Summer's customers are still warm. Spend the next 30 days going back for the reviews
Busy season is over and most movers asked nobody for anything. The 30-day plan to collect reviews, photos and referrals from the families you already moved.
The crews are home by five again. The phone has slowed to something a person can answer. And somewhere in your software are the hundreds of families you moved between Memorial Day and Labor Day, most of whom were never asked for anything after the truck pulled away.
That list is the best marketing asset you will have all year, and it has a shelf life. A customer remembers the move clearly for about two months. After that it blurs into the rest of the chaos of a new house, and a review request arriving in November feels like it came from a stranger.
So the play for the next 30 days is not a new campaign. It is going back.
Why reviews, and why now
Two numbers from the benchmark report frame it. Across 75,599 moving company listings, the median company has 30 reviews, and the top ten percent sit at 427 or more. That gap is not talent. It is whether anyone asks.
The second number: 18.6% of moving companies sit below four stars, a higher share than almost any local trade. The reason is structural. A customer whose dresser got scratched writes a review without being asked. A customer whose move went perfectly does not, unless somebody asks her. A company that never asks ends up with a profile written by its worst days.
Going back for the summer's happy customers fixes the ratio from the other side.
Week one: the list and the text
Pull every completed residential job since May 1 that has a mobile number. Take out the claims, the damage disputes and anyone who complained during or after the move. Those get handled separately in week four. Sort the rest newest first, because the August customers are warmest.
Then text them, in batches of about thirty a day so you can keep up with the replies. The template:
"Hi [name], this is [your name] from [company]. Hope you are settled in at [street or town]. We moved you on [date] with [crew lead] and [second name]. If the crew did right by you, a Google review helps a small company more than anything: [link]. Mention the crew by name if you can. Thanks again for trusting us."
The crew names matter more than anything else in that message. They tell the customer you actually remember the job, and a review that names a mover reads as real to the next family shopping. Get the short link from the "Ask for reviews" button in your Business Profile so it opens the review box directly.
One follow-up at five days, one line, then stop. The exact pace and the mistakes to avoid are in the reviews guide.
Week two: the photos on the crews' phones
Every crew lead has a summer of photos on his phone: the wrapped piano, the truck backed to a brownstone, the stack of labeled boxes in a garage, the crew in front of a load. Collect twenty of them and put them on the Business Profile with a sentence each, naming the town and the type of move.
96.2% of moving companies already have at least one photo, so having a photo is nothing. Having twenty from this summer, with dates Google can see, tells a family shopping in October that the company is alive and working. While you are in the profile, check the hours. 29.6% of movers list none, and a company with no hours disappears from the "open now" filter.
Week three: the people who sent the work
Most summer moves came from somewhere. An agent, an apartment community, a senior living coordinator, a storage facility manager, a past customer. Pull the referral source from the job notes, and if the notes are empty, that is the first thing to fix for next summer.
Then send each source a short note with the customer's name in it. "We moved the Garcia family on Elm Street in July. Thank you for the recommendation." Ask for nothing. A named human thanking a named human is the entire referral program, and a note that arrives in September lands better than one that arrives in June when everybody is drowning. The slow season plan covers how to turn those sources into a winter.
Week four: the ones who complained
Call them. Do not text.
"Hi, this is [owner] at [company]. I saw the notes on your move and I wanted to hear it from you directly." Then listen. Fix what can be fixed, refund what should be refunded, and do not ask for a review. Some of them will write one anyway, and the ones who do will describe an owner who called, which is a review a competitor cannot buy.
What to expect
Hypothetical numbers, then run your own. Say you have 200 summer customers on the list after trimming. If one in six leaves a review, that is about 33 new reviews in a month, which would move a company sitting at the median well past it, in a season when almost nobody else is collecting. Where your company sits now, by state, is in the benchmark report.
The review texts, the follow-up and the profile update are all part of the free 14-day trial, any service, no card. Text or call (385) 396-5586.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, moving companies among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor