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Cialdini’s 3rd Weapon of Influence is one that many people can relate to: Social Proof — Simply put, people tend to do what they see other people doing.

However, there are a couple of conditions that should be met if you hope for this weapon to be as effective as possible:

1.  We’re most susceptible to being influenced when the people we’re copying are similar to us (e.g. teenagers tend to try smoking because they see other teenagers doing it)

2.  Social Proof works best when uncertainty is high — reason being, we’re hardwired to “go with the crowd” when we’re unsure of what to do as it’s an evolved survival instinct.

So let’s take a look at how Social Proof can be designed into different landing pages:

37 Signals - Basecamp

I really love these guys — not only do they manage to create some extremely elegant marketing and landing pages, they actually TELL YOU how they do it.

The Signal vs. Noise blog is chock full of goodies on how the 37 Signals team goes about creating their landing pages and marketing sites.  The one we’re going to look at today is the Basecamp Marketing Site.

This page is loaded with various elements of social proof.

First, let’s take a look at the primary headline and sub-headline:

Right away you’ll notice the read underline directly beneath the “Millions of people use Basecamp,…” sub-head.

Next, just below the main splash image, you’ll see another sub-headline along with a number of graphical items:

This sub-head is particularly interesting as it attempts to get the reader to identify with one of the various job titles they list.  Remember, the law of social proof works best when the reader/user can identify closely with the person or people they’re copying.

Now take a look at the graphical elements beneath the sub-headline.  These are all people from different industries and with different job titles.  Once again, the folks at Basecamp are trying to get their reader to identify with one of the people they have in their testimonials.

And if all that didn’t do the trick, take a look at the call-out box on the right side of the page.  It provides a staggering number of actions taken by a very large amount of people on the Basecamp system.  This is an attempt to really drive home the concept of social proof and thus, the credibility and reliability of the Basecamp system.

ZenDesk

The folks at ZenDesk go for a much simpler form of social proof: text-based testimonials.

As you can see, just beneath their carousel, you can see a scrolling ticker of testimonials from their most well-known customers:

And remember, testimonials can be used anywhere!

I wrote a post a few months back on the redesign of our shopping cart page.

On the right side of that page, we included testimonials from our customers:

This was one of the many elements we included on the page to bring our abandonment rate down to 50% (from 75% - 80%).

Just like with our first Weapon (Reciprocity), the concept of Social Proof works best when coupled with other Weapons, especially “Authority” (which we’ll examine in a bit).

In our next post, we’ll take a look at Cialdini’s psychological law of “Liking”.

Marketing is manipulation.

I truly hate to think about business in these terms, but the sad truth is that if I don’t, then I risk becoming one of the victims to this form of manipulation.

Worse still, I’d miss out on some golden opportunities to attract people to my services and products.

That same motivation is what led Robert Cialdini to study and codify the psychological principles behind “compliance” - in other words, he wanted to figure out how people could be influenced into taking specific actions.

If you haven’t read it yet, I can confidently say his book, Influence - The Psychology of Pursuasion, is a MUST READ if you intend to start a business.

Cialdini’s “6 Weapons of Influence” are the psychological principles you must master if you hope to make money in a marketplace.  Salesmen, copywriters and marketers have relied on this text for over two decades to super charge their sales and marketing efforts.

Designing the Weapons of Influence

What I hope to do over the next 6 weeks is walk you through each one of the 6 psychological principles Cialdini outlines in his book and show you how they can literally be “designed” into one of your landing pages.  I’ll use examples from some of the more successful and well recognized landing pages on the web today.

Here’s a brief outline of Cialdini’s 6 Weapons of Influence:

1.  Reciprocity - The basic thesis behind this principle is that we’re culturally conditioned to return favors done for us.  So if someone were to give us a free book, we might be inclined to donate to their religious organization (you all know how the Hare Krishnas roll).  This same principle can be applied to landing page design.

2.  Commitment and Consistency - This principle basically states that once someone has verbally committed to taking an action, they’ll likely follow through with it regardless of the hurdles that appear.  The trick in marketing is to get someone to commit to making a buying decision before you ever ask them to pull out their credit card.  By committing to the purchase up front, they’ll be less likely to abandon the process.

3.  Social Proof - This is an obvious one: people are more likely to follow the crowd.  It’s a trait we’ve all evolved over thousands of years.  Cavemen had to follow the crowd in order to survive and the way to utilize this in marketing is by showing your prospect how many other people (ideally, people who are similar to your prospect) are purchasing your product or service.

4.  Liking - In a nutshell: we tend to be influenced (or purchase from) by people we like.  This is a little more difficult to incorporate right into a landing page, but there are a few tactics that make it possible.

5.  Authority - Which cook book would you rather buy:  the one that “Mario Batali swears by” or the one “Joe Shmo thinks is the best cook book ever written”?  If you’re like most folks, you’ll tend to go with the Batali bible.  Reason being, he’s an authority figure in the world of food and all else being equal, we tend to give more weight to those in the position of authority.

6.  Scarcity - The scarcity principle is an extremely effective tool.  This can influence both “the angle” of your sales pitch and the price your able to charge for a service or product.  The more scarce it is the more you can charge (basic supply and demand) but it also gives the impression of exclusivity.  And who doesn’t want to have access to something others don’t?

BONUS:  Contrast - This isn’t one of Cialdini’s principles but it’s used in many of the most successful sales pitches and marketing campaigns.  This principle states that it’s difficult for people to determine “the value” of a product by simply looking at its price tag — for the most part, if you’re operating in the tech space, your potential customers have never seen your product or service before. 

With the absence of a point of reference, they won’t know if the price tag you put on your product is low, high or fair.  The way around that is to give them a point of reference for comparison, so that you can demonstrate the value in quantifiable terms. It’s critical that you incorporate this concept into your sales and landing page designs.

So for the next 7 weeks, I’ll write one post per week on each principle along with a few examples.

If used properly, I can personally attest to the fact that these concepts will help increase conversions, sales and profits - guaranteed!