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- Why you should review your OWN products (and how to do it)
Why you should review your OWN products (and how to do it)
PLUS: Maybe the only advertiser Reddit actually likes (and how they do it)
Perrin Carrell
October 08, 2023
Helloooo content connoisseurs.
It’s Perrin from Content Bites.
As far as content goes, reviewing your own products might be pound-for-pound the most valuable stuff on your website, so we’re going talk about that today for sure. And then I’m going to show you perhaps the only advertiser I’ve ever seen Reddit actually, outwardly show some love to (trust me: it’s a cool one).
Main course: Why you should review your own products
Snack: Maybe the only advertiser Reddit actually likes (and why)
Morsels: Links from Brian Dean, Quick Sprout, Ahrefs, and more…
Let’s dig in.
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Main Course: Why you should review your own products (and how to do it in a way that generates revenue)
Whatever se sell, we all know reviews are important.
We want good customer reviews. We want testimonials. We want people say good things about us on Amazon or G2 or Clutch or any of the other major review sites.
But lots of the time, we think about reviews as things that happen to us.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
Of course, there’s always going to be some element of reviews that we can’t control (which is good, really; makes it easy to understand and serve our customers).
But we can also take some initiative.
We can do stuff to lead those conversations on our own platforms instead of just feeling the effects of those conversations happening somewhere else.
Because one thing is also true: if a customer is looking for reviews and comparisons, they’re going to get that information from somewhere. It’s infinitely more valuable if they get it from us.
And we don’t have to stop at our own reviews. If we really want to get buck wild, we can also review our competitors.
Before I even get into the nitty gritty, lemme just answer a quick question that I’m sure you’re asking right about now: What do I even mean by “review your own products”?
I mean producing content that targets people who are looking for either reviews or comparisons of a certain kind of product.
People in what I call the “review bucket” (us marketers and our sophsticated terminology amright?) are usually asking questions like:
What are the best shoes for plantar fasciitis?
Plantar fasciitis shoe reviews
[Specific plantar fasciitis shoe] reviews
Theses folks are looking for articles like the following:
Best Smart TV for 2023 (CNET)
Allbirds Review (Good Housekeeping)
In other words, they want to see what other people think of the product.
Most of the time, that’s going to be a third party.
But there’s no reason we can’t also try to publish that same kind of content… about our product categories… and even about our competitors — and this is what I mean by “reviewing” your own products.
Let me build a business case for you…
First, reviewing your own products is usually a very strong SEO play.
Any keyword that indicates a person is either looking for reviews or otherwise comparing products is ultra-high value.
For a person to be searching for reviews — either for our product category as a whole or for our product in particular — they have to be deep in the buying funnel. They basically have their credit card out.
If we can get in front of those people in that moment, we can usually convert them at a really high rate.
These are people searching for stuff like this:
“[product] reviews”
“best [product]”
“[product] vs [product]”
“[product] alternatives”
These kinds of searches show strong buying intent because comparison = willingness to buy.
In other words, people searching for reviews or comparisons are one of the most valuable possible traffic segments for any business.
These kinds of keywords have other benefits, too:
They’re often relatively easy to rank for
They often have fairly strong traffic potential
Let me show you an example.
Suppose we sell shoes for people who have plantar fasciitis.
If we wanted to capture people in the review phase of buying these shoes, we might write a listicle targeting the keyword “best shoes for plantar fascitis”.
Here’s a screenshot of the data for that keyword. And here’s the data (to save you a click):
Keyword difficulty (15 in Ahrefs, or relatively easy)
Traffic potential: 39,000 monthly organic visits
Guys, that’s insane.
That means that we have a keyword that’s relatively easy to rank for, that we could potentially net us 30,000+ eyeballs a month, and that targets people who basically already have their credit card out.
Bear with me while I do some napkin math.
Suppose we only win a fraction of that traffic — 15,000 monthly visits or so. Then, suppose we can move about 30% to a product page (common with these kinds of pages). Then, suppose our specialized shoes cost about $200, and our product pages convert at a standard 2%.
We’d still make: 15k visits x 30% x 2% x $200 = $18,000 in additional monthly revenue from a single blog post.
If we actually won that keyword by continually investing in it, all of a sudden, we’re at nearly half a million dollars of revenue per year.
A bit a transparency… this is a fairly juicy keyword. Yours might be smaller or more difficult, or… something.
But are these kinds of keywords almost always worth going for? YES.
And that’s especially true if you have a high-ticket item, like software (shoutout to the second part of this issue of Content Bites, where we talked about how HelpScout uses this exact strategy to generate 70,000 targeted potential customers per year using this exact strategy).
But we can do the same thing with other keywords in the “review” bucket, too…
We can use “review” keywords (like “Capital One 360 credit card review”) to review our products AND our competitors’ products — nudging people to try ours.
We can use “…alternatives” keywords to capture people who are unhappy with our competitors and offer our products as a solution.
If you’re in any kind of established space at all, these kinds of keywords almost always have traffic potential, and they always convert.
Warning: If you’re in a large software category, expect a bit of competition; sophisticated marketing teams often understand the power of this kind of content.
Second, you can send paid traffic to this kind of content and move people through a bunch of parts of the buyer’s journey really quickly.
Bear with me while I google something for you.
I googled “best CRMs for sales teams”. Here’s a screenshot of the top paid results.
There’s your usual fluffy sales pages, but the page that really wins this result is Zoho.
If you click that that link, it goes to this page (don’t worry: I stripped the parameters so we wouldn’t register a bunch of false ad clicks).
It’s a page that fulfills the exact purpose a reader searching for that keyword might require: comparing the tools.
More than that, it’s comparing itself to its competitors.
It’s being honest, but it’s highlighting its major differentiators, and, somewhat predictably, declaring itself the best.
Note: people aren’t idiots, by the way. They understand what’s happening. But it’s also true that when people are truly shopping for a solution, they’re usually happy giving us an opportunity to (fairly) sell ourselves.
Let’s look at another.
This page is actually NOT owned by a company.
It’s an affiliate site.
They’re running Meta ads that look like this to “best”-style listicles that look like this.
In other words, this kind of strategy works so well, people are even making money with it as an affiliate.
By serving these kinds of ads to these kinds of pages, you can literally take someone from discovery straight to a purchase (or lead).
Overall, this is just a super, super strong type of content.
It shouldn’t make up the bulk of our content, probably, but it’s ultra-potent, and it’s probably something that we can’t afford not to do.
Third, it’s great for conversion: customers want to compare, so give them a place to do it.
Simplest for last.
Customers want to and will be comparing products during their buyers journey.
We can let them find those conversations elsewhere (and worst of all, on our competitors’ sites), or we can give them a place to do it.
Picture the following two customer journeys.
Journey #1: Prospect lands on our site > reads our content and likes it > investigates our service offering > decides they want to compare us to other products > LEAVES > reads whoknowswhat > might or might not come back.
Journey #2: Prospect lands on our site > reads our content and likes it > investigates our service offering > decides they want to compare us to other products > finds a prominent guide to compare products on our own site > is on our site while they make their most important decision.
Which is more likely to buy from us?
Lastly, it’s a good way to nudge stragglers to buy.
Review-style content — because people like to shop and compare basically constantly — is almost always compelling.
It’s easy to get people to read, and people want to know which widget “wins”.
And that means we can use review content to draw people back into our ecosystem, and, even better, draw them back into the bottom of the buying funnel.
Example.
Suppose we sell accounting software, and we offer free trials.
Over time, we’ve built a large email list of people who have signed up for a free trial but have not made a purchase.
We could send them an email serving them a post titled “Top 10 Accounting Software in 2024”.
We already know they’re interested in our product on some level because they’ve signed up for a free trial.
What this does is capture the people who are still in the process of making a decision and beam them directly back into our funnel, Star Trek style.
Then, we can make a case for ourselves (and, of course, put ourselves on the top of the list).
How to deploy this for yourself:
Use an SEO tool to look for keyword data on keywords with the “best” modifier for every kind of product you sell
Do the same for “review” keywords and “alternatives” keywords — for both yourself and your competitors
Create a category on your site for this kind of thing
Write the content; be fair and honest, but don’t be afraid to declare yourself the best
Link them all internally
Experiment with ad traffic to see if you can get it to convert
Measure & iterate over time
Snack: Maybe the only advertiser Reddit actually likes (and why)
Ok this is a super short and super sweet case study.
Reddit is notoriously difficult to advertise on.
To say that people are fickle would be an understatement.
Redditors are savvy, and they generally don’t appreciate what they would call corporate shilling.
But is it a bad place to promote content?
Absolutely not. You just have to do it in a way that respects Reddit and what Reddit is all about.
This week, I found a company who absolutely smashes that. And you won’t believe what they sell…
…it’s woks.
Like, the big pans.
Here’s what their ads look like:
Link to the actual post (1,800 upvotes, by the way)
Below the ad, one of the top comments even says: “Super cool vid. Y’all still the best marketing account on reddit. Up-front about who you are, post interesting content, and even helpful advice rather than doing sleazy ‘guerilla marketing’” (link to the comment).
And if you follow your nose to this company’s account, they post stuff like this — and pretty much only stuff like this — basically all the time.
So WHY does this work? A few reasons:
Transparency. They’re just straight up with Reddit. Hey, we’re a business and we make a cool thing. I want to show you how we do it.
They’re showing something interesting instead of selling. It’s not about asking people to buy. It’s about showing a cool part of the process. With Reddit, you have to promote WAY up-funnel and trust them to find their way down-funnel if they like the product enough.
They interact. They look, feel, and act like friendly Redditors.
It’s great proof that Reddit doesn’t dislike ads. In fact, they specifically really like ads sometimes — but if, and only if, we, as advertisers prove we understand wtf Reddit is all about.
How to do this for yourself:
Document something related to your product that Reddit would like — usually something interesting in the making of it, or some kind of interesting data
Put that in a format Reddit would like
Promote it (paid or organically) in subreddits that make sense
Show effort and transparency
Engage with all the comments
Track what you can, but don’t try to sell anything
Measure and repeat
Morsels: Content marketing links
That’s the issue.
Go forth & conquer.
—Perrin
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