5 Examples of Social Proof for Reputation Marketing

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Read time: 7 minutes

How to Use Reviews as Social Proof to Win More Sales

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Need an extra push on your website and social media to increase your revenue?

This one simple trick improves lead-generation rates online for small businesses and service companies. It’s taking advantage of social proof to promote your reputation.
 

What is social proof? It’s when you use customer reviews and other customer touchpoints in your marketing to show potential customers why they should hire you.

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Social Proof Meaning: Why Social Proof Is Important

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Social proof is marketing material that validates customers’ decisions. When they’re looking for a service provider, they want someone they can trust.

You’re “proving” to your online audience with customer reviews, testimonials and buyer actions why they should choose you.

You might be the best landscaping company in Knoxville, TN. But how will homeowners looking for a new backyard believe that from browsing your website or Facebook profile? Wouldn’t every landscaper in Knoxville call themselves the best?

Social proof solves this problem. It tells your website visitors “don’t take my word for it….” This is important because 84% of customers trust social proof more than anything else. This includes things like advertising and sales brochures.
 

Social Proof Psychology
 

Social proof psychology works because social proof is a form of persuasion.

It’s natural for humans to want unbiased information about your company before deciding to submit a lead form. If a Knoxville homeowner is looking for a landscaper, they’ll turn to what others say about your landscaping company.

That’s why social proof works well on a psychological level. Homeowners want to feel comfortable in making the right choice. You help them feel this way when they read positive online reviews, know your company’s reputation and see when other homeowners buy from you. At this point, they become far more likely to contact your business.

Now that we’ve got a good handle on social proof and its importance, let’s look at five social proof marketing examples for your small business.

 

5 Examples of Social Proof
 

1. Social Proof Reviews / Community Pages
 

Use reviews as social proof as an easy way to promote your services on your website.

With a dedicated Reviews page, users can see on your website all your top Google and Facebook reviews and Video testimonials and audio testimonials!

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Here’s an example from ShareMe.chat Tradeshow:

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Showing reviews on your website can make a big difference on your conversion rate. For example, one study showed that 74% of people were more likely to contact a business from a webpage that shows customer reviews compared to one that doesn’t show reviews.

Adding reviews to a website is a simple yet powerful way to use social proof/community page and persuade your website visitors to become customers.

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2. Feature Testimonials

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A feature testimonial is a testimonial review from one of your best customers that you feature on your website’s homepage. These testimonials work best right below your “hero image,” a prominent banner displayed front and center on your homepage.

Feature testimonials are another example of social proof reviews that work well because they isolate a positive review where it’s sure to attract a lot of eyeballs.

Below is a great example of featured testimonials on the homepage for Integrity Cleaning in Vancouver, WA:

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At ShareMe.chat, we wanted to see how feature testimonials impact your website’s performance. So we conducted an experiment to test feature testimonials below a website’s hero section.

Our results show that feature testimonials outperform sales copy in generating leads by 56.2%!

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3. Share Reviews on Social Media

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Facebook is a massive source of leads for any service business, so it makes sense to have an active Facebook Page for your company.

A Facebook Page also provides another channel to share customer reviews online and promote your business. This is an excellent example of using reviews as social proof.

But copying and pasting reviews on Facebook and other social media platforms become time-consuming. Automation can make this process more effective.

Automatically sharing social proof reviews with photos of the work you did to your Facebook Page increases post engagement by 3x compared to plain-text reviews.

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4. Use Your Reputation as a Sales Proposition

 

As noted above, it’s one thing to say you’re the best, but it can be difficult to prove.

Unless your customers think like Buddy the Elf, most people will be skeptical if all you say is, “Best Exterior-Cleaning Company in Greenville, SC.”

But if you have reviews to use as social proof, then you’ll have ammunition to share social posts that instead say something like, “Highest-Rated Company” or “Top-Rated Company.”

With a simple language tweak, you clue in your audience to a quantifiable reputation that can back up your awesomeness.

Let’s look at an example from an actual cleaning company located near Greenville, SC that promotes its reputation on social media.

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Sharing that you’re the “highest-rated exterior-cleaning company” is an excellent example of using social proof as reputation marketing.

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5. Engage Website Visitors With Real-Time Social Proof

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One of the most powerful ways to engage your audience is by showing them social proof on your website in real-time.

What does real-time social proof look like? With one simple line of code, you can have a discreet website popup to show reviews or other customer actions—as they happen.

Here is an example of what social proof widgets can look like in the bottom corner of your website:

This kind of social proof increases website conversions by at least 10%—and often more—so they are very effective at bringing in new sales for any service company.

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