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Marketing tells us we should focus on selling solutions to problems, rather than selling the product. In this blog post, I’m going to describe 3 problems that can be solved with a rating or review system such as Multi Rating Pro.
Problem 1: An way for users to sort posts by ratings
Rating and review systems allow you to sort your information by the highest rated. This provides a natural ranking order which also helps your users cut to the chase. Multi Rating Pro provides a couple of widgets and shortcodes which allows you to display your highest rated posts and rating entries. You can also sort rating entries by most recent.
A case study is an international photography competition uses Multi Rating Pro to allow judges to rate photographs and award prizes. The competition in 2016 had 13 judges who rated 4,545 photographs submitted by 1,066 photographers. Only judges have access to and permission to rate photographs. Ratings are exported to a CSV file once all judges have finished rating all photographs in a competition.
Here’s an example of a website called ScoutAdvisor which uses Multi Rating Pro to allow users to rate houses and places for scout camps in Italy. As of November 2016 this website had 2,738 active users.
Problem 2: A way for users to review posts and share content
User generated content with reviews or ratings is a powerful content marketing strategy. Consumers are more likely to trust user generated content which can lead to an increase in conversions and sales.
There are two brands which stand out when it comes to user generated reviews: Amazon.com and TripAdvisor. Amazon sells products as it’s main business with user generated reviews a key part of it’s marketing plan. Some users skip the official descriptions of products and jump straight to the user reviews. TripAdvisor on the other hand is all about reviews and their main business works on an affiliate model. When users like what they see, they are redirected somewhere else to complete a transaction and TripAdvisor receives a commission.
Multi Rating Pro allows users to rate or review posts for products, places or services for example and then this information can be displayed on your site. In addition, schema.org microdata can be generated to enhance your organic traffic with rich snippets shown in service engine result pages (SERP).
Problem 3: A way to obtain user feedback
One of the most important things you can do to grow your business is to gather feedback from your customers. Customer feedback provides you with valuable insight into what your customers really think about your product or service. What would you do if you found out some of your customers are having a sub-optimal experience, or their expectations have not been met? You might use this data to help you make better business decisions.
Polls can be termed as quick surveys that involve only a single question. Surveys take more time to complete and consists of multiple questions. Polls and surveys can be easily created with Multi Rating Pro to gather user feedback. You can collect additional information as needed using the custom fields or by using the Gravity Forms add-on to include a wide variety of field types. The [mrp_rating_item_results] shortcode can be used to show a breakdown of multiple choice answers with totals. For surveys, you might choose to export ratings to a CSV file which makes it easy to analyse ratings and gain new insights.