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This Product Sucks! How Opinionated Reviews Will Make You More Money

In 1979, Miller Beer released an advertisement featuring several men sitting at a bar, enjoying an ice cold Miller beer. Below the picture, which showed the men laughing and clearly enjoying their activity, was a very simple caption: Miller-High Life is America’s quality beer since 1855 and it is the best-tasting beer that anyone can find. An assertive statement, to say the least. There was no focus on the actual taste of the beer, beyond asserting that it was indeed the best. Instead, the advertiser simply asked readers to trust his opinion.

If you’ve had any part in advertising, particularly writing reviews, in the past couple of decades, you probably know that this ad wouldn’t really fly anymore. Today, the powerhouses like McDonalds use subliminal messages and invest millions of dollars in exploring “nagging” or the effect that a child can have on their parent by simply begging them to make a trip to the fast-food restaurant, or buy him the new Super-Awesome Ninja Play House. After all, a marketing professor at Texas A&M named James U. McNeal estimated that the total market for child “nagging” was around $324.4 billion in 2008.

But the average Internet reader is on to the whole scheme. There are certain things they expect from advertisements and, by extension, product reviews. If you can’t simply assert that a product is the “best” like our 1979 friends at Miller, how do you write a review that will convert visitors? To start, you could try being a little honest. You might be surprised at just how many negative reviews have a history of maintaining solid conversion numbers.

Considering Geography in Reviews

The first mistake you’ll make when writing a review is forgetting to consider what your readers actually want to know, not necessarily what you want to tell them. First of all, you have to reach them where they live. It’s no wonder that Google has placed such stock in localized search recently. If you can make a product more relevant to a person where they live, you lift your review from the anonymous environment of the Internet and place it directly in your readers’ homes.

Let’s consider an example using wireless Internet services, an easy way to get “geographical” on your readers. Obviously, coverage area is an important item to consider when choosing wireless Internet services, particularly those associated with mobile devices, like 4G services. You could simply make the statement that your wireless affiliate covers “nearly every area in Boston.” In the end, however, that really doesn’t tell your readers anything valuable, even though you might think it does.

But take a look at this page on Boston CLEAR 4G services at ClearWirelessInternet.com. It’s pretty clear (no pun intended) that the company doesn’t cover the entire Boston area. In fact, there are some pretty notable gaps in the service coverage. But contrary to what you might think, that’s perfectly fine. While you might not get many conversions from people in South Boston, you are being honest about your coverage area, and clearly demonstrate how the company covers the majority of Boston, without simply stating it. You could try to cover the missing areas with a bit of crap, but your honesty and specificity will go much farther in helping your readers make their decision.

What Readers Expect in Their Reviews

The closer you can get to letting your readers interact with your product in a review, the better. Sometime in the future, we can look forward to 3D models of products that project from your computer screen — allowing you to literally hold a product in your hands before buying it online. But until that day, you’ll have to rely on some compelling and honest content to do the job.

The best starting point is the five senses — sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound. Be as descriptive as possible when talking about your product. One of the most brilliant developments in advertising was the Scent Strip, which like our Miller advertisement, first started appearing in 1979. These strips appear in magazines to advertise perfumes and colognes. Love them or hate them, and there are many people that do hate them quite a bit, they accomplish one important goal, engaging the reader’s previously unused sense of smell. And that smell is obviously the most important feature of the perfume. Nobody cares if it comes in a “bottle crafted by Italian artisans,” or that it looks like “bottled raindrops from a lush tropical island.” Readers care how the perfume smells, and with little exception, only how it smells.

You can take the same idea and translate it into your own product reviews. If you’re writing a review on bath soap, tell readers how the bubbles from the soap “soothe and exfoliate skin” and how the soap smells like “fresh lilacs on a warm summer day.” Be specific, but don’t engage too much hyperbole. A descriptive and powerful review walks a fine line with tacky and bombastic.

Finally, if a product sucks, let the reader know what you didn’t like about it, but highlight things that you feel make up for those deficiencies. Don’t be afraid to let your personal opinion bleed into the content. Readers will browse thousands and thousands of reviews and advertisements in their lives — yours needs to target a small, focused demographic with honest information. Your goal is not, or should not be, to trick your customers into buying one product from you and hope that interest in that one product doesn’t drop. Instead, you should be focusing on creating an overall product with your reviews — a community where readers will trust your opinion because you give honest information on products in which they’re interested.

We talk about advertisements a great deal when referring to reviews, and with good reason. An advertisement understands the natural impatience of consumers, and is really no different than a well-crafted product review. While this does justify keeping your written reviews on the short side, you should also consider studying as many advertisements as possible to get some ideas for your own reviews. If you can engage a reader in the product and form an honest opinion that a reader can trust, you stand to make more money on your visitors, and you don’t even have to abandon those pesky ethics.

Tags: business blogging, content, writing

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