Casey Hibbard is a copywriter who specializes in maximizing the marketing juice from customer reviews, especially in the technology field. As she explains in her book “Stories That Sell: Turn Satisfied Customers into Your Most Powerful Sales and Marketing Asset,” a detailed narrative of your customer’s experience with the product or service you offer can be one of the most powerful sales tools you have.

The points raised in the book can be applied to many fishing products and services, especially high dollar purchases such as watercraft, marine electronics, guiding and fishing lodge packages (though I personally never fail to scan the comments about any item of tackle I’m considering on sites such as Tackle Warehouse, Bass Pro, or Orvis).

Amazon was early to encourage buyer reviews and I’ve noticed it doesn’t matter how elaborate a product’s presentation is on that site - from sophisticated videos to multiple photographs, marketing copy, and Q & A’s - I always place more weight on customer reviews (... ok, not those that complain about delivery issues or the fact they can’t binge watch every new streaming show). Why is that, and how can it direct website content for fishing businesses?

Casey explains our preference for user reviews by explaining they tap into well known biases of human behavior, namely: we trust what others say over what a business says about itself; we look to others to model how we should act; and we love to hear about other people. These statements seem intuitively correct but they’ve also been studied and confirmed by marketing researchers and psychologists.

Trusted sources of information scale from friends/relatives and strangers with experience (i.e., other customers) at the top, various forms of media in the middle, and advertising as the least trustworthy.

Psychologists use terms such as “social proof” and the “logic of appropriateness” to explain our tendency to follow the lead of what others in our social class or “tribe” have already done and given a stamp of approval to - as Casey says: “People perceive less risk when others have successfully gone before them.”

And finally, people are insatiably interested in other people’s stories and experiences and we see this reflected, for example, in the popularity of all forms of media. It’s easy to overlook, but reviews aren’t really about a thing or service in isolation, they’re a story about how that thing or service made a person feel or provided a benefit for them.

Carefully presented reviews satisfy these customer biases by lending your product or service three very valuable traits: credibility, education, and validation.

To take the guide and lodging industry as an example - how many sites fail to convert visitors because they’ve put minimal effort into securing reviews and endorsements from satisfied customers? Any fishing service business can post a happy quote or two from a semi-anonymous source, but it’s rare for any to take the trouble to interview clients about their experience in detail, or work with customers to write their own narratives (and it's my experience people love to write about memorable fishing experiences)?

Many buyers of fishing trips bring along non-fishing partners - how often do you see their positive experiences shared in a meaningful way on a fishing lodge or guide website?

At a minimum, does the website establish credibility and education by providing as much information about the fishing as possible: species, seasons, tackle, and the hospitality offered in terms of logistics, lodging, meals, ambiance, and activities other than fishing?

You’re in an information-persuasion arms race with your competitors. Hiring a skilled writer to re-work web copy or extract meaningful reviews from customers can be a significant competitive advantage.

Stories that Sell in the Fishing Industry