We here at Barketing Solutions are all about, well, solutions for our clients. We want the websites we create to look professional, provide an excellent user experience to your customers, and dominate the competition in terms of SEO.
We also want to highlight what makes your pet business the best option for your customers, whether you sell pet food and supplies, provide dog walking or pet sitting services, or something else entirely.
Utilizing social proof is an effective way to turn curious would-be customers into actual clients, and it’s easier than it sounds. Stick around and we’ll cover the ins and outs of social proof, how you can use it to enhance your pet sitting website, and more!
What is Social Proof?
When you want to know whether or not a new restaurant in your neighborhood is worth eating at, who do you ask? Do you ask the restaurant staff or consult friends, family, or other people in your community?
Obviously, you can’t trust the restaurant staff for an objective opinion because their livelihood depends on your business. Friends, family, and other people like you offer a less biased take because they, like you, want a positive dining experience and some good food, and they wouldn’t tell you to expect that if they didn’t believe you’d find it there.
That’s social proof in a nutshell and it can be applied to your pet sitting business. Instead of you or your staff singing the business’ praises, you let your base of satisfied customers speak for themselves and, in the process, build confidence in others that you will do a great job and reliably deliver the services you promise.
Social proof builds trust and authenticity, letting your community know you’re the real deal.
Top Tips for Utilizing Social Proof
When properly implemented, social proof is a highly effective marketing tactic. Here are a few ways we recommend using social proof to enhance your website.
1. Maybe Skip the Reviews Page
It was common practice to feature a reviews or testimonials page on a business website so potential customers could see that you have plenty of happy customers. This practice has fallen out of fashion because—let’s be real here—you’re the business, and this is your website, so why wouldn’t you cherry-pick the ones that paint you in a positive light and leave out the bad ones?
Your customers see right through this tactic. That’s why, instead of wasting space with an ineffective reviews page on your site, it’s better to link to objective review sites like Google, Yelp, Facebook, and Nextdoor.
These sites give your customers an objective look at your business and help establish social proof since you’re not the one curating and controlling what is displayed.
2. Get Emotional
There are many logic-based, business-minded people out there who feel the most helpful feedback is fact-oriented and direct, but that’s not what many of your customers are looking for. Instead, they want to hear personal stories and heartfelt testimonials about how you and your staff were attentive to their pet’s needs, caring, loving, and kind throughout every step of the transaction.
Stories that feature a more emotional take on the experience work well to paint your pet sitting service in a positive light and humanize you and your team. Instead of just another face in the crowd of available pet sitters, you’re now a person just like them who understands their pain points and is ready and able to address them as a professional.
So, if you have a particularly poignant customer story or experience, politely ask the client to leave feedback detailing their experience. It can be beneficial for you and your business.
3. It Never Hurts to Ask
You can’t necessarily control what your customers post in terms of feedback.
What you can do to maximize the effectiveness is encourage your happy customers to leave positive feedback. This will help you clinch new business and translate to greater sales and profits, meaning the longevity of your business may depend on it.
Just remember—it’s easy enough for a customer to hop online and leave a review, but people are busy. Having a tablet on hand for the customer to leave immediate feedback is helpful. Offering an incentive like a discount can be effective, too, but it is against the terms of service on most platforms. It’s really not worth getting your page suspended or banned. You should never outright bribe someone for a review.
4. Use Media
Text reviews are great, and the best part is that customers can leave them in seconds. However, people have short attention spans these days, so they will most likely look at the star rating and skim the reviews.
Using media to capture a potential customer’s attention can combat this. Pictures and even video reviews (if you can get them) are more likely to stop someone from browsing and get them to stop, look, and listen, thus maximizing the chances they receive your message and start realistically considering your pet sitting services as a choice.
Getting a video review is not easy, but again, it never hurts to ask. Even one video review, complete with some basic video editing to showcase your professionalism, can be very effective.
Choose Barketing Solutions
We know all the tips and tricks for utilizing social proof because that’s what we do at Barketing Solutions. We offer various services meant to maximize the effectiveness of your pet sitting website or other pet business site so your customers know you care about professionalism and will care about their pets as well.
So, please don’t take our word for it; put us to the test! Ask around the pet business community and you’ll see our social proof in action for yourself. Contact us today to find out how Barketing Solutions can help you!
Erika Godwin is the President of Barketing Solutions and the Co-Founder and CMO of ProPet Software, an industry-leading kennel management software. Erika has over 8 years of experience with WordPress and graduated from Elmira College in 2009 with a BS, Business Administration- Marketing and Management.
