The end of the year is often a time for reflection and planning for the New Year for many small businesses.

From maintaining momentum into spring, to local charity and holiday events and team training – the end of the year presents many opportunities for small businesses to expand their reach and connect with their customers and clients.

It’s also a time to think back to the hard work you’ve put in and the customers & clients you’ve served throughout the year.

While you can dig into other mission-critical business metrics, reviews are a great touchpoint to examine at the end of the year.

Public reviews can help sway the decisions of future customers and clients, so they’re an important piece to most small business’ digital marketing gameplan.

I’ve mentioned this on this blog before, but reviews make your business real.

Solving real problems for real people which lead to them sharing real experiences with your small business.

Solving those problems in a unique, valuable way can be an express lane for gathering those reviews at a consistent clip throughout any season.

Learning From All Feedback

The rule of thumb for online reviews hasn’t really changed in all of my years of working online: you’ll hear from your most delighted customers or you’ll hear from your dissatisfied customers.

The best small businesses learn from both subsets of customers/clients.

Studying what they liked best about working with you is a great way to reinforce those features and continue to do those.

Examining the negative reviews and associated experiences can be a source of inspiration to closing a gap in your service or any number of the systems you have in place for your small business.

Review Metrics

Quantity and quality.

Getting reviews at a consistent frequency is a good sign of a growing small business, but so to are quality reviews.

Reviews that include relevant information about the experience working with you allows others to get a clearer view of your service, products and team, making them even more valuable to future customers.

Tale Of The Tape Review Questions

Here at the end of the year, do a quick check on your reviews – how many did you receive?

How many would you put into the “quality” column?

Relative to the number of projects or products sold, what was the ratio of reviews to projects or customers served?

How will you get more customers into the “delighted” subset so that you hear from them more often?

What will you learn from any negative reviews – what can you be doing better with your small business?

What can you do to learn more from customers/clients that didn’t find time to share their feedback?

No matter how many years you’ve been running your small business, there are always opportunities to learn & grow.

Heading into 2026 reviews can be a great inspiration for learning and continued growth in the New Year.