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Social Proofing & Its Benefits In Marketing

How social proofing is used in everyday marketing and how to implement it into your strategy

By DevelopynPublished 3 years ago 7 min read
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Social proof is a psychological phenomenon which can be used to great effect in marketing when it comes to attracting new customers to your services and converting them. The general gist of it is that people are more likely to follow the crowd and choose the option that seems to be most popular with others. The logic behind this is that if other people can be seen using a service, this vouches for its credibility and shows it can be trusted to present great results, whereas a service that has no apparent social reinforcement may make people less likely to ‘take a chance’ with it. After all, you would be more likely to want to spend your money on a service that has a good reputation and a proven track record than a business without any backup to their claims!

Social proofing is done through various methods, all of which can sway someone’s decision to choose your service to varying degrees. These tactics are used all the time, though they are so commonplace that they may go overlooked and unnoticed- yet still manage to have a subconscious effect on a person’s decision making.

This blog will outline a few examples of social proofing and how it can work in your favour to market your business to new clients.

Statistics

This is a popular tactic employed by tonnes of businesses within their marketing efforts. If you see an advertisement for a mobile phone network with the message ‘’serving over 1 million happy customers throughout the UK’’, you would likely think that this is a credible and well established brand that must be the real deal to be able to secure so many customers on an ongoing basis. The fact that there are so many people subscribed to this network gives the impression that they can be trusted and the injection of this information into their advertisement really makes the difference in terms of winning people over and shows the viewer that your solution is already tried and tested by other regular people just like themselves.

Reviews

Reviews are a key insight for the viewer that can greatly enhance the social proofing efforts of your brand. Not only can real examples of people in relatable positions to yourself be shown, but so can their opinions and a detailed breakdown of their experience. If you can amass a great number of reviews from your clients, people will likely feel more at ease with choosing you as a service provider. This is fairly basic and obvious marketing psychology, but still works nonetheless and is worth a mention if you’d like to improve your conversion rates.

Now obviously we want these to be positive reviews, so that is another factor which comes into play. However, at a fundamental level, we will always instinctively hold a brand with a lot of great reviews over one that has little-to-no reviews. As humans, we want to feel secure and it’s easy to see something that has worked for other people and want to ‘play it safe’.

However, a large sum of negative reviews can impact your business and client conversion rates greatly. Potential customers will think twice before choosing your product or service if you have a plethora of bad feedback from previous customers that has not been addressed. Whereas a smaller business that has 0 negative reviews, with their previous customers’ experiences being positive, will have the edge.

More reviews = More trustworthy

Less reviews = Less trustworthy

More negative reviews = Less trustworthy

Less negative reviews = More trustworthy

Social Media Following

A strong social media presence will not only bring in more business from shared posts. Growing your social media following will display a positive message to new customers that you’re still in business and growing. If you accumulate a large following, people may notice this and get the impression that there is ‘something to see here’ when they visit your page. A great way to initially grow your following is to be attentive and publish engaging content that your target audience will enjoy. Once you have harboured a decent following, this effect of people joining your page to see what all the hype is about will gradually start to present itself and will increase perpetually over time- generating a snowball-type effect that will help to grow your online presence.

Influencers

This is very commonplace nowadays. You may have seen your favourite YouTuber giving someone's product a shoutout in their videos. This is a paid sponsorship, but this kind of influence from someone we admire can have a decisive impact on the viewer’s likelihood to buy. Not only may we feel like we’re supporting our idols, but we also feel like we can identify with them when we have the same items. Hiring an influencer to feature your product in their video is a fruitful way to take advantage of social proof. Having this kind of spotlight can also give the impression that your brand is widespread and successful, further increasing the viewer’s likelihood of believing you provide a quality service that they can ‘play it safe’ by using.

A massive example here is Raids: Shadow Legends, it’s rare to watch gaming related YouTube videos without the channel owner asking if you’ve been living under a rock because you’ve not heard of Raid: Shadow Legends. The game has had millions of downloads from YouTube conversions alone and this was due to pushing their brand across the YouTube platform through influencers.

Display Credible Affiliates

Letting people know of affiliates is a great way of reinforcing their trust in you. If you fit air conditioning units and you’ve previously had a contract with a well-known car manufacturer, this is the perfect piece of information to put on your website. If it is apparent that you have been trusted to do quality work by other reputable brands, it says a lot about your trustworthiness as a company. Here’s a real-life example: Developyn has several team members who consult for IKEA on internal projects, and we proudly display this for potential clients to see, allowing them to appreciate our professionalism, trustworthiness and credibility as a company.

As you can see, we love to let people know about some of our high-profile clients

Implementation

Any business can implement social proofing as a marketing strategy to some degree. Whether you’re simply asking your customers to leave you a review on a major platform (Google, for example), or if you’re launching a television advert campaign that boasts impressive statistics. If you feel like this is something that may benefit you, it may be a good idea to think about how you could implement an element of social proof into your marketing campaign, and at which level it would be necessary for your industry. It doesn’t always have to be strenuous work to get the ball rolling, and something as simple as requesting a review could go a long way for a small scale business such as a takeaway or a taxi service.

Maintenance

Once you decide on how you can utilise social proofing to help your marketing efforts, it’s not just a one-and-done solution. It needs to be maintained to see consistent results. What I mean by this is that asking customers for reviews for one week will be great and may offer great short-term results, but things may start to get quiet again after that week. Another example could use social media: you may push people toward your social media channels for a month and put a lot of effort into it, but things are only going to slow down again after that time period unless you maintain and adapt your strategy accordingly. For the best results, try and see this as an ongoing task and be attentive to it.

Tips:

Sooner the better

Always ask for a review from clients or customers sooner rather than later. This will allow them to give their most honest review. If it’s positive, it’s another one for the portfolio. If it’s negative, you can use this to improve your performance, customer satisfaction or product to prevent any negative feedback in the future.

Start small

You don’t need to get 50 reviews in one day or gain 40,000 Facebook followers overnight. A lot of amazing feedback in one sitting can seem suspicious to most. A social media page that has just updated their profile picture and added a phone number with 5,000 followers would ring alarm bells to anyone. Slow organic growth is always the best option for gaining trust.

Feedback

Networking with other businesses, friends, and clients/customers is some of the most important social proofing you can do. If you’ve worked with another business, offer each other feedback as it will help you both improve and make the necessary changes needed. Ask a friend/previous customer to honestly tell you what they think of your business model and if it makes sense- especially if they are within your target demographic.

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