Marketing and Psychology might seem two very distant lines of study. But when combined they can work miracles. Marketers have been leveraging the power of psychology to increase sales and grow their business for years. The most common form in which it exists is via the placement of a product, its color, its packaging and so on.
Most of the times consumers fail to properly identify their needs. Which hinders all the successive buying steps, such as evaluating available alternatives and picking the best one. It’s the job of a marketer to properly place a product in front of potential consumers before they feel the need to buy it. And in order to do that, psychology is a powerful tool. By building social proof in your website, you will have the opportunity to play with your client’s psychology and influence them to make a decision to grow your business.
What Is Social Proof?
Product placement and pricing might be the first layer of marketing, but on a deeper level marketers use FUD and FOMO.
The FUD concept, which stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, is so powerful that it can make your potential consumers stop, think and change their behaviour. FUD and FOMO are two similar concepts and can be used interchangeably. FOMO stands for Fear of Missing Out, which resonates the core concept behind the FUD model.
So how do you make your consumers stop what they are doing, take a second to think and change their buying behavior? One of the most effective tools used to leverage the FOMO and FUD model is Social Proof.
Social Proof is user-generated content that naturally accumulates over time on different Social Media Platforms. The most common forms of Social Proof are Online Comments, Reviews, Ratings and Mentions. But Social Proof can also exist in the form of Download Counts and, New Email Sign-Ups.
Why is Social Proof Effective?
Yes of course it works. Fear is the first and most primitive emotion in Humans and the strongest one as well. But the purpose of Social Proof is not to instill Fear into your consumers. Most of the times fear will already be there in the minds of your consumers. Consumers fear buying the bad product, they fear missing out on good products, they fear wasting money, they fear not getting all the features, they fear not getting enough post-purchase support. The list can go on.
As a marketer you need to resolve these fears and doubts. But why would you use Social Proof? Well we will give you two reasons but first let’s shed light on two stats. According to a report, 60% of millennials make reactive purchases because of FOMO. Moreover, the effective rate for FOMO Marketing is 87%. Now let’s talk theory.
According to Robert Cialdini who wrote in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, “we view a behavior as more correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it”. So the first reason says, if you see one of your friends performing a certain task, you will be more encouraged to perform it yourself. Similarly, if you see your friends picking a product over other alternatives, you will be more likely to buy that same product.
And the second reason says, in the face of uncertainty we seek information from others. And not only that, we assume that they have more exclusive information that we don’t have access to and thereby any decision they take will be worth following.
Types of Social Proof to Boost Conversion
By leveraging social proof, you are able to sky-rocket your sales and take your website to a new level. Without further ado, let’s have a look at some of the most effective ways you can add social proof to your website and boost conversions.
1. Real-Time Customer Activity
Customer Activity is a great way to let site visitors know what the old users are doing on your website. This also massively improves the user-experience on your website navigation. By displaying the real-time activity of your site audience, you are able to basically build social proof to your website and encourage others to do the same in the process.
NotificationX is one of the most effective tools that lets you display automated & real-time customer activity and build instant social proof in your website. This FREE plugin for WordPress lets you build instant credibility for your business and boost your conversion rate right away.
Looking for a way to add recent sales notifications without a third party service? The WooCommerce Notification plugin is a great way to add a live sales feed to your WordPress site.
2. Use Social Proof with Urgency
Remember how important Fear is for marketers. Fear of missing out on good quality products at a lower price is what keeps most consumers awake at night. But as a marketer, your job isn’t to scare people. Your job is to leverage their fear and prompt them to take a certain action with urgency. These actions can be any of the following:
- Buy your product
- Sign-Up for your Newsletters
- Leave a Comment
- Pledge donations
But how do you create a sense of urgency? A great tool would be the Pop-Up appearance animation. You set your content inside a pop-up box, and the pop-up box only appears when a certain action is performed. This unpredicted and sudden appearance of the Pop-Up box will not fail to grab the attention of your users.
NotificationX lets you create Pop-Up boxes that can contain any form of Social Proof messages. It comes with multiple built-in templates, which you can deploy instantly as soon as you have filled it in with your own content.
Or you can use a plugin like the Scheduler for WooCommerce to add limited time or seasonal deals. Use the built-in countdown timer to show customers how much time is left to snag a deal. And you can auto-schedule the start and end times as well as an email notification for out of stock items.
3. Social Media Exposure or Popularity
Social Media Exposure is a two way process. First marketers curate Social Proof from different Social Media Platforms and second they leverage these to make sure they have a strong online presence.
This can happen by encouraging more people to leave reviews and ratings for your business. Once you establish social proof with strong online presence more people will feel encouraged to stay connected to your Social Media Accounts for future announcements such as Discount Offers and Feature Upgrades. And you can easily use a social media WordPress plugin to add your links, social counts, recent posts and more to your site.
4. Customer Testimonials
In smart marketing approach, business owner knows that satisfied customers can drive their sales more than the persuasive sales pitch or representative. What customer testimonials do is that it gives your website much needed credibility.
Review of the Total WordPress Theme
By showcasing the positive feedback left by your clients, you are able to build instant social proof to your website and encourage others to try your service out. If you are using Elementor Page Builder on your website, then you can try out addons for Elementor to display attractive testimonials on your website with ease. Otherwise, there are plenty of good WordPress testimonial plugins you can use to add a testimonials section to your site.
5. Industry Influencers or Experts Endorsements
In today’s marketing phenomena, influencer marketing has become a big deal for the growth of your business. The thing about this marketing strategy is to reach out to an entirely new set of audience. Since the celebrity influencers have their own sets of large followers, it gives you an interesting opportunity to take advantage of it. When they recommend or mention your product through their channels, it would lead to influence lots of their trusted followers to try and check you out as well. This is how with this social proof technique you can take your business to a new height.
Let’s say for example: Bob WP is influential persons for WordPress. With his expert endorsements through Podcast or YouTube reviews, more people are willing to check out what your product is offering and try them out themselves as well. This is why Influencer marketing can be absolutely crucial for your brand recognition and reach to a wider audience.
6. Integrations with Other Platforms
Business partnership can be very essential for the growth of your company. It is a very popular marketing strategy to reach out to a new set of user-base and get access to new products as well. Most importantly, the more integrations with popular platforms would encourage people to put their faith in your products.
WP Optin Wheel Integrations
Just think of it in this way, when purchasing from an e-commerce shop, you tend to check for authenticity first, right? After seeing integrations of other platforms, we feel a lot more comfortable to trust the company. With this social proof technique, you can make your business to credibility to the new visitors and massively improve your conversion.
7. Social Share Counts
Nowadays social media platform affects a lot to the visitors from reading any blog to making purchase decision. Showcasing social share counts on your website adds instant social proof to your content. It encourages your audience to put their faith in your company and try out what you are offering.
Over the years, social sharing has been a proven way to boost the site conversion. In terms of content marketing, displaying total number of share counts on your blog influences other visitors to check it out themselves. The more people share or view your content, you are likely to gain more engagement.
8. Ratings & Reviews
Basically, online ratings and reviews hold the complete reputation of your business platform to the outside world. It is an opportunity to leave a good first impression among your site visitors. Newer people will feel interested to buy your products, if your customers leave positive feedback for trying out your service.
According to the research conducted by Feedvisor 90% of people won’t purchase any product from Amazon under 3 ratings. Not only that, 50% of buying decisions are made after visiting any site when they look at positive reviews with good ratings. So, this is why it is absolutely crucial to leverage social proof to your business platform by showcasing customer ratings.
WooCommerce has ratings built-in along with the option to only allow reviews from actual customers. This ensures your reviews are real and trustworthy.
9. Social Media Mentions
Social media mention means when people tag you in their posts or comments to seek your attention. In this day & age, it is the most popular way to get your brand’s name ringing around the world. So, whenever people recommend your company through their account, it can be highly beneficial for you. It will work as a social proof and other people would feel influenced to try it out in the process.
This is how social media mentions can have a huge impact on your business growth. With the help of FOMO marketing plugin NotificationX, you can easily showcase your social media mentions on the website. You can connect your social media accounts with Zapier and start leveraging social proof to your site by displaying popups whenever someone recommends you.
10. Customer Recommendations
Remember the saying, ‘Customers are always right?’ It’s a no brainer that they are the most important things about your business as well. Well, your satisfied customers’ valuable words can lead to a great source of traffic for your business. Unfortunately, many people often fail to realize the importance of this aspect. According to the Research conducted by Ragan’s PR Daily, 83% of purchasers are actually influenced by the recommendations coming from their friends and family.
The same trick can be applied for your WordPress powered store as well. With the help of NotificationX, you can display amazing review teasers of your WordPress plugins & grow your business.
11. Popular Posts or Products
Showing related posts or products is one of the most popular ways to make your visitors check out what else you are offering. It’s a quite effective technique to help users find the exact thing they are looking for. By finding the alternatives on the same place, they wouldn’t have to go to another site. Therefore, it can be massively beneficial to keep your audience interested and increase site engagement in the process.
For an e-commerce platform, you can categorize your products to most selling or most popular ones. Visible sections such as these are bound to grab your visitors immediately hooked up and look into your other products as well. With the help of this social proof technique, this is how you can sky-rocket your site conversion. For example, WooCommerce includes a “Products by Rating” widget already built-in. So you can easily advertise your top rated items in your sidebar, footer or other widget ready area. Or use the integrated WooCommerce upsell feature (under the “Linked Products” tab when creating a product) to recommend complementary items on your product page – like the “Others Also Bought” section on the image above.
12. Use Social Proof From Relevant People
In marketing psychology, if you are able to display your total number of purchaser information with location on website, this will influence your new visitors to get your service on the spot. By showcasing the real time sales notification alerts on your website, it’s highly effective to add credibility to your business and boost your site conversion on a large scale.
13. Email Subscriber Or Users Count
Email Newsletters are a great way to make announcements about upcoming feature upgrades and discount offers. But often times potential users will not sign-up to a new newsletter fearing spam. No one likes to receive emails that add no value to them.
Then how do you convince these unwilling people to sign-up to your newsletter? The answer is simple: Social Proof. Once they see others happily signing-up for the your Newsletter, they will feel more motivated to sign-up themselves.
If you are wondering how you can display Email sign-up alerts on our website, you can use NotificationX. This plugin allows you to display the recent subscriptions as attractive notification alerts on your website without any coding.
Or you can create your own custom callout section using your page build. For example, with WPBakery or Elementor you can easily insert a callout section that includes your social proof along with a signup form.
14. Repost User-Generated Content
Users might praise your business or they might brutally thrash you on social media platforms. So yes, User-Generated Content can be a nightmare. But as a marketer you can curate positive feedback and use them as Social Proof on your website. User-generated media files, walkthrough blogs, and review videos are all good marketing content that can be used as Social Proof on your website and re-shared on social media.
15. Comment Engagement on Blog Posts
Blogs are the second most popular form of online content right after Videos. Despite the introduction of new forms of online content, blogs haven’t lost their popularity. Encourage your readers to stay engaged, and leave a comment of their own, by showcasing new comments.
An easy way to achieve this is by adding a “Recent Comments” widget to your sidebar or footer. This is a technique many popular blogs put to good use, including WP Tavern.
Alternatively, you can display Comment alerts using a plugin like NotificaitonX. With the plugin installed you can display recent comments made by users as a notification popup. With this social proof technique, you’ll be able to encourage your audience to join in the discussion and increase engagement on your website.
16. Press Coverage To Gain Credibility
Press Coverage is the oldest form of marketing. From the early 1900’s marketers have been leveraging TV commercials and media outlets for exposure. And the number of people who regularly watch TV, read magazines and follow popular blogs is impressive. But how do you reinforce this coverage to your potential target market?
You display it on your website of course. The simplest and easiest way to reinforce your marketing message among your potential clients it to create a showcase of the resources where your products were reviewed or featured. Include the logo, a quote from the article and of course a link so your readers can check it out for themselves. This method of reinforcement is equally effective for TV Commercial, Affiliate Blog Reviews, and Comparison Blogs.
17. Top Client’s Logos
Money makes money. This is true for generating new clients. Old consumers have the power to convert new user-base. They can also help you to tap into a completely new market segment. This is why it is important to highlight your official partners so that other companies feel encouraged to do business with you as well.
Adding a few logos or case studies to create social proof on your site and give your site the credibility to take it to the next level. If you’re using a page builder you can design an impressive Logo Carousel in no time.
18. Display Your Best Numbers
As a business there might be multiple milestones that you consider as evidence of your growth. For example, in how many days you hit 100K downloads/purchase can be a great marketing content. By putting a spotlight on the key figures of your business, it will influence your site visitors put their trust in your company.
This social proof tactic has a proven track record of gaining more conversions. However, we do recommend you first compare that number with the industry average. Such number figures will help you create a positive image about your business in the minds of your target market. If you are into Elementor page building, then you can highlight the key information of your company in a stunning manner.
To wrap this up, the importance of leveraging social proof on your site is absolutely undeniable. The success of your entire business depends on the way you implement social proof on your site. No matter how good your products or services are, you will hardly ever be able to influence anyone to try them without it. This is why you should find the suitable tool to add social proof to your site and take your business to a new height.
There are many WordPress solutions you can use to add social proof to your site. Take the time to consider what your site needs, and use plugins for social links or popups as needed. Or give an all in on solution for social proof like NotificationX a try. There’s even a FREE version full of basic features to start building credibility for your WordPress site.
So, what do you think about the Social Proof tools we have mentioned? Do let us know if we have missed any point in the comments section below.
Keep reading the article at WPExplorer. The article was originally written by Kyla on 2019-11-14 16:43:45.
The article was hand-picked and curated for you by the Editorial Team of WP Archives.