When you want to put social proof (like customer reviews, influencer videos, or statistics) on your website, you might run into some problems…
- Actually getting social proof. For most businesses, it requires a concerted effort to coordinate collecting social proof whether they are asking for it or finding it on social channels.
- Displaying social proof. Designing a way to show it off is a whole other challenge. Even when you have social proof to share, finding a professional and engaging way to require web design skills many companies don’t have ready access to.
- Driving sales with social proof. Just having social proof is rarely enough. You need the right social proof to connect with your target audience and showcase the features you want to highlight.
This post covers all these bases. Specifically, we’ll cover:
Vocal Video is an end-to-end testimonial collection app that helps you get more social proof, display it on your website, and increase your conversions. Find out more and start your free forever plan.
What is Social Proof?
The term “social proof” is used to talk about a psychological phenomenon and the content that contributes to it.
The concept shows when potential customers compare products or services, they’re influenced by the choices their peers have already made.
So, forms of social proof like customer reviews, statistics, influencer endorsements, and online or word-of-mouth recommendations all play a vital role in decision-making. When you include these different types of social proof on your website, you can deepen your website visitors’ understanding of your brand and increase your conversions.
Social proof works for a whole host of different reasons…
- You convince potential customers, showing the claims on your site can be replicated in real life.
- You create a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out), showing people their peers are already seeing great results with your product or service.
- You humanize your brand, showing how much you value your existing customers.
- You learn more about what your customers appreciate, so you can develop a better product and a more effective marketing strategy.
Now, let’s look at some examples of social proof that can build your brand and drive sales from your website.
3 Types of Social Proof to Use on Your Website
Once customers start to engage with your company online, you can often choose from several types of social proof to use in your marketing. Some strategies represent a new project for your marketers, while others can be set up today by making a few simple changes or adding a widget to your website.
1. Expert Social Proof
You get expert social proof when someone with authority or influence in your industry associates themselves with your product or recommends your brand.
This gives a sense of reliability to the claims you make on your site. Visitors get the impression that if your product is good enough for the person they respect or admire, it’s good enough for them too.
The most effective form of expert social proof will change dramatically depending on your business. A startup might break new ground and earn a mention in the press. In contrast, software companies could benefit from recognition in industry awards ceremonies, and healthcare organizations will need to show accreditations to establish their expertise and build trust.
Even without press write-ups and celebrity endorsements, there’s a high chance you’re sitting on expert social proof that could become an effective part of your website.
Logos from High-Profile Customers
If the companies you work with have brand recognition within your target audience, adding their logo to your site (with permission) provides expert social proof at a glance.
If you’re curious about how this can look, check out the graphics on Vocal Video’s homepage.
Industry Awards and Certifications
Potential customers want to work with the best, and showing your product has been honored as the most effective, best-designed, or most innovative in its category is a great way to do this.
For example, Klue has been consistently recognized as a G2 industry leader, and they show both the badges from this accolade and the statistics from the report on their homepage.
Find out how Klue uses Vocal Video to scale social proof across sales, marketing, and customer success in this case study.
Guest Posts as Endorsements
When experts associate themselves with your brand, you gain credibility and increase your audience as your content reaches more of their followers.
Influencer marketing is associated with social media posts. Celebrity endorsements are often used in big-budget marketing campaigns like TV ads. But whatever field you’re in, you can feature industry experts on your website too.
Creating hero images, inviting someone to act as a guest blogger, getting an expert quote to use in an article, or even having them on your podcast can all make a difference.
How to Display Expert Social Proof on Your Website
Putting logos or badges on your website can be as simple as adding a new graphic to the page where you want to display it. In the case of industry awards, the awarding body may also give you code snippets so you can add their official badge to your site rather than copying one you find through an online image search.
The best place to display this content on your website is on your site's homepage. It should be instantly recognizable to your website visitors, so use graphics rather than text.
Many companies choose a horizontal layout for the badges on their site, so their visitors can skim them as they scroll through the other essential information on the page.
2. Wisdom of the Crowd
“The wisdom of the crowd” is the idea that when a large group of people supports your brand, it’s a sign of consistently high quality that builds FOMO and drives more people to your product or service.
There are several ways to showcase the number of people your business has already helped on your website.
Display Your User Count
When the number of companies or individuals using your product grows, it pays to show the statistics as an indicator of success.
New customers may be more likely to trust raw data than the more subjective metrics of positive reviews. To convince more visitors, it’s best to add both to your site.
For example, Freyr Solutions' homepage includes statistics about the number of customers they’ve worked with, alongside other statistics that show their global expertise and the strength of their logistics operation.
Freyr exponentially decreased the cost of video production with Vocal Video. Read about it in this case study.
Share Reviews from Third-Party Sites
If your company has been established for a while, there’s a high chance you’ve picked up a profile on an external review site like Yelp, your Google business profile, or a service like TrustRadius or Trustpilot.
Because these sites have brand recognition, potential customers tend to trust their product reviews when they’re researching a purchase decision. Seeing reviews and star ratings from an independent source on your site helps build credibility because your site visitors can trust you didn’t just write them in-house.
There’s also an element of the wisdom of the crowd to this website social proof strategy. The higher the number of reviews you have on these sites, the more likely someone is to trust your company.
For example, Ignition references their five-star review average on their homepage, citing four widely respected sites as sources (the Xero App Store, QuickBooks, G2, and Capterra).
Mollie Phipps, Global Product Marketing Manager, told us how Ignition uses Vocal Video to drive peer-to-peer referrals. Read the case study here.
How to Include Reviews from Third-Party Sites on Your Website
If you want to increase the power of social proof and close more sales through your website, there are several ways to bring the reviews you get on other sites to your own.
If you search for review plugins online, you’ll be able to find widgets to display your latest online reviews on your homepage, landing page, or testimonial page. This can look far more professional than screenshotting a review and adding it to your site as a graphic.
Businesses tend to display social proof statistics like their user count, follower count, total number of sales, or number of five-star reviews near the top of their homepage. These statistics act as an instant source of validation to back up the claims they’re making in their headlines.
3. User-Generated Content as Social Proof
The benefit of user-generated content lies in building trust, putting your selling points in real terms, and showing how you can solve a relatable pain point.
In contrast to using expert reviews and accreditations to add gravitas to your site, reviews from satisfied customers show real people have already seen great results, so new customers believe they’ll see the same benefits for themselves.
Any form of success story from a real customer can drive site visitors toward your call to action and increase your website’s conversion rate.
Reviews Show Your Product in Real Life
When someone sees your product in action, it tells them two things. First, the reviewer really used the product, so they’re talking about an authentic customer experience. Second, the product matches up to the claims you make on your site.
Vocal Video customers Prepared4X include a carousel of video reviews on the product pages of their site. The videos show their firelighter product at work in a variety of settings, used by people of all ages. This proves how easy and effective the tool is and encourages new customers to complete their purchases in the online store.
Employee Testimonials Show Your Vision and Values in Action
In addition to showcasing testimonials from your customers, employee stories can give your site visitors a look behind the scenes and show them the passion that goes into your product.
Companies can use employee testimonials in many different parts of their marketing strategy. From meet-the-team videos introducing customers to the people who make your company tick to company culture videos to boost conversions from your recruitment pages, there’s a form of employee story for every use case.
For example, LivePerson uses written employee testimonials on their career page, as well as bringing video testimonials into other areas of their marketing strategy.
Testimonial Galleries Showing a Wall of Love for Your Product
You can boost the power of social proof on your website by adding even more reviews or testimonials to your site.
Similar to the number of reviews you have and the concept of the wisdom of the crowd, testimonial galleries can be more effective than single testimonials. When you start to gather more social proof, consider displaying it together so your visitors leave with a strong impression of the sheer number of real people you’ve helped – like the pages promoting the Foundation Academies’ Giving Tuesday campaign.
Some of the examples above show galleries of video testimonials rather than written texts.
When you’re thinking about the types of social proof you want to add to your website, there can be even more advantages to using this attention-grabbing and interactive medium.
Key Benefits of Video Testimonials
Compared to static forms of social proof like written reviews or graphics showing your follower count, video testimonials have a few key advantages.
- Video testimonials are more credible and trust-building. Companies can artificially inflate a user count, but viewers can see an interviewee in a video is speaking from the heart.
- Video testimonials are more authentic and detailed than written reviews. The speaker has space to elaborate on their thoughts, and they include elements that can’t be shown in a graphic, like body language and tone of voice.
- Video testimonials are more interactive and inviting than the other social proof elements you can add to your website. It’s easy to skim a line of text about the number of reviews you have, but video grabs the visitor’s attention and encourages them to find out more.
Adding a video testimonial or customer stories page to your site can seem like a massive undertaking, especially if you’re starting from scratch with social proof.
But with our video collection app, the process is incredibly easy.
Vocal Video: Collect User-Generated Social Proof Video in 3 Steps
Vocal Video is an end-to-end video testimonial platform designed to help any business collect social proof for websites, social media platforms, and countless other areas of their marketing strategies.
Our system creates content that’s proven to raise conversion rates. Plus, our app is simple for both your marketing team and your happy customers to use, so you’ll see increased response rates when you ask for testimonials and build your collection of social proof faster.
Step 1: Customize a Video Collector
Your Vocal Video collector is the interface that guides respondents through the recording process. It displays interview questions one by one, shows them their recorded responses, and does it all in a clean and intuitive interface that includes your company’s branding.
To set up a video collector, choose from one of more than 45 industry-specific templates, then customize the questions with your company’s name and the talking points you’d love to cover. Vocal Video includes templates designed for e-commerce and physical stores, B2B marketing, non-profits, healthcare, and more.
Because video collectors are URL-based, you can increase your responses by sharing the link wherever you touch base with your existing customers. Try…
- Including the link in your newsletter or in the footer of the marketing emails you send to long-standing customers
- Sharing the link on social media to encourage more of your followers to share their stories
- Adding the collector to your website as a permanent feature so you can collect a steady supply of fresh content.
Step 2: Get Automatically Edited Responses
We’ll send you a notification whenever a new response arrives in your library. Then, open your Vocal Video dashboard to view your latest video.
Our unique automatic editing process stitches together a respondent’s answers and adds your brand elements to create a video that’s ready to share online. If you’d like to tweak the music, graphics, or length of the clip, we include all the tools you need to make it happen without any additional software or video know-how.
Step 3: Embed Video Testimonials on Your Website
Once you’re happy with your video, publish it to a Vocal Video public page, where we’ll host it ad-free. Public pages are great for search engine optimization and helping more people find your brand, but if your end goal is to share social proof on your website, we’ll automatically generate the embed code you need to make it happen.
Click “Share” and then “Embed” to copy a code snippet for a video, video card, or video gallery. Then, simply create a new HTML block (for example, in a site builder like WordPress), paste the code, and refresh your page to publish your video.
Let’s take a look at how Vocal Video customers have used social proof videos on their real-life sites.
Time Doctor Bases Case Studies on Real Customer Stories
The Time Doctor productivity and performance app uses video testimonials in the case studies pages of their site.
On this page, Rafael Vasquez of SmartBuyGlasses describes his experience with the product. Visitors have the choice of reading the full case study, where the company writes about the pain points their customers face and the solution they provide, or hearing the customer describe how that translates into a buying and onboarding experience.
Authors Share Reader Testimonials to Launch Their New Project
To launch the book A Brief History of a Perfect Future, authors Chunka Mui, Paul B. Carroll, and Tim Andrews collected reader testimonials to display alongside the written book reviews and Amazon links on their site.
Their review carousel is one of several social proof elements on their site. They combine the testimonial gallery with an invitation for more readers to share their thoughts.
The Hashtag Me Campaign Partners with Brand Ambassadors
The Hashtag Me campaign promotes emotional well-being in educational institutions. It produces content with influencers to encourage more people to get involved in the movement and share their stories.
SleepTest Shares Healthcare Testimonials with a Compelling Before and After
SleepTest provides at-home testing for people with sleep disorders. The testimonial page of their website supports the statistics, accreditations, and product descriptions on the homepage to show they understand how important their solution can be for their patients and providers.
Use Vocal Video to Enjoy the Power of Social Proof on Any Webpage
Social proof assets like reviews, testimonials, customer stories, and success metrics can give your marketing strategy a massive advantage. This is particularly true for your website, where new customers discover your business, compare your service to your competitors, and build up their understanding of what makes your brand unique.
Vocal Video solves one of the main challenges businesses face when they want to use social proof in their marketing strategies…
- We make it easier to collect more social proof from your existing customers.
- We help you shape the user-generated content you receive with compelling asynchronous interviews.
- We share your social proof content in beautiful, customizable videos and galleries to reach even more potential customers.
This helps you bring video into more aspects of your marketing strategy, so you can connect with more customers and enjoy a higher rate of conversions from your website.
Sign up for your Vocal Video account to boost the social proof on your website today.