If appearing in search results has become simpler due to highly personalized Digital Marketing strategies, what makes a potential customer choose your offer over your competitor’s?
First — in a subconscious reaction — this customer will think about whether they already know or have seen your brand before. Then, they will analyze the content they are seeing to decide whether interacting with you will provide a solution to their need!
After overcoming this first dilemma and clicking on your company’s link, the customer will be faced with another choice: deciding whether to swipe their card now, on your offer, or whether to go back a few pages to buy from your competitor.
In this example, your page is beautiful and easy to navigate, and all of your photos and listing description are optimized to sell — but your potential customer returns to the search results page and decides to explore your competitor’s listing!
When you stop to analyze the difference between the pages, you notice that yours is more elegant, your photos are amazing and the description of the offer is perfect — but your competitor keeps the reviews and comments of previous customers public!
Social proof is this: the security that silences the indecision of new customers when faced with the choice of buying your brand’s solution now, or continuing the long search for an alternative!
I’m Guilherme de Bortoli, CEO of Enjoy Minder, and I’ll teach you in this text:
- What is social proof;
- How does this mental trigger work;
- How to influence your audience’s purchasing decision;
- And how to collect the evidence your brand needs to sell more!
What is social proof?
One of the last barriers between your product or service on the Internet and your perfect customer’s card is how much they think they can trust the result your brand offers!
Since trust cannot be bought — it is earned — people can only find out about the reputation of a brand, or a product or service, by checking what former customers and users think about them.
A sale based on trust can only happen when a new potential customer can know in advance:
- How much your company’s solution has already served other people;
- How much your brand can cause more headaches than it solves;
- And how much it can make it easier to make a wish come true.
Following this logic, actively displaying your customers’ best reviews on your pages — and making it easy to collect new opinions — helps your brand gain the trust it needs to influence new visitors’ purchasing decisions!
This accumulation of social proof can be built using one or more of the collection formats I’ve listed below. Check it out!
Customer Testimonials
Making space to display your customers’ honest testimonials about your products or services is a good first step to accumulating social proof that can help convince the undecided!
And it works best when used in conjunction with the other modalities I’ll show you below!
Reviews and ratings
The evaluation system can be even more practical when it comes to receiving social proof from customers, since the customer only needs to fill out a rating (from one to five stars, for example) or a classification (“liked” and “disliked”) to leave an opinion, register an engagement or add to the overall average rating of the evaluation.
Numbers and statistics
By aggregating and presenting the most relevant data about the real users of your products or services, you gain the opportunity to create compelling statistics to get the undecided off the fence and guide new sales!
Success stories
Every new customer wants to know what life is like for previous customers after purchasing a product or service (or after starting a relationship with a company, from banks to department stores) because they need to have as many signs as possible that this same solution will suit their profile and their budget!
Displaying successful cases provides raw material for the new client to do part of the justification and convincing work on their own, leaving the company with only the responsibility to live up to expectations!
Influencers and endorsements
The popularity of other brands and important people in your business niche should also be exploited to advertise your company on the Internet and speed up people’s familiarity with it !
Many people tend to think that sponsored content is frowned upon on the Internet, but any content seen is better than no content.
Not to mention that endorsements are already commonplace for most social networks, where legions of loyal fans of influencers pay extra attention to the sponsored post with the intention of contributing to the creators they like the most!
The Psychology Behind Social Proof
When in doubt between acting or not acting in a new situation, the vast majority of people will act according to the social trust caused by the herd effect: “if scared, follow other humans for protection and collaboration”!
This phenomenon is mirrored from physical to digital behavior, since the more buyers a product or service has (and the more testimonials and reviews the page for that offer displays), the more new consumers will be able to:
- Justify the price of this solution to themselves;
- Explain why the solution will work for them too;
- See yourself in the shoes of one of the successful buyers;
- And close the purchase with the tendency to return to the page to share a positive opinion about the product too!
In other words, new customers use reviews from other consumers to inform how much they trust your business!
Optimizing product or service pages to leverage the power of social proof works best when one of your company’s focuses is Customer Success, as negative endorsements can also happen and hurt your sales.
This could be the case where searches for your brand result in many pages on Reclame Aqui or don’t even appear on Google!
Since Customer Success takes into account that your company only scores points when the customer wins, applying a strategy to offer a quality product or service, facilitating the collection of social proof and displaying it to the entire Internet, is a way of using Digital Marketing to graduate a product or service that “sells well” to “the best-selling of all”.
Look what Apple did with the iPhone!
Popularity is valuable because it can be inherited by new releases in the same way that it is with iPhones: everyone knows it’s expensive, but it’s an increasingly excellent and long-lasting phone for most people.
Just as social proof can also be passed from a figure that adds trust to the audience in your niche (such as an influencer or a brand similar to yours) directly to your offer — if you guarantee the endorsement, of course!
In addition to humanizing your business, by exploring the psychology of social proof as a tool, you will always have someone answering “yes” to the constant question in the minds of your next customers: “Should I buy from this brand?”.
Effective Social Proof Collection Strategies
The most effective way to collect social proof is to ask for it!
This process can be automated using Digital Marketing tools and involves:
- Conduct post-purchase satisfaction surveys ;
- Send questionnaires and various forms;
- Interview the protagonists of success stories;
- And manage digital communities around your brand or the niches in which it operates.
Asking for customer reviews in these diverse ways gives your business the opportunity to recognize the strengths of the products or services it offers, to optimize future Digital Marketing campaigns or update current offers!
Extracting key data from this collection (such as your percentage of satisfied customers or other information that justifies the potential effectiveness of your product or service for the profiles of people you would like to reach) can also be done automatically in any form of social proof to be used in later strategies — such as in a slogan or in highly personalized segmentations!
Strategies for implementing social proof in your business
When considering a social proof strategy for your business, keep in mind that there will always be a bit of distrust on the part of some consumers if the reviews of your products or services are from real customers, but filtered to show only the good side of your brand!
This obstacle is easy to overcome if you add simpler testimonial formats that show authenticity about what your offer can really offer people.
Over time, testimonials from new customers will become increasingly positive as your brand learns from its mistakes and builds a solid reputation that will become the new normal!
What you need to do is start asking your past and current customers to leave their opinions about your brand — and make it easy to collect them to the point where leaving a comment or rating takes no more than three actions to complete.
The easier it is for someone to give their opinion on something, the more reviews you’ll get — so add a space for comments:
- Side by side with the title of a product or service in your online store;
- Add a feedback link to all your social media profiles or email signatures;
- And exchange incentives for testimonials using the power of landing pages!
Rewards work exceptionally well to motivate people to become ambassadors of a brand’s quality.
Recently, Aliexpress created an incentive program to make users take photos with the products they received and confirm whether the product received matched the order made in the store.
The result has been the achievement of a privileged position among the most profitable marketplaces today, using the overwhelming force of social proof to convince new buyers to close a deal — showing that it is safe and beneficial to buy online — instead of losing these sales to the competition!
Future Trends of Social Proof in Digital Marketing
Even though I’m only now talking about how different types of social proof have a huge impact on a new customer’s purchasing decision, I don’t think this trend is a passing fad — quite the opposite!
The use of social proof is a consolidated practice that happens spontaneously when customers have a space to share what they think about a product or service.
This spontaneity is inherited from one social network to another over the years — and which, currently, is most evident between YouTube and TikTok!
YouTube and TikTok are two platforms that are very well prepared to receive the coming years of new formats of shopping reviews from buyers themselves (and influencers that emerge from this type of community) because they are audiovisual content that tends to be:
- Direct;
- Easy to create;
- And simple to share.
Depending on your business goals, YouTube and TikTok may not be the right places to put your resources.
In this case, outline the ideal profile of your audience and go to the platform they are already on, being proactive to also influence your current customers to evaluate purchases on the platforms that are most important for your business’s financial goals!
As I showed you in this text, people’s testimonials are already a determining factor for many sales that you haven’t even seen happen, but that you now know how not to miss!
Show that your business has fans!
You need to prove that your business is a success for consumers — and the best way to do that is by providing a space to showcase what your brand’s fans have to say!
Social proof coming directly from your customers brings in sales you would never make otherwise because:
- It takes advantage of the herd behavior of human beings;
- Gives new customers everything they need to justify a purchase;
- And they fit perfectly into the current (and future) trend of people consuming and publishing video content on TikTok and YouTube!
With the right incentive and a direct channel of communication with your business, gathering your first authentic reviews is not that complicated — and the return can be a considerable increase in profitability and in establishing your business as an authority figure!
Start by analyzing your Digital Marketing strategy by completing the free diagnosis here at Enjoy Minder.
Then, decide which audience would be ideal to reach and — most importantly — how you would like that audience to see your company!
With all the steps in this text (and with the partnership always open here with Enjoy Minder), you have everything you need to get there. Just go!
