Social Proof Marketing

By Adam  |  18 Nov 2015 12:00:00

If you run an eCommerce website you doubtlessly want it to look as appealing as possible. You might be using beautiful, eye catching photography, a perfectly user-friendly design and offering the most generous prices on the most desirable products... but you know what's more likely to sway people than these things? Knowing that there are a lot of other satisfied customers out there. A lot of people equate popularity with quality and seeing that you are a popular service will really help to encourage sales. It's a psychological thing (known as social proof) where people imitate the behaviour of others because they think that's what they should be doing too (even if only on an unconscious level). You see it all the time with fashion trends, television shows that people watch, music people like and so forth.

So what does that mean if you don't have a very popular business? Does that mean that you won't be able to make your website appealing? Not at all! There are many ways that you can make your business look more popular than it is. Firstly, having lots of likes and followers on Facebook and Twitter will be a nice and easy way to make your business look popular; you can gain followers quite easily by interacting positively with others and though they won't necessarily be customers, when customers do look at your number of followers (which can be broadcast on your home page), they will just see a large number of what they perceive to be people who are happy with your business.

Testimonials are also a good way of making it clear that people like you. If only three people have ever written a testimonial for your business, just put them up as "selected testimonials" because it's not strictly an untruth, but it will also give the impression that you have so many testimonials that you can't post them all. Furthermore, statistics often look good; you could write "thousands of people shop every day" when really the verb "shop" in that case might just mean that they visited the site or something. These are just some of the ways that you can make your website more appealing and you mustn’t feel bad about misrepresenting information; if people honestly knew how good your business was, they'd buy from you anyway, right? So I hope this advice has been useful to you and that your eCommerce website will continue to grow!