Collecting and showcasing social proof is one of the best ways to enhance your brand’s conversion potential — whether on your website or other digital channels.
Positive customer feedback is an exceptional way to demonstrate your brand’s competence and commitment to developing highly effective solutions to your target audience’s pain points. It can also guarantee your business’s dedication to customer satisfaction. Plus, it’s an excellent way to differentiate your business from your competitors.
But, at the end of the day, including social proof in your digital marketing tactics isn’t just about establishing brand credibility. More than that, it’s about earning your prospects’ trust and influencing their shopping behaviour. Not convinced? Just consider that 88% of consumers need to trust a brand before buying.
So, if you’re looking to capitalize on the benefits of high levels of brand trust — including an elevated conversion rate, increased customer loyalty, and better word-of-mouth marketing results — here’s how to master social proof to promote your business.
Make Sure to Provide Testimonials From All Customer Types
Who do consumers consider to be the best brand spokespeople?
Well, according to the latest data from Edelman — the ultimate authority on all things trust-related — there are two groups of people consumers depend on when seeking brand/product recommendations.
- On the one hand, most people have confidence in scientists and experts, especially when it comes to innovative solutions they don’t fully understand.
- On the other hand, around 61% of people want to see social proof of a brand’s competence from people similar to themselves, knowing that this will be the feedback most relevant to predicting their product satisfaction.
So, if you’re looking for effective tactics to build brand trust and encourage your target audience to invest in your solutions, do your best to showcase a variety of testimonials that testify to the positive experiences from multiple customer types and use cases.
For inspiration on how to do this, check out CapitalPad. This business caters to two types of people — searchers and investors. But, knowing that its positive track record with one segment of its audience won’t be as important to the other, Capital Pad showcases social proof that speaks to both types of prospects. This doesn’t just ensure that it instantly serves relevant testimonials to web visitors. The fact that the customer feedback demonstrates Capital Pad’s success rates in both areas of its expertise further establishes the brand’s credibility and helps it win over more leads than by only focusing on one area of its services.
Create Content in Collaboration with Influential Industry Voices
As mentioned above, sourcing social proof from the right people boosts or diminishes your brand’s trust-building and conversion-inspiring potential. That’s why it’s a good idea to explore the possibility of enhancing your brand’s trustworthy reputation by collaborating with influential industry voices.
If there’s an expert or public figure your audience already trusts, then it’s more than worth trying to find ways to secure them as a spokesperson for your business. This marketing strategy can help you:
- convince your prospects that they can rely on you to receive high-quality products or services
- boost your brand’s reach (by targeting your collaborator’s audience
- effectively position your brand as a credible entity. This will help you engage your audience more effectively and maybe even shorten the sales cycle for people who discovered you through an influential industry voice.
For example, check out Academic Influence on YouTube. You’ll find that it features several video interviews with noteworthy scientists who are considered top experts in their fields. And while this does a tremendous job of helping the brand expand its reach, it also works wonders for establishing its own authority in its field. After all, why would world-renowned scientists like John Christy, John Mearsheimer, or Niall Ferguson collaborate with a brand if they didn’t believe it was a reputable and credible entity?
Or, for a slightly more snackable approach to this strategy, take inspiration from Louis Poulsen. This brand regularly sends its products to influencers in the home decor niche, using the strategy to further establish itself as a desirable brand in the industry and gain access to valuable (and highly aesthetic) UGC it can use on its social profiles.
Include Star Ratings Wherever You Display Products
What’s the easiest way to signal that a product genuinely does what it promises to do? Without a doubt, it’s displaying star ratings.
Even though star ratings are not nearly as detailed (or convincing) as other, more elaborate formats of social proof, research shows they’re rather effective at influencing customer behaviour.
PowerReviews discovered that 90% of shoppers consider star ratings when browsing products. And, even more importantly, 94% of purchases are made for solutions with an average star rating above four stars, showing that people genuinely look at this tidbit of info before clicking the “Buy” button.
But here’s the thing. Star ratings work marvellously on product pages (where shoppers already populate the mid-to-lower stages of the sales funnel). Nonetheless, they can have an equally positive impact on any other part of your website (or online presence) where you wish to elevate your brand’s trustworthiness and encourage conversions. So, why not feature this type of social proof on every page where you display your solutions?
For example, Bariatric Fusion includes a Bestsellers section on its homepage, featuring some of its most successful products. Instead of just listing random products and saying “Our customers are happy with these solutions,” the brand emphasizes product quality with star ratings. This way, potential buyers don’t just get to see several supplements with a 5-star rating. They also get an additional piece of info — the number of reviews for each product — which does a great job of demonstrating that these solutions indeed worked for a large number of buyers.
Display Shopper Behaviour in Real Time
Why do consumers seek out social proof in the first place?
Well, buyer behaviour research shows that most people don’t know how to act when they feel incompetent to make the right decision. In these cases, they often opt to follow people around them.
One way to describe this instance of human behaviour is to say it’s an example of conformity (or herding behaviour). But, when it comes to shopping and following others, there’s one crucial distinction: people looking at social proof genuinely believe that those around them are more competent at making purchase decisions than they are.
So, if you’re looking to build brand trust and influence your prospects to buy from your business, it may be a good idea to show that they’re not the only ones considering (and shopping with) your brand.
Live shopper behaviour updates are a marvellous method of doing this for two reasons.
On the one hand, they’re great for showing that there’s activity in your online store and that there are dozens (or hundreds) of shoppers buying your products at every single moment).
On the other hand, they can be a great product recommendation tool, helping elevate your web visitors’ understanding of your brand’s offer and encouraging them to buy more than one product.
If you check out Tailored Athlete’s Athletic Fit Jeans product collection page, you’ll see this is precisely what the brand does. By showcasing real-time shopping updates, the brand is creating a sense of activity around consumers looking at specific products or collection pages. By including shoppers’ first names and locations in the updates, Tailored Athlete also shows that its customers are real people from the real world, making it easier for new prospects to pull the trigger and invest in their first item of Tailored Athlete clothing.
Encourage Social Media UGC
Even though consumers consider social proof a crucial source of purchase-influencing information, many people have a hard time trusting traditional social proof.
A survey from 2023 discovered that 75% of shoppers have concerns about fake reviews, a fear further flamed by each massive attempt to remove fraudulent UGC from shopping platforms like Amazon.
So, if you’re searching for tactics to build trust and influence your audience’s shopping behaviour with social proof, it’s a good idea to inject some transparency and authenticity into your marketing efforts.
One easy way to do this is, of course, to use social media as a platform for sourcing genuine user-generated content.
Doing this offers several benefits:
- By asking customers to share their experience with your solutions, you get the opportunity to source real and unfiltered feedback you can then embed on your website.
- Interacting with customers in this way establishes your brand’s reputation as a user-first business that cares about delivering a stellar customer experience.
- Finally, encouraging social media UGC works great for community building. It helps you engage your existing customer base, build stronger connections with clients, and show potential prospects the type of experience they can expect if they choose to invest in your products.
Check out how Escort Radar achieves the latter. It expertly uses UGC to highlight its products’ effectiveness. Plus, the comments section further supports the brand’s claims that it offers some of the best products in its niche, seeing how it’s filled with dozens of photos and reviews submitted by happy customers.
Showcase Case Studies and Customer Success Stories on Your Blog
Sometimes, the best social proof isn’t that which presents your brand or products in the best possible light. Instead, it’s the more granular instances of customer spotlights that go into every single detail of your organization’s work process to show an unparalleled dedication to helping customers receive an unmatched experience.
In fact, if you look at what content formats performed best in 2023, you’ll find that customer stories and case studies ranked at the top of the list, delivering positive results for 28% and 19% of marketers respectively.
So, if you want to showcase social proof that will be a bit more detailed than the average customer testimonial, it’s an excellent idea to start giving the limelight to your satisfied clients.
For inspiration, check out how USM Haller does it on its company blog. By telling stories about the people and professionals who use its products, this furniture brand creates a canvas for depicting all the versatile uses its storage solutions can serve. They work great in office settings. They’re modular, which makes them an excellent choice for pop-up shops. Finally, they provide multiple customization options. That makes them the ideal option for business owners (or design enthusiasts) who want unique pieces on which they can put their own marks.
Use the Power of Third-Party Review Aggregators
If you’re aiming to build brand trust, one helpful tactic you could explore is to source your social proof from the right review aggregators.
We already mentioned that the majority of people worry about fraudulent ratings. However, if you look at research on where consumers go to read product reviews, you’ll find that a few third-party aggregators stand out as their go-to choices.
For example, statistical data shows that most end-consumers turn to Google, Yelp, Facebook, and TripAdvisor to evaluate local businesses. And if you look at the B2B sector (especially SaaS), you’ll find that websites like Capterra, G2, and TrustRadius all rank high in terms of trustworthiness, making them a great starting point for sourcing social proof for your digital channels.
Of course, how you apply these formats to your marketing strategy hugely depends on what your audience values.
For instance, when targeting professional users, it’s a good idea to present them with more formal instances of social proof — like the award badges Slido shows off on its homepage.
Then again, if you know that your audience just wants to know that you provide a reliable and quality service, you could automate the process and do something similar to Fuse. This San Francisco-based HVAC and electrical repair business proudly showcases its Yelp and Google reviews on its homepage.
Make Social Proof Measurable
Lastly, as you explore tactics to boost the effectiveness of your social proof, consider employing measurable formats.
This will allow you to impress your prospects with big numbers. It will also add a dose of transparency to your business’s reputation, which is a crucial aspect of building and retaining consumer trust.
For example, Clockify implements this tactic spectacularly by calling web visitors’ attention to the number of users who signed up for its software product the previous month.
Or, for a slightly different approach, check out Paycor. Knowing how important integrations are to its audience, this business points out that it offers 300+ integrations, a fact that is super-easy to check by clicking on the link provided on the homepage.
In Closing
Even though inspiring consumers to convert is becoming more difficult by the day — after all, they’ve got an almost endless supply of choices at their disposal — mastering social proof can make a genuine difference. Both to your brand’s reputation and your conversion rates.
So, if you’re looking to elevate your brand’s online presence, implementing the social proof tactics discussed in this article is an excellent way to accomplish your goals.
Naturally, to ensure optimal results, measure the effectiveness of these branding/reputation management strategies and adjust as needed. That way, you won’t just guarantee that you’re presenting your business in the best possible light. You’ll also ensure that the feedback you showcase resonates with your prospects and has a real role in inspiring them to invest in your brand’s products and services.
