If you’ve ever seen a school of fish move, you know how people act when they’re in a group. You get outliers, but for the most part when you put people together they try to conform to the actions of the group — that means often you’ll see a kind of collective opinion form.
The 1951 Asch conformity experiment is a famous example of this, and it’s one of the foundational psychological experiments that’s been quoted over and over again. People gave wrong answers because they believed the group had it correct, or because they felt pressure to vote with the group.
Robert Cialdini coined the term “social proof” in 1984 to cover this phenomenon. People are more likely to take actions they see as “correct” for a given situation because other people are doing them. It’s one of the most powerful phenomena in marketing. And you can turn it to your advantage.
Types of Social Proof
There are several different types of social proof, and different authors break them down differently. But here are some of the most common.
- Expert approval. This tends to carry a lot of weight.
- Friends. We weight the opinions of people close to us higher.
- Crowds. If people are using it and talking about it, the product must be good, right?
- Celebrity endorsement. We buy things celebrities endorse; we want to be like them.
- Certification. If the product is approved by governing bodies who carry weight in an industry, it must be good.
- Testimonials. A good testimonial about a product or service can convince people you know what you’re talking about.
All of these revolve around convincing people that other people like your product.
Building Social Proof
So we know what social proof is. How do we get it?
You could go the sketchy route and just…make it up. Some people do. But that sort of thing backfires eventually. The best way to build social proof is to get your product or service in someone’s hands, and that means work.
Guest blogging was one of the fastest ways to get noticed back when blogging first started, and it’s still an effective tool today. When you can say “As seen on” by your name it’s a lot easier to get people interested.
Pitching yourself and your product or service to large outlets is a great way to build up that social proof. It’s one of the biggest things that PR companies do. They work to manage someone’s reputation, and that usually means making them more famous than they were.
Ask an Expert
One very effective way to use social proof to build up you or your company’s reputation is to cultivate relationships with experts. When you have an expert’s name backing you, it’s a big deal because people know that expert understands what they’re talking about.
Fitbit leveraged this well by creating a whole section on their website with quotes from health industry experts and publications. This “Buzz” section allows people to see current clips, quotes and links to experts in the field, often writing for health or lifestyle sites. That helps them sell.
Show Other People Buying
KlientBoost does a lot with conversion. On one of their podcast episodes, Proof CEO David Rogenmoser mentioned something that had worked for their company.
“I was booking a trip to South Africa, and I was gonna do this safari, and I was on … Booking.com, or one of those sites, and I saw a little thing slide out that said, somebody just bought two minutes ago, book soon,” he said.
“And I didn’t know the person, but it gave me confidence to go put down like five grand on this safari. And that’s when I was like, man, this is really cool, we need this for our funnel, ’cause we were selling courses at the time, but it didn’t exist. And so we just kind of built it real quickly in a weekend and thought, hey, let’s throw it up there and see what happens. And we saw over a 50 percent increase on our order floor when adding just a little notification like that.”
If you can find a way to show other people buying the product, you’ll see an uptick. It’s the same principle behind when you’re at a restaurant or coffee shop, people will often order something they’ve seen someone else eating.
Harness Reviews
Reviews are an essential part of every big e-commerce platform for a reason: they work.
According to Nielsen, 73 percent of customers say they read reviews to decide whether to purchase a product. 35 percent say that if there are no reviews, they’re less likely to purchase in the first place. Look at the way Amazon structures its site. You have a review score available right there so you can build social proof and convince people to buy your product.
Use Influence
Influencer marketing is a hot buzzword, mainly due to Instagram’s burgeoning market for advertising posts. From celebrities to micro-influencers only famous in their niche, influencer marketing is here to stay.
Mattress company Leesa is an example of a brand that was built almost entirely on influencer marketing. They contacted bloggers and social media influencers in their niche and sent them samples so they could see the quality of the bed. That led to good reviews and influencers promoting them.
There are a myriad of ways to take advantage of social proof. These are just a few. Make sure you’re using social proof in your marketing mix to take advantage of crowd psychology.
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This content is sponsored by M. Rafiq.
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