How does "Helpful' help our clients?

You will have noticed the "Helpful' button next to your reviews:

On the surface this is rightfully understood to be a way that visitors to your site can acknowledge that a review has been particularly helpful to them by 'voting' for it. The main question for our clients, though, is 'how can this be helpful to my business?'

Let's look at an example (click on the image below to enlarge):

 

How has this helped the hotel in question? 

To answer this we need to mine down into the thought process of the 'voter'. They first went to the hotel's website, they then saw that there were independent reviews from past guests and clients; they then selected 'Weddings', so we can be safe in assuming they were looking for a hotel to host a wedding! They then read this specific review, and afterwards voted it helpful. Helpful in what way? We're going to take a big leap into the dark here and make an assumption:

Helpful in influencing them to make contact with a view to booking a wedding!

The same applies to every review written about every service for every client - a helpful vote is a very positive indicator that great reviews attract business.