. These platforms provide an excellent opportunity for prospects to discover your products or services, gain trust from unbiased user reviews, and, ultimately, assist in the decision-making process.  Platforms like G2, TrustRadius, Capterra, PeerInsights and other directories can be very influential in a potential customer's consideration of products in a very specific field or industry. 

Actively managing your presence on all these platforms should be a key part of your strategy, as the effort is low and the impact is extremely high. 

Here’s how you can leverage these platforms for your demand gen program:

Improve your product’s category visibility and discoverability with a free listing: Directories and review platforms often rank well in for very specific niche product software search results, which can improve your visibility as part of the product consideration process happening as part of the visit on the directory pages. By listing your company on these platforms, you're making it easier for potential customers to find you (and simply know you exist if your company is smaller). In most cases, a profile is actually free, so there’s no reason to not show up here.  

Focus on getting reviews as quickly as possible - Simply get reviews at first. Encourage all of your customers to leave reviews in exchange for gift cards or company swag. Customer reviews are gold for the sales process when key customers are used to support late-stage prospect questions. 

Use for paid traffic: Directories and review sites can also drive highly-targeted paid traffic back to your website and provide an alternative from Google and Microsoft as your key drivers of paid search traffic. If paying for traffic, ensure you are bidding in the right categories and regions / countries for your sales team. 

Make use of intent data: Some directories provide intent data which is a list of companies that are showing interest in the category. This can be extremely helpful data allowing sales and marketing to reach a buyer who has just gone “in market” for their product by marketing specifically to that set of accounts. 

Reviews are a great way to build your ad copy: Customers' words are powerful and sometimes represent that core of the value you deliver. Analyze your customer conversations and reviews to learn how they refer to their challenges and solutions to improve marketing copy and effectiveness of your message.  

I incorporate online review sites into my overall organic strategy. Online review sites typically rank very well for non-branded terms in search engines like Google. So well actually that they are particularly difficult to leapfrog.

What I'll do is list out the most important non-branded search terms for my company and then identify the review sites that rank in positions #1, #2, or #3 for those terms. I then pick the top two review sites that make up the most amount of this search real estate.

Then because review sites typically rank the listed businesses in order of highest grading and most reviews, I will drive reviews to those two sites. I will ask all of our customers who have given us NPS scores of 9 and 10 to review us on those sites. I'll continue to invest in this strategy until I'm in position #1 on these review sites.

So even if I can't get my company's branded website to rank in position #1, #2, or #3 for a certain term, I can make sure I am visible on the websites that are in those positions.

Online reviews and 'social proof' are incredibly valuable, as ultimately, we are humans selling to humans - even in B2B.

You can leverage online reviews and third-party platforms by considering the following as part of your strategy:

• What platforms make the most sense for your business and target audience?

• Once you have established the platforms that make the most sense, what is needed to optimize each profile and your presence on each platform?

• How can you collect more reviews from customers while still promoting honest and transparent feedback?

• What other platforms can you cross-promote these reviews on?

• What other ways can you amplify these reviews?

These are the types of questions you want to evaluate to leverage online reviews. This will look different for every business, but there is more than likely an opportunity for you to leverage reviews.