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Kat M., California

Facebook, Yelp or Google Reviews? How important are they?

Well… I had a meeting from my business advisor from a company called Cultivate Advisors who said that any company with a yearly revenue of less than $1M should refrain from paying for google/facebook ads. This company has been in Inc 5000’s Fastest Growing companies for 4 years in a row and the way they scaled from $0 – $1M was by asking for as many google reviews (they have almost 500 glowing 5 star reviews) and asking happy and satisfied clients for referrals. This company has helped over 2000+ small business owners scale their businesses and they themselves have scaled from $0 – $20M since they started in 2013.

I was advised – don’t cast a wide net, instead dig deep. Instead of reaching new people who don’t know about you, go to every single one of your happy and satisfied clients and regularly ask them for referrals and reviews.
P.S. He said after working with so many companies, they’ve found that google reviews hold a lot more weight with SEO rankings than FB/Yelp reviews so if you were to focus on growing one – do google. I wish I knew this before because I have almost 20 reviews on Yelp, about 10 on FB and just 8 on Google… but that’s going to change now! 🙂

So, this is what I did:

1. I scheduled a 15 minute call with my families (preferably with their kids but if the kids are not available, then just the parent is ok).
2. I asked them a few questions over zoom then compiled a few answers (so maannnny to choose from but I can always make another video later!)
3. I made two videos for now, one is a review from the parent’s perspective and another a review from the kid’s perspective (this is the one I’ve edited so far).
4. These videos will be shown on my landing page so potential families can easily see proof that my studio is a great place for their kids.
5. I will then transcribe what they all said into text and over the next few months I’ll copy that text and send it to the parent and say something like, “Hi _______, this is the video review you did for me. I just transcribed exactly what you said into written form. Would you mind copying this and pasting it as a review on Google?”
6. And since they said a LOOOT of things, I’ll break it up into sections so that one parent can potentially post a review every few months on Google, each review varying from the last one they did because they said a lot of different things during the video review.

Google reviews are great but also having video reviews on your page is very engaging. I feel if I asked parents to write a google review first and THEN do a video, it would just be too much. But doing a video first allows me to ask a lot of questions which gives me a lot of material to pull from. The video reviews can then be recycled and edited into short form content and posted on IG/Youtube Shorts/TikTok/FB. And then recycled again into multiple short paragraphs for parents to post on Google multiple times, spread throughout a few months instead of just one review!

I hope you get to implement this as well and that it would grow your studio! 🙂

Kat M., California

Hello! The last video I shared were all kids talking about their experience. This video is now the parents talking. I hope you like it! This is the same concept I shared with the other post… do a video review! It’s much more moving than just a written review.

If you felt this video moved you in some way, it would help if you’re able to comment on my youtube channel. I will be doing screen shots of the comments and sending it over to the guy who edited this. He’s also building his business and I want to help him as well by sending him reviews of what people think and how people feel after watching this video. 🙂