7 Sure-Fire Ways to use the Power of Social Proof to Grow your SaaS

Are you effectively using social proof to attract and retain customers for your SaaS?

It’s a term I’m sure you’ve heard before and you’ve probably dabbled in adding the odd testimonial slider to your website, or even created a video or two. 

In this article, I’ll be sharing the top 7 methods to incorporate social proof to promote your SaaS business, so even if you’re a marketing pro, I urge you to read on as there could be that one tip you’ve missed that could help your conversion rates sore.

However, let’s first circle back to the term of social proof and what it really means…

What is social proof?

Social proof is a psychological phenomenon, which demonstrates how a group has an impact on an individual’s decision-making process, also referred to as “herd mentality”.

Individuals will therefore intrinsically copy other people’s behaviour, as it is assumed that if a number of people are doing it, then it must be the correct. 

For example, if you see a restaurant packed full of people and a queue out the door, most people would be drawn to that compared to the one across the road which only has a few customers, as it must be serving great food, right?!

In marketing, social proof is used to help convey trust in a product or brand, and validate a person’s purchasing behaviour.  This is often in the form of ratings, reviews, testimonials, celebrity endorsements, awards and accolades, as well as statistics such as how many people have purchased their product or service.

The power of third-party endorsements is even more apparent with SaaS start-ups since the product is lesser-known, and positive reviews and testimonials therefore help increase buyer confidence as well as build trust and credibility in the brand.

That said, here are 7 simple and sure-fire ways to use social proof to help boost growth for your SaaS:

1. Leveraging the power of testimonial videos

When you’re first starting out, you don’t need to fork out thousands for a high-end video production with lights, drones and background music!

The easiest way to create testimonial videos is by asking your existing customers to jump on a 10-20 minute Zoom call with you and record it.  Then just crop out the parts of you asking the questions with some free video editing software such as VideoPad, iMovie, Openshot or HitFilm Express, or you can even trim the recording directly in Zoom itself.

You can even kill two birds with one stone (are we still allowed to use that expression?), and take a recording during your customer onboarding or training calls to get some useful snippets!  This is a handy tip to collect as many testimonial videos as possible, especially in the early stages.

Another important point to note, is that during the interview you need to ask the right questions so you can get some impactful quotes from your customer, as well as learn other valuable insights into how your product has helped their specific situation, such as:

1. “What was the challenge or problem you had, which led you to seek our software?”
2. “What was your process before using our software, and how has that changed since you’ve introduced our solution?”
3. “Can you think of a particular scenario that illustrates where our product truly provided value?”
4. “Please sum up how our solution has helped your business in general (in terms of time, costs, productivity, customer satisfaction, moral etc)?”
5. “Would you be happy recommend our software to others, and if so, why?”

Don’t just publish them on your website, make sure you post and share them on social media, send out to existing customers by email or include them within your email automation sequences (not just for nurturing/acquisition, but retention too).

Testimonial videos are also very effective when used as ad creatives in retargeting campaigns, to help convince those who have visited your website and are thinking about maybe signing up, but haven’t decided yet.

2. Deep dive case studies

Write and publish case studies with a deep dive into how your product managed to solve a specific challenge or problem your customer had been facing, and again, how it has impacted their business either by helping to increase profits, save time or improve productivity etc.  Then present these facts clearly as statistics at the very top of the case study page.

Make sure you design it well with plenty of images, and of course incorporate a quote from the customer and their photo to make it more personal and memorable.

Your case study can either be a web page (which is often better for SEO), or as a downloadable PDF.  However, one word of warning, NEVER offer a case study as gated content (asking people to give over their email address to download).  This makes no sense, as it’s essentially helping you to win more customers so you want as many people to see and share it as possible, and customers don’t value that type of content enough to want to hand over their personal details.

3. Industry review sites

Register your product on software review sites such as Capterra, G2, GetApp and Software Advice, and email your loyal customers (i.e. 3+ months of subscription renewal) to kindly ask them to leave a review.  88% of consumers trust user reviews as much as personal recommendations.

The process of actually collecting reviews for these sites (to improve your position on them) is often much more complicated.  It is therefore always best to use offers such as a free subscription month, upgrade or an extra seat as an incentivise to improve the likelihood of a response.  It won’t directly cost you any money (just a little in resource usage), but will save your customer money in their pockets, which any business will always appreciate.

Even if you think your ICP or target customers aren’t the type of people who would actually visit those review sites to do their research, everybody uses Google right?  In most cases, when you search on Google for ‘the best [your product category] software’, the above-mentioned review sites often show up on page 1 or 2, giving even more visibility to your brand. Try it now, see if it works for your type of product.

Furthermore, you can add badges or widgets to display the ratings and reviews you have obtained from these portals on your own website, since they carry much more weight and trust than those published directly by the website owner (as many people assume that they are made-up, which unfortunately is true in some cases).   

Another widely used platform for SaaS companies is ProductHunt.  This is a great place to help create a buzz around your product with early-adopters and get those all-important upvotes, which can boost brand visibility especially during a start-up’s product launch phase.

4. Prime-positioned testimonials

Don’t just add a rotating testimonial slider at the bottom of your website pages… that ghostly area way below ‘the fold’ to which most people never scroll.  There are much better ways to promote these valuable endorsements so they don’t go unnoticed!

The following placements can really help to get your testimonials in front of your visitors’ eyeballs, and make them even more impactful.

• Add them to the hero section of your home page or even include a testimonial within your main headline.  It’s more credible to show that a customer stated your product was the best at doing X, rather than claiming it yourself.
• Showcase them prominently next to related product features.  
• Show testimonials on your signup page, to provide that last-minute validation that they are making the right choice.
• Email testimonials to your trial users to help convince them to convert.
• Send testimonials to your customers who have recently signed-up to negate any post-purchase dissonance.

Also, remember to monitor the results by checking what impact the changes have on your conversion rates before and after, or with A/B split testing on your website and landing pages, and within emails.  It’s common to see up to 34% uplift in conversions with good quality and well positioned testimonials.

5. The power of endorsements and influencers

When you think of influencer marketing, the first thing that probably springs to mind are celebrities promoting beauty products, or sports personalities fashioning a pair of the latest running shoes.  However, even though this type of strategy has been widely adopted to promote consumer products in recent years, this doesn’t mean that it can’t be effectively leveraged for B2B SaaS as well.

The truth is, it’s quite the opposite.  Whatever industry or niche you find yourself in, there will be experts and people of authority which have tens of hundreds of thousands of followers hanging on their every word! 

You can partner and collaborate with them by giving them a free subscription to your product so they can try it out and hopefully rave about it.  Alternatively, you can offer to recommend their product or service in return, which may provide a mutual benefit as you should both be targeting the same audience.  Finally, if that fails, you can try some other incentive (financial or otherwise) to help seal the deal.  

Your collaboration could include brand mentions on social media, a mention or link within a blog or even an endorsement via a YouTube video.  YouTube is widely used channel as a ‘how to’ information source for many different industries, and there are a plethora of experts and consultants broadcasting video content, which are likely to welcome new topics to talk about, and slip in the odd product mention or recommendation here and there! 😉

To start searching for influencers for your particular industry, you can use tools such as Upfluence, however they can work out to be quite expensive, especially for start-ups. So, here are some more cost-effective approaches:

Content curation and engagement sites

One way to find industry experts or influencers would be to see who is producing content relevant to your product, which is receiving high engagement, shares and backlinks. This can be achieved by searching for industry keywords on sites such as BuzzSumo, Ahrefs or Feedly.

Social networks

You can also find influencers via LinkedIn or Twitter by searching for relevant hashtags and see who comes up top for mentioning them within their posts, and reach out to those that have the highest number of followers. 

YouTube is another great channel to find influencers especially if you’re considering using videos within your influencer marketing strategy (which I strongly advise).   Again, just search for a key phrase to describe your product, or one which is widely used within your industry, and see which videos have received the most views and contact the author.

6. Communicate milestones, logos, accreditations and awards

Whenever you achieve a milestone within your business, then you should shout about it and notify your visitors within your website copy or other communications, such as your bios on marketplaces and social media sites. 

Whether it’s a thousand or million customer served or users gained, a certain number of user actions completed by your product, revenues earned or products sold by your customers thanks to your software, a milestone number of social followers or even an anniversary to show how well-established your company is.

If you’ve managed to acquire some well-known brands that your prospective buyers love and trust, then showcase them on your website with ‘used-by’ logos. 

Although, it is not recommended just to show the logos of all your customers, which others won’t recognise or recall.  Low-profile logos could have the opposite effect of reinforcing a positive and memorable impression. As they say, no proof is sometimes better than low proof!

Finally displaying award badges, accolades, accreditations and trust seals can boost conversion rates by up to 30%, so if you don’t currently have any, take a look at what others in your industry are doing and enquire to see how you can apply.  They are often not as difficult to obtain as you may think.

7. Engage in social listening

We can’t talk about social proof without mentioning social media.  We’ve already discussed that social networks are a great place to find influencers and communicate your customer wins, but you also need to be listening out to any mentions of your product that convey positive brand sentiment.

Within B2B, this commonly occurs on networks such as LinkedIn, Slack, Twitter, Facebook (yes it’s not just for B2C), Reddit and Quora.

It is true that brand mentions are more prevalent in B2C than B2C.  However, B2B buyers trust their peers more than anyone else and therefore business people frequently recommend products to others within their network, especially if they’ve had a positive product experience. 

In recent years it has become increasingly common for people to reach out to contacts via social media to ask for recommendations, so you need to be aware when this happens and use it to your advantage.

You can employ a social listening tool to monitor your brand mentions across the web, not just in social networks, but also in blogs like this one as I’m doing below.  Doing it manually can be a tedious and time-consuming task and you’re likely to miss some.  There are many social listening tools on the market, but the main ones to look out for are Mention, Sprout Social and Brandwatch.

Once you are alerted about a mention, then be sure to share, re-post, or re-tweet, to your current followers to help spread the word and increase the virality of your brand.

To summarize, we all know that social proof works, but how it’s implemented is what really counts!  

Therefore, if there’s something mentioned above that you’re not actively doing within your marketing strategy, then give it a go. 

Given that 92% of B2B buyers are more likely to purchase a product following reading a trusted review, it makes sense that the more ways you can get your prospective user to think positively about your product the better.