Get Better Conversions On Your Ads With This New Social Proof Feature Using LinkedIn Lead Forms

I’ve got a quick tip for you today that my team running our LinkedIn ads showed me - and if you’ve been running LinkedIn lead ads specifically, you’ll appreciate this. It’s a new social feature that LinkedIn quietly added without telling anyone, but here’s the thing - it has the potential to definitely impact conversion rates and here’s why:

Social proof.

If you know anything about marketing, I’m sure you’re already well aware of how social proof works and WHY it works so well.

And we all fall under its spell…because we’re pack animals. We want to know what others are doing, what’s working, and what doesn’t. I like how OptinMonster.com explains how we use social proof...

“When making a purchase decision, our brain looks for a mental shortcut that will allow us to make a decision, pass judgment, or solve a problem quickly and with the least amount of mental effort.”

I use social proof all the time to make decisions. Let’s take a very basic example….

Let’s say I want to try a new restaurant (pre-Covid times), I’m new in the area, and I’m in the mood for Italian. I drive by a few different places and they all appear about the same from the outside.

How can I tell which is better? I look for the one that’s full of people.

Of course, I do the same online too - and so do your prospects. I’ll look at reviews and how many there are. I know some people can actually get carried away with this… they read through the reviews and look for evidence that the people leaving reviews have the same standard or tastes they do. 

Why is that? Trust. 

People are looking for reviews they can trust. 

It’s no different for other businesses either…

• 87% of buying decisions begin with research conducted online before the purchase is made.

• 92% of consumers are more likely to trust non-paid recommendations than any other type of advertising.

• The average consumer reads 10 online reviews before making a purchase decision.

• 88% of consumers trust user reviews as much as personal recommendations.

• 82% of Americans say they seek recommendations from friends and family before making a purchase.

• 70% of people will trust a recommendation from someone they don’t even know.

• 92% of people will trust a recommendation from a peer.

You can see that adding social proof to your marketing collateral can make a huge difference. That’s why it’s pretty cool that LinkedIn added in this new feature in the LinkedIn lead gen forms. If you’re not using them yet, simply put, they’re a very simple way to click on an ad promoting a free white paper for example, and your information is already filled in. Just one less step for your audience. Marketing 101, make it as easy as possible for your prospects to take that next step.

Here’s what it looks like… (without the social proof). You’re scrolling along on LinkedIn, you see this ad, you’re interested and you click “Sign-up”...

But now, with the small new feature LinkedIn added, it looks like this…

Here’s the ad you see...

You click on “Get Quote” and it takes you here… where you see that 27 other people in your industry have already requested a quote. Must be something to this, right?

Here’s another example. In this case, this is an ad that’s been running longer and we see that 156 people are also interested...

Let’s look at a different industry. Here’s an ad and the pre-populated form with the new social proof feature:

You can see how when your prospects see that others in their industry have also submitted their information, they’ll be more likely to submit theirs as well… if for no other reason than that they feel more comfortable doing so because it’s been proven by so many others before them.

This is a subtle but highly effective feature LinkedIn has incorporated to help you build trust, authority and credibility in your industry, while increasing your conversion rates.

Want to Learn More?

If you’d like to learn more about how we use social media ads (including ads like the ones highlighted above), we have a specialized team called the LinkedSelling Elite Digital Group with many different options to work with you to meet your goals. 

We have different solutions that help businesses of all sizes get more leads and sales appointments for their sales team, filling your pipeline with amazing sales opportunities. But in order to help you discover which would be the right solution for your situation, we need to talk.