How do you get a satisfied customer to become an online advocate? Columnist Brian Patterson offers tips on how to ask for reviews to help bolster your business.

Outside of the food and hospitality industry, it can be a real struggle for businesses to get positive reviews.

Consumers don’t typically review their landscaper, gym, car rental agency and many other business types that they interact with on a daily basis unless something goes wrong.

Because of this, we talk daily with companies who do outstanding work and have a great real-world reputation, but have more negative online reviews than positive.

For business owners, this disparity between offline and online reputation is beyond frustrating. So what’s a business owner or general manager to do when they find themselves in this situation?

Ask happy customers for reviews.

Tip the review balance back in your favor by getting those happy customers to be your online advocates. Below, I’ll share some tips, best practices and tests you can run to get more positive reviews.

But first, you may be wondering: Is it okay to ask for reviews? For Google, the answer is aresounding “yes.”

Yelp, however, has issued conflicting statements on whether or not you’re allowed to ask customers for reviews. I asked Yelp directly, and they told me that it is okay to ask for reviews as long as there is no incentivizing (See #2 in “5 Yelp facts business owners should know”). For all of the other review sites, you’ll need to check their terms of service and guidelines.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s dive in…

The gold standard: Asking in person

There’s no better way to ask for, and get, reviews than to do it in person. The person-to-person request is incredibly effective, particularly if the requester has spent a lot of time with the customer. We’ve found that asking in person can garner you seven to eight times more reviews than asking via email.

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Marketing Land