Social proof and how to convert leads *faster*

The fascinating psychology of Social Proof; Let’s nerd out about marketing  (and make more sales while you’re at it). In this solo episode, Jenna breaks down one of the most powerful (and often misused) psychological tools in marketing: social proof. 

Find out how social proof actually works in your brain, why some testimonials convert and others flop, and how to position real client results in a way that builds trust fast.

This one’s for the entrepreneurs who know they’re great at what they do, but need to showcase it to new leads without feeling awkward or overly braggy.

🚨 WARNING 🚨 the price for Testimonials That Sell DOUBLES on Friday!

 ✨ Testimonials That Sell: The mini course that teaches you how to actually use testimonials in a way that helps more people say “yes” to working with you.

➡️ GET IT HERE: www.magicmarketingmachine.com/tts

In this episode, we cover:

• What social proof actually is (and how to use it right)
• The weird truth about long lines, crowded checkouts, and concert entrances 🧠
• Why Canva’s testimonial templates are low-key sabotaging your sales
• How to make sure your client results actually land with your audience
• Why “proof” beats logic when someone’s deciding to buy
• A permission slip to keep your own ‘hype folder’ of wins and kind words 🫶

Jenna also walks you through real client stories (including how she helped one client have a $30K launch and another sell seats in a workshop with just a few posts) and breaks down why storytelling sells better than stats ever will.

✨ Join Magic Marketing Machine: For service based business owners who wanna grow on Instagram, get clients from your content, and run your account in 15 minutes a day. www.magicmarketingmachine.com

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Share it with a fellow marketing nerd or DM Jenna your thoughts @jennaspaige!
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Tap here to get your free Posts That Sell Template (This caption got us 10 sales calls in 3 hours)

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https://www.magicmarketingmachine.com

Music by Jordan Wood

Hosted by Jenna Harding (Warriner), Creator of Magic Marketing Machine

Transcript

Let's be nerds together about marketing psychology. Come on. I know we all wanna be the cool girl, but if you look back at elementary school, the nerds are the rich ones now. So let's take a page outta their book. What a silly thing to say. Um, just being a goof. But I am a total nerd from marketing psychology, and today we're gonna talk about the psychological phenomenon of social proof and how you can use it to make more sales in your business. 

A lot of the marketing that I teach is based on psychology. I mean, all marketing is at the end of the day, but I remember this formative story that I heard about an experiment where a lineup was formed in a mall and the lineup went nowhere. But participants walking through the mall, they had no idea that it went nowhere.

And because this line was long, folks just started getting in it. They figured because the line is there and people are enthusiastically in it, it must be going somewhere good.  And sure enough, when this experiment happens, people just keep getting into that lineup. They don't know where it's going, but they're getting into it.

Actually, recently I saw a video on TikTok where someone who worked at it was either a concert hall or an amusement park. The type of venue where there's six entrances all lined up beside each other with turnstiles, like Disney World, and their whole job was to stand there and tell people, keep going.

There's lots of open spots. There's spots to the right. There's spots to the left because as soon as a line would form, presumably people would start getting into that long line instead of going to the short lines, to the right and the left. Ever been at the supermarket? I know I've made my point, but ever been at the supermarket and there's a till and there's no lineup, and you go, it's probably closed because there's no one in it that.

This is social proof, and this is something that you can harness and should be harnessing in your marketing, in your social media, marketing on your website, all over the internet in person, in order to build trust faster and convert leads faster because people believe in you because you're giving people evidence that you are who you say you are and that you're legit and that you can get the A result.

Another super common example of this would be on a book cover. It might say like, Oprah's book Club or 100,000 copies Sold. All that is is saying, Hey, this is really popular. Other people think this is good. Therefore this, they literally call it a psychological phenomenon. You believe it is good too. Ever gone to an entrepreneur's website and right under the banner image there's a list of the publications they've been featured on social proof.

Ever been watching a webinar and the person hosting the webinar will do their sales pitch and be like, Ooh, I see people are enrolling. Welcome Sarah from Chicago. Welcome Janet from Ontario.  The easiest way, the easy breez way, and the way that people mess up the most, do you know what it's gonna be? It's using testimonials. 

I don't think anyone's gonna argue us that testimonials are important, but the issue is so many business owners use them poorly. I actually got so frustrated with how many testimonials I was seeing online that were just totally useless, that I created an entire mini course on how to get them, how to use them, and how to design them in a way that actually makes people pay attention.

You know who the biggest culprit is. It's Canva. I love using Canva. But when you search testimonial in Canva, you get this square that says client love. And that's the biggest words on it, is client love. And you know what happens when someone is scrolling Instagram or whatever and they see client love, they do not read the next words.

They do not read it. They keep scrolling. One, because client love is the biggest words. It has the hierarchy of text. So a k, a, your eyeballs go right to client love, and then your brain goes, oh, okay. This is something about this person. Nothing to do with me. It's talking about someone else. There's nothing I can gain from this.

Number one rule of copy, your leads wanna gain something from what you are writing. So they're always looking at through a lens of what's in it for me, right? So they see client love, they scroll. They're not even reading it. You could say that you changed their life, that all of their problems are gone now and they're multi-billionaires.

Nobody's reading it.  They need to be designed in a way that pulls your eye to the most important text. So even someone who is skimming it immediately gets the point, feels like it's about them, and we embed into their brain all of the value that you bring your clients. And all they had to do was glance. 

People need to feel safe in order to work with you, right? Especially if you're selling anything that is over a hundred dollars. You know, people need to feel safe and secure. They don't wanna take a gamble. They need to trust you. And social proof builds that trust. I'm gonna say probably faster than anything else.

I'm sorry if you can hear the dog walking in the background. It was rainy today and so she didn't get to go on a W Listen, I would go on a W in the rain. It's her that won't go on a W in the rain  anyway, posting social proof, posting testimonials, builds that trust and in a way defies logic.  You could try and logic someone into a sale.

You can logic someone to buy with you all day long. But at the end of the day, there are things other than logic that consumers are using to make a buying decision. Like how much they trust you, like what other people say about you. Like, will it work for me? Prove it by showing someone like me and proving that it worked for them. 

One time I sent out a sales email and in it there was a line about an acting coach that had joined my program, magic Marketing Machine, and had a big, beautiful result from it. And I said, you know.  So and so who's an acting coach who had this result, and I can't, I can't remember. This was years ago and someone joined and it's always a pleasure and it's so valuable when someone tells you exactly why they signed up to work with you, and an acting coach came to me and said, I.

When you talked about that other acting coach joining, I was like, great. Now I know this will work for me. Now, I work with service providers. If you're a coach, if you run a group program, if you're a therapist, if you're a web designer, these are all examples of services and these are the type of people that I work with to help you grow on Instagram and get way more clients from your content.

Now, that just spoke to the logic part of your brain, right? The next question your brain is asking is, okay, we'll prove it. Okay, well how, okay, but I'm different. How will this work for me? Right? Like that's what you're thinking.  This is how our brains work. But what if I told you one of my clients in Magic Marketing Machine, I helped her just have a $30,000 launch. 

What if I told you I just helped the fitness instructor get the most reach she has ever gotten before?  Thanks to what I teach in the program.  What if I told you I just helped a parenting coach have a $40,000 month?  What if I told you I helped an email marketer sell five spots in a workshop from just a couple of stories and a post on Instagram?

Those things are all true, by the way. But don't those things make you trust me more? Plus, when I position them as stories, it's more interesting than saying like, one of my clients reach when up 555%. Also true, but very logic based. Are you thinking right now, Jenna? Was this just an excuse for you to tell us like all the crazy results your clients have gotten?

You know what, maybe it was, but it's also just really good examples.  Lemme give you another tip though. Once you start collecting testimonials,  keep them all together. I link people to an Airtable base so you can like sort store them and sort them by topic and that. But even if they're just in a Google Drive, and there's a couple reasons for that.

One, because you are gonna be so freaking successful that you will have hundreds of positive testimonials and you're gonna wish that you organized them. But two, because it can be your pump up folder. You know, it can be the place that you look when you're feeling down on yourself and you go, you know what, I'm amazing.

And then just read through all of the positive stuff that people have said about you and said to you, even if it's just like comments on Instagram stuff, maybe you're not ever gonna post about, but you just wanna lock in and remind yourself that you're amazing, can be really helpful. Especially, especially when you go to write a sales post, because you gotta put your head in the game when you go to write sales content.

The more jazzed you are about what you're talking about, the more jazzed it's gonna sound when you write it. If you want any of the products that I not so casually plugged in this episode, the enrollment for Magic marketing machine is open. That is my signature offer to help service-based business owners grow on Instagram, get clients from it, and manage your account in 15 minutes a day.

And if you want testimonials that sell. To help you get better testimonials from people using proven strategies that help you get testimonials that don't stink. Because a lot of times when people are left to their own devices, your clients are gonna send you testimonials that are borderline unusable.

So I'll show you how to get better ones from them. Keep them super organized, design them in a way that looks good and people actually pay attention to. And there's even a sales post template included in that as a bonus. And I'll link all of this in the show notes and I'll see you in the next episode.