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Below is a transcript of the Chatbot Marketing Training Course by Customers.ai and Isaac Rudansky, of Adventure Media. Get the full course here and become a messenger marketing master. Get Customers.ai’s free chatbot builder to execute these tactics today.
Welcome back chatbot fans. And now, we’re going to talk about social proof and tribal identity, which is really the core fundamental idea with regards to how people make their buying decisions.
Anyway, social proof and identity. Social proof basically states that one of the ways, and an important way that we determine what is good, and proper, and correct in the world, is by seeing what other people think is good, and proper, and correct in the world.
It’s a very straightforward rule, and is very powerful, and we think about our own buying patterns, and we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll see just how powerful of an influence this could be.
In an interesting study by Albert Bandura and colleagues, I forgot what year this was done. 67% of kindergarten children who were previously terrified of dogs were willing to climb into a playpen with a dog after watching other children play with dogs for 20 minutes a day for just four days.
That’s the principle of social proof in action in youngsters, and this concept of social proof applies to all of us throughout all stages of life. When we see things on Instagram from people we admire, we respect, we want to buy that, right? when we see reviews and testimonials, we’ll talk about that in a moment, we want to buy that.
And this is not a bad mechanism in our brain, the reason why this has been developed over so many thousands of years is because this usually works in our favor, right?
There’s a blizzard of information out there, and if we’re able to find a group of people, or be able to trust in a group of people when trying to figure out what behavior is proper or appropriate, or what product service is good, that’s an enormously efficient shortcut in making decisions, and we probably be a lot worse off as a human race if we didn’t have something reliable like that in place, so we’d make decisions like that.
The power of social proof is amplified when we see people like us engaging in certain behaviors.
Now, remember, this is important. It’s one thing to see just people using a product or people using a service, but if we can’t identify with them, if they’re not like us, then it has much less of an impact on us.
When people that are in my demographic, and people who have my interests and desires are buying these products, or using these services, or acting in a certain way, that’s when social proof becomes a massive weapon that you could wield.
Like I said, aside from just the overall idea of social proof, this is the concept that I was just discussing of tribal identity.
We identify with tribes, and tribes doesn’t necessarily mean religious tribes, which that could be the case as well, but if I’m a Jets fan, or if I like a certain band, these are all subtle cues that make up my overall identity, these are things that I relate to.
If I see you relate to the world in a similar way that I relate to the world. I will trust your judgment with what products and what actions or what things are good more so than people who do not share the same characteristics.
So, this includes interests, like I just mentioned, personality characteristics. If you’re more outgoing, and I’m outgoing, I’m more likely to trust your preferences then somebody who is an introvert, okay? So, same demographics.
If you’re in my age group, gender, race, ethnic background, other desires of just “I like to travel, you like to travel”, “I like poetry, you like poetry”, “I like art exhibits, you like art exhibits.”
So, the more we could as marketers show prospects, and shows leads that people like you, with your interests, in your age group, with your religious background, or whatever it may be, pick a dimension, as many as you can, and this takes some thought and take some analysis of your data, and you could show them how those types of people are using and enjoying our products and services, you have done an enormous amount of good to the effectiveness of your marketing campaign.
And this social proof and identities is exactly why websites use testimonials, why they use reviews, while you have Google+ pages set up, why you have Facebook reviews, why you want to get Instagram likes, why you want to get Twitter followers, all that.
You might think you’re doing it for fame, but the real reason why it works is because it creates social proof, it’s a way for people to understand that you are good, your business is good, that is how we make snap decisions, this is how our buying patterns develop.
Interestingly enough I found this over and over with client websites, and with my own marketing campaigns that I’ve run.
Testimonials and reviews that could tap into tribal identity are more important and are more impactful in the buying decision than actual product information.
Think about that, if you if I had the choice -and I do this all the time, I help clients redesign their landing pages all the time in this way — to put product information, details about the product, the features, the benefits, all that sort of great stuff.
I always choose to put to highlight a good testimonial, and again, the testimonial has to be authentic, and it has to tap into tribal identity, and it has to convey that people like you are using this product, it’s so much more persuasive than all the product information, because psychologically people want to buy things, and they make that initial impression, that initial judgement to buy when they see other people like them buying.
Yes, the product information and supporting information, the price of the product, and the return policy, and all those things are important, but they’re not as important, they’re all secondary and tertiary to the primacy of social proof.
What’s beautiful about what we’re doing here with Facebook chat, about marketing, is that Facebook provides us a trove of demographic information that we could tap into, and we’re going to talk about how to use Customers.ai to personalize messages with specific variables, and I’m going to show you an example in the very next page.
So, here we have a chat bot that I created, and here’s basically what it says, it’s for selling strollers, this is an example, so just pretend here that I’m a mother of two, okay? I mean, it might not be that hard to imagine, but just imagine it.
So it says, “Hey Isaac, we just completed a massive customer survey and we found that 90% of mothers with two or more children rated this stroller 5/5 stars for portability, comfort, and easiness to clean.” and here’s a picture of the stroller.
This is what Jennifer Smith, a mother of two, said about this particular model “This is by far the best stroller I have ever used, the accessories are affordable, and they make it so easy for me to stroll my toddler and my newborn around town at the same time.
This stroller makes me want to have two more kids just so I have an excuse to buy another one in a different color.”
Okay now, of course the testimonial is not real, I made it up, but you get the idea.
If you’re running your business well, and you have good reviews, you should be using them in your chat box and notice how we segmented this out two mothers of two, this is a chat bot that will go out to all the customers in our database that have identified as mothers, and that have two or more children, right?
and we also have done research, of course, and we’ve done interviews, of course, and we’ve done surveys, of course, and we’ve done polls, of course, to know that easiness to clean, comfort, and portability are the most important factors.
We’re combining many elements of good marketing into a chatbot that’s going to have engagement rates that are through the roof.
So, when you’re building your chatbots, and when you’re drafting your chat box, it’s important to start thinking about the variables that you want to collect about your customers, right? Which attributes are important.
So, in our case of the stroller company, it’s important to know “are you a mother?”, “how many kids do you have?”, “what are the most important product features to you?”. If you’re a negotiating seminar, it’s important to know “what industry are you in?”, “what type of negotiating do you do?”, and “what location are you in?”
Because then we know exactly how to market to you, and which testimonials to show to you, right? so it’s very important to understand the specific important attributes of your customers that are relevant to your business.
Then you’re going to go into Customers.ai and we’re going to build out buckets of specific attributes that we can target and speak with each tribe in a specific way.
So, for example, for our stroller company we’re going to have an audience in mobile monkey that is only going to send messages to mothers who are expecting, we’re going to have another audience for mothers with one child, with newborns, let’s say that are under a year old, then we’re going to have another audience from mothers two and above, then we’re going to have another audience for fathers, okay?
and our drip campaigns, and our chat blasts, and our messenger ads, are all going to be tailored to the needs and desires in the tribal identity of that specific group.
That’s the power of Customers.ai and chatbots, I hope I’m conveying how sophisticated we can get, and how effective we can get, and how much more powerful it is when you combine these principles like commitment, consistency, reciprocity, and now social proof and tribal identity.
We’re going to segment your drips and the blasts, like I just mentioned, by different audiences, and you’re going to see these engagement rates literally go through the roof.
Through the chat blasts, and through the drip campaigns through Mobile Monkey we’re going to show testimonials, reviews, product demonstrations If you have those on video, or even product demonstrations based on an image-based series, customer success stories, the sky’s the limit.
You guys are the ones that have to get creative to figure out how to implement these specific tactics and these persuasive techniques into your chat box through using very highly segmented audience segments.
Another important tip for using social proof, everything has to be concrete. Avoid saying lots of people, right? lots of people means nothing to anybody, but it’s much better to say “300 mothers of two have bought this stroller” that’s powerful, right?
So, when you’re using statistics and you’re using numbers, and you’re using testimonials, use concrete numbers, avoid any unsubstantiated superlatives, like “everyone says this stroller awesome” no, it’s easy to clean, it’s portable, it’s lightweight, right?
Use things that are actually concrete, that means something to everybody that are objective, that’s how you get social proof to really work to your advantage.
There’s so much you could do here, right? What I would recommend is a great exercise, is take time and write down two to three different ways that you could incorporate social proof like I said, whether it be a product review, whether it be a testimonial, whether it be a product demonstration, whether it be a customer success story, think of ways that you could take the content you already have, or try to generate new content like this, and use social proof, use tribal identity to your advantage similar to how I set it up with the stroller example, for your own business, for your own products to nurture leads, and to engage new leads in a much more effective and positive way.
