How to Use Influencer Marketing for Maximizing Social Proof

Influencers are everywhere. 

Between 2015 and 2025, the size of the global influencer marketing industry has grown from just around $1.7 billion dollars to a whopping $32 billion dollars. Platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok have spawned a new breed of social media superstars who have helped innumerable businesses grow from relative obscurity to million dollar brands.

Why influencer marketing works

Terms like “influencer” or “influencer marketing” have only been around for a couple of decades or so. Yet, they carry a powerful element that has driven consumer behavior for centuries – the power of word-of-mouth referrals, also called “social proof.” 

Influencers are typically people like you and I, but enjoy a strong following online; mostly over social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. These platforms are algorithmically programmed to drive higher visibility to content with high engagement.

Thanks to their strong following, they are able to drive a lot of eyeballs to the content they create, often helping build the fundamental base for social media virality. 

The result – a word of recommendation from an influencer can drive a lot more visibility to a brand than a similar recommendation from a regular social media user with fewer or less engaged followers. 

In some ways, influencer marketing is similar to celebrity endorsements at a smaller scale. While celebrity brand endorsement campaigns can cost a brand several millions of dollars in fees, a similar campaign with a social media influencer with a million followers costs a mere fraction of this.

Nowadays, many marketers even prefer to work with a larger number of influencers who have smaller, more loyal followings (known as micro-influencers or nano-influencers), as these collaborations can drive outsized impact.

Building social proof with influencer marketing

Social media is one of the most impactful marketing channels for building brand visibility and social proof, but it is not the only one. 

A lot of new customers are also acquired through other channels, like search engines (including AI engines like ChatGPT), paid ads (Google Ads, Meta Ads, etc.), email marketing, and event marketing, to mention a few. 

Influencer marketing may not have the same brand awareness or conversion-driving value when it comes to these channels. Yet, customers you acquire through these channels face the same kinds of dilemmas and indecisiveness while purchasing your product or service. 

Utilizing your influencer marketing investments to demonstrate social proof can be a brilliant way to not only overcome shopping hesitancy, but also enhance the net ROI of all your customer acquisition campaigns.

There are a number of different ways to do this. 

Influencer testimonials

Testimonials are one of the most effective ways to showcase the real-world impact that your product or service has on your customers. 

Various studies have found that showcasing testimonials on your marketing assets can increase conversion rate by anywhere between 150% to 270%. This refers to endorsements from regular people like you and I.

Influencers, however, can have a much higher impact on the conversion rate. A testimonial from an influencer is not yet another endorsement. Instead, it also brings with it a sense of trust and credibility that drives conversion rates much further. 

Charlotte Tilbury is a great example of how to use influencer testimonials on your marketing assets. The award-winning luxury makeup and skincare brand works with a number of micro-influencers – influential makeup artists with solid social media followings – to drive adoption of their brand.

Testimonials from these influencers are then showcased prominently on the Charlotte Tilbury website, along with a shoutout to the influencer’s social media page. This is a win-win partnership that helps both parties gain visibility.

Source: Charlotte Tilbury

Sometimes, influencer testimonials are used within a social media channel. Such testimonials could also be collaborative in nature, as both the influencer and the brand get high visibility through such a partnership.

Glossier, a popular skincare brand, collaborates with influencers and micro-influencers on their social media channel. These influencers get visibility (and perhaps endorsement revenue as well) through this partnership while Glossier gets high-converting testimonials for their social media page.

Source: @glossier

Highlighting influencers on product pages

Brooklinen is a New York-based seller of high-quality bedding, bath, and home accessories. Their product pages are a great example of how to tie in a product page with social proof derived from regular customers and influencers. 

Each of their product pages has two sections of social proof. The first section carries user-generated content: reviews from regular customers, along with user-submitted photos and videos. 

This is followed by the “Brooklinen in the Wild” section that highlights posts from influencers and micro-influencers. These are Instagram users with several thousands of followers, and highlighting their posts under this column adds further credence to Brooklinen as a trustworthy retailer of bedding items.

Source: Brooklinen

Influencer social proof in email newsletters

Your email newsletter is perhaps the most effective channel to nurture leads and convert them into paying customers. 

One reason why email newsletters work so well is that they are a peer-to-peer channel that enables businesses to reach their leads directly without relying on third-party social media algorithms.

Unlike Instagram or TikTok, where your posts may not appear in the feeds of all your thousands of followers, email newsletters reach the inbox of each of your subscribers. Showcasing your influencer endorsements as social proof is a great way to drive clicks and conversions from your mailing list. 

There are a number of ways you can deploy influencer social proof within your email newsletters: 

• Share testimonials from famous influencers in your industry to drive higher CTR
• Collaborate with influencers to demonstrate your product in action
• Build collaborative content that you can link to as part of your email newsletter

Here is an example of Samsung showcasing testimonials from fitness influencers while promoting Galaxy Ring.

Source: Samsung Gulf Electronics

Such a showcase can do wonders in driving up conversions, since testimonials build up the credibility of your product, and the Call To Action alongside these testimonials generates high click-throughs.

Here is an example of using influencers to showcase your product. House of Indya, an Indian fashion retailer, ties in local influencers to build social proof and integrates these mailers with a discount campaign to drive up conversions further. 

Source: House of Indya

You will notice that the example above not only uses legit influencers for social proof. They take it a notch further by integrating it with social proof from regular customers.

As a business, it is always a good idea to experiment with different campaign formats to identify one that works for you. 

Finding the right influencers for your campaign

As a marketer, you will be tempted to sign up with the most recognizable influencers in this space.

The truth, however, is that the social influencer industry has exploded in the past few years, and macro-influencers (those with upwards of 500K followers) can charge as much as $10,000 per post. A comprehensive influencer marketing plan could set you back hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Optimizing your influencer marketing campaign for social proof is essential. 

To start with, target micro-influencers with under 100,000 followers who charge relatively lower, and also have a closely knit following. These influencers enjoy high engagement and also have a relatively targeted audience in terms of topic interests. 

Such influencers also aspire to reach the big leagues, which means they are more ready to put in the work to launch a multi-faceted social proof-based marketing campaign, which is not just limited to social media.

While it is recommended to work with smaller influencers because of their higher engagement rates, doing so means that in order to reach a massive audience, you’ll need to collaborate with several influencers at once.

This approach can quickly become prohibitively labor-intensive if you approach each engagement as a one-off, but Sarah Bramley, a marketer from the Mother Raw salad dressing brand, was able to circumvent this challenge by using the Popular Pays platform as a hub for everything related to vetting, briefing, contracting, and coordinating with influencers. 

Source: Popular Pays by Lightricks

As a result, she says she was able to reduce time spent per influencer collaboration by 75%, while reducing costs by 50% and increasing social proof assets acquired by 400%. 

Identifying the right social proof strategy

As with any campaign, your costs are determined by the effort required to execute your strategy. Identifying the right social proof strategy is critical since your ROI depends on it to a great extent. 

To do this, look at your customer journey, and audit the click-through and conversion rate at each step of the process. 

For instance, you may notice that while you are able to attract visitors to your blog pages, they are not subscribing to your mailing list. Or, that while you have a sizable email audience, the conversion rate is quite poor. 

The next step is to experiment with different levers driving conversion. Influencer marketing is definitely one of the most effective channels. But there are far cheaper options available as well. 

You could, for instance, consider embedding reviews from Google and Facebook beside your CTA. Not only is this free, but it could ensure a significant improvement in conversion without investing in influencer marketing. 

With Trustmary, showcasing third-party reviews on your website is a pretty straightforward process. You can also choose to import your reviews from several platforms, including Google, Facebook, Yelp, etc., and show them next to your call to action.

Tracking ROI for your influencer-tie-in campaign

Influencer marketing can be a very profitable strategy by itself. So, calculating ROI is a pretty straightforward process. It’s the value of new business that this particular campaign brings divided by total influencer marketing spend.

However, when you tie influencer marketing with social proof, it gets tricky. This is because in this case, your influencer integration is only one of the many factors driving conversion. 

For instance, if you are showcasing influencers in your email marketing campaign, then the marketing spend not only includes the cost of hiring influencers, but also the rest of the spend related to building this email list, and the platform cost. 

According to Jonathan Bird, a marketing consultant and founder of Delivered Social, the best way to calculate the incremental ROI of using influencers in your social proof messaging is by running a multivariate test campaign. 

He recommends testing a number of different variants of your campaigns – a base variant with just the Call to Action, and no social proof, one variant that includes regular customer reviews with the CTA, and one that includes popular influencers with the CTA. 

If there is no noticeable difference between the variants, then an influencer tie in for social proof may not make financial sense.

To calculate the ROI, you need to calculate the value of new business generated by the original influencer marketing campaign, and the incremental increase in revenue contributed by using your influencer testimonials in your other marketing assets, against your gross influencer spend.

Wrapping up

Social proof is a powerful lever for conversion optimization, and highlighting them in your marketing assets can significantly drive customer acquisition. With growing popularity of social media channels, influencers on these platforms are also becoming more recognizable, and are capable of building the much-needed trust and credibility for businesses. 

If you are a business with an existing influencer marketing strategy, then integrating these voices into your other marketing assets can be a brilliant way to drive up the conversion rate at minimal increase in marketing expenses.

There is one flaw with influencer marketing: consumers know that influencers are paid to recommend products and services.

That’s why sometimes recommendations and reviews from regular consumers can be more effective. They are also much easier and cheaper to unlock. Trustmary can help with that.

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