Five Great Strategies To Build Social Proof

What is social proof in digital marketing? In short, it is positive engagement around your brand seen on your website and social channels as well as review platforms. It's a popular tactic and easy to implement. This article shows you five ways how...

Types of Social Proof That Convince Customers To Spend Money With Your Company

Of course you want more customers and to increase dollars per order. This is an easy technique to use, so this article will help you implement it.

Here are five great strategies to build social proof and bring gobs of positive buzz around your brand.

Social Media Proof

There is one ideal place to begin, and it is with social media proof.

Social media has become mainstream. Savvy brands are recognizing it as an opportunity to leverage visible positive engagement by highlighting what customers are saying about them. You can even use testimonials from social media platform on your website.

There are lots of great social media management tools that help you to keep track of your brand mentions across all online and social media platforms. In turn, you can feature positive word of mouth as part of your marketing strategy.

Case Studies

While case studies may be a bit more formal in their nature, they can often be utilized to provide high authority social proof. Also referred to as long-form social proof, a case study leverages the idea that consumers view in-depth and long reviews as being more credible than brief excerpts.

There are a lot of businesses that are doing case studies right but there are also many that are doing them wrong. A case study should explain the customer’s story; the problem they experienced and the steps you put in place to rectify it. The case study should also include comments from the consumer in order to validate what you are saying.

Customer Testimonials

One of the most obvious yet effective methods of social proof marketing from an online reputation agency is using customer testimonials. You only need to look at Amazon to see how effective this is.

All of the products sold on Amazon have a comprehensive review section whereby people can read comments, as well as reading consumer questions that have been answered about the product. Reviews can be about your:

• Products
• Customer service
• Brand as a whole

It is really important you use an independent review platform for reviews and testimonials. Many companies have been caught purchasing fake reviews or even making up their own feedback.

Customer Showcase

Customer showcases can work well too. This works especially well for clothing brands.

You should encourage people to send in photos of themselves wearing your garments so that they can be featured on your website and social media. It will help for customers to see your clothing on people like themselves that have purchased your clothing items, rather than on models in ads. Plus, it is another nod towards the trustworthiness of your brand.

Social Proof Examples - Statistics

Another way that you can use social proof to increase your conversions is by showing real-time stats on your website. This includes fun visuals that enable your customers to see how many people are currently purchasing or viewing a specific item.

A good example of a website that does this is Hotels.com - they show when each of their properties was last booked in real-time, for example, “booked one hour ago” or “booked one day ago.”