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
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This article was written by Kyla and originally published on WPExplorer.