Happy Sunday!

I hope you had a great weekend so far and you’re ready to dive into an email all about the different levers you can pull to increase customer trust and confidence in your brand or product.

We are officially five days out from my birthday (Friday, June 28th!), and unfortunately, we had to cancel the New York City Sharma Nights event due to a venue issue. We’re going to push it to a later date, and when that’s locked in, I’ll share it here.

Sharma Brands is hiring for four roles right now. If you know anyone who’d be a good fit, please send them the links to apply for the role below:

Okay, so today’s email goes into all the major forms of social proof that I think you should leverage as a brand. If I missed something, please reply and tell me. Also, I haven’t heard from you in a while, so just reply with how life is for you!

The main forms I will cover in today’s email:

  • Influencer/Celebrity Mentions, Quotes or Content
  • Creator Content
  • Customer Reviews
  • PR/Affiliate/Performance PR Articles, Headlines & Snippets
  • Partnerships & OOH
  • Social Media Content
  • Certifications
  • Awards
  • Clinical Trials

Okay, let’s get into it…

Influencer/Celebrity Mentions, Quotes or Content

This is what everyone thinks is the pinnacle of social proof — a surprise mention from Taylor Hill pulling out Cadence Capsules while showing what’s in her bag to VOGUE, or when Lauryn Bosstick loves her JASPR air purifier so much, she invites the founder on her podcast. The reason these endorsements work so well is because it taps into the buy-in that someone already has with the celebrity, so if I don’t directly trust JASPR, I do trust that Lauryn knows the best products, which may be good enough for me to justify a purchase. For the record, the Jasper Pro is awesome.

Leveraging these quotes can be risky, especially if you don’t have a relationship with the celebrity or influencer. Technically, using the content or quote without their permission can land you in hot water. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t amplify when a celebrity or influencer becomes a fan of the product. Here are two ways to leverage it:

  1. Get earned media coverage. Just because you can’t talk about the fact that Sydney Sweeney loves using the Solawave wand doesn’t mean that you can’t pitch People Magazine to publish an article titled, Sydney Sweeney Revealed That the Secret to Her Glowing Complexion Is a… Face Wand?“
  2. Bring those celebrities in. After Cadence realized they had a fan of the brand, in Taylor Hill, they co-created a product together. The Supermodel Set is available for purchase on their website and provides both Cadence and Taylor Hill with content and something fun to highlight.
  3. Leverage celebrities as your way in. When you don’t have the ability to tap into your customer base and ask them to create together, you can do what WhatsApp did and hire the Modern Family crew. They leveraged the humor and likeness of Modern Family to get people who would’ve otherwise never taken a second look at WhatsApp to maybe give it a shot.

Creator Content

Working with creators is multi-beneficial from a marketing standpoint and also comes with a lot more benefits around usage than celebrity mentions do. With content creators, there are generally three reasons you work with one:

  1. Their reach. If you’re a brand like Kroma Wellness looking to spread the word about the 5-Day Reset, then it makes sense to work with someone like Alyssa Lynch to leverage her reach. 
  2. Their content. When I worked with The Pill Club (RIP) a few years ago, we worked with various creators, like Cosette, to create content that we could run with paid dollars. She didn’t have more than 30k followers, but it didn’t matter. We just needed the content and, in this case, the ability to whitelist her handle.
  3. Their co-sign. If you have someone who is known for a certain standard, partnering with them to get their co-sign on the product can be hugely valuable. For example, if you sell an electrolyte powder, partnering up with a bunch of SoulCycle instructors for a campaign shows to the broader consumer audience that SoulCycle instructors co-sign the product and its ingredients.

With creator content, you can also negotiate usage terms into your agreement. I recommend locking in your price to renew early versus doing it after you realize the content crushes. You know what the old saying is: Yesterday’s price is not today’s price.

Customer Reviews

There is nothing as prominent, useful, and authentic as genuine customer reviews. You can tell when they sound genuine from the way they’re written, and believe me, authentic vs inauthentic customer reviews absolutely impact the conversion rate of your PDP or landing pages.

Encouraging and even incentivizing your customers to leave reviews should be a standard practice. Collecting as many reviews as possible should be a goal. Whoever is in charge of collecting reviews should have a bonus structure tied to the number of reviews collected.

Being able to use stats like “40,000+ 5-Star Reviews” makes any ad, landing page, email, or affiliate article 10 times more credible and tempting to purchase from. 

Make it extremely easy for customers to leave reviews, ideally with additional characteristics. For example, True Classic has people add what size they bought on the PDP from True Classic, what size they normally buy, and their height/weight. Their benefits message heavily revolves around good fit, so these characteristics attached to reviews make it easier for new customers to make a purchase. If you go to their homepage, you’ll also see how they leverage messaging around 150,000+ reviews.

PR/Affiliate/Performance PR Articles, Headlines & Snippets

Just like the People Magazine article above, getting mentioned in articles so you can leverage the publication’s logo, or getting a nice feature, so you can leverage a direct quote, goes a long way. Depending on the audience you target, you want to choose which set of publishers to display quotes/social proof from. 

When I was building JUDY’s landing pages a few years ago, I had two buckets of publishers I would pull from:

For people who are 35+, I would include logos like the New York Times, Town & Country, Good Morning America, etc. 

For people under 35, I would show logos like PopSugar, Refinery29, VICE, etc.

When you pull quotes, you also want to pull quotes that align with the benefits that you are pushing on that page. For example, Jolie had this article in Apartment Therapy. If the landing page was aimed at a middle funnel audience and the concern was around how easy/hard it was to install a Jolie, you’d use a quote like this on the page:

“I actually ended up being able to screw the Jolie model on by hand. It was so shockingly easy that I thought I did it wrong, but when I turned the water on, everything was in working order.” — Apartment Therapy.

However, if the page is trying to push messaging around better hair and skin, then I would pull a quote like this:

“I would specifically recommend it if you deal with breakouts on your body, especially your shoulders and back, or have curly hair.” — Apartment Therapy.

Sounds legit, right?

Another great spot to use these is turning these press clippings into static ads that also feature snippets showing off benefits. You can see this example from My Subscription Addiction.

Partnerships & OOH

This one isn’t as impactful as customer reviews, per se, but this is something that I think adds a ton of credibility and social proof to a brand. Partnerships are where you align up with another brand or media company to do something fun for both sides. OOH stands for “out of home” and can be anything from a screen in Times Square.

Here are two examples of how this plays up social proof, credibility, and trust:

American Express and Equinox. When they partner together, it lifts the credibility and standing of both brands in someone’s mind. For one of them to leverage the other in their marketing materials makes the one leveraging look stronger, too.

Leveraging a billboard creative. Proudly display it on the homepage of a website or through organic social channels. Imagine if you had a picture on your homepage, halfway down, with an image of your brand on a billboard in Times Square... everyone knows you have to be a big deal or a legit brand to have that. It immediately inspires trust and two times as great social proof for the site.

Social Media Content

Two main places I think social proof is prevalent for brands are Instagram and TikTok.

On Instagram, you can curate and pull all the reposts of mentions into a highlight that lives on your profile. This allows new customers who land on your profile because of an Instagram ad to be immediately met with social proof about the brand.

On TikTok, you want to make sure that when, not if, but when people search your brand name in the search bar, they see content that speaks back to the benefits that you’re pushing in your funnels. This can happen in two ways:

  1. You incentivize or encourage your own customers to post about the product on TikTok. Or... don’t? Some brands, like Jolie, have so many customers posting about the brand when never asked. I think it has to do with people wanting to signal to others that they are cool, hot, and trendy enough to have a Jolie.
  2. You pay a ton of creators or incentivize a ton of TikTok affiliates to start making content with the brand. Similar to what you see brands like Liquid IV, Mary Ruth’s, and Smackin’ Sunflower Seeds doing. 

Certifications

Have you ever seen certifications on a beverage bottle or a food product you just bought from the grocery store? Or seen an icon across all your skincare items that let you know it’s cruelty-free? That’s what these Certifications are. Unfortunately, everything is pay-to-play. Some are more expensive than others—the Non-GMO certification is $105 a year, and Leaping Bunny (certifies cruelty-free) is, I think, $500/product/year. Whole30 Certified can be in the thousands or tens of thousands. 

These certifications are expensive, but they certainly help move products. Being Whole30 Certified means you also passed the test that the certification comes with. For example, being Whole30 Certified would convince one of the millions of people who know Whole30 to take your product over the next one. 

If you want to use the Susan G. Komen name, ribbon, or logo to run a sale where the profits go toward the foundation to fund breast cancer research, you might have to put down $50,000 as a licensing fee before running the promotion. 

This single article recommends 11 certifications. Everyone is making recurring money. I think there’s an opportunity for an all-encompassing new stamp/certification so brands don’t have to spend 5-6 figures on certifications.

Awards

Awards are like the earned-media version of Certifications. You apply for them, they also require some upfront deposit/payment, and then you see which award you win. It doesn’t necessarily matter which specific award you won from a publication or media company, but rather that the media co/publication that awarded it to you is trusted. 

For example, if you have a cleanser and you won in the Viral Product category with Allure’s Readers Choice Awards, the badge still reads, “Reader’s Choice. Award Winner. Allure. The Beauty Expert. 2024.” 

It doesn’t matter which one you win; that badge on your landing page or product page is going to go a long way. On Crown Affair’s Collections Page, the awards from Allure, Glamour, and Cosmopolitan are proudly layered on top of the product images. I absolutely love that brand.

Clinical Trials

The last form of social proof I wanted to make sure I covered here is clinical trials. Clinical trials are what separates brands from saying:

“81% of customers who use the Jolie shower head experience reduced hair shedding.”

VS

“The filtered shower head helps reduce hair shedding.”

You can actually make claims, go to market with them, and have the supporting study as evidence for anyone who wants to see. What is better than a clinical trial? It’s also a high barrier to entry to get one. In the US, it can be $150,000 to get a proper clinical trial done. I know of brands who have done clinical trials in India for $30,000 USD and have had no different results than a company spending $150k here.

Clinical trials are all done by a third party, and the “branding” of a clinical trial is well-known and understood as something that carries a lot of weight with consumers. You can buy a certification, but you can’t just buy the results of a clinical trial. It’s why Mary Ruth’s new hair growth product launched with a clinical trial.

Brands typically wait a long time to get clinical trials. I encourage you to look into how to do them cost-effectively and put that on blast. It’s high-leverage and allows you to advertise and say things that your competitors can’t. They’ll get in trouble.

Okay, now the only other thing I wanted to cover was where are all the places you can leverage this social proof:

  1. Ads — all your paid social ads, influencer ads, ad copy, etc.
  2. Website + Landing Pages — put it in your LP hero’s, collections pages, homepage, product pages, etc.
  3. Emails + SMS flows — all your cart/site abandon flows, up-sell flows, and anytime you mention a product, include social proof. Even if it’s an education-forward email, you can tailor the social proof to match the punchline of your email or text.
  4. Organic Social — The new version of Googling a brand is just going to their organic social channels. Yours should be flooded with social proof or very easy to discover where it is.
  5. In-Store Display — In stores, the on-shelf signage, any end cap displays, pallet displays, or register displays. You can mention your social proof there, and it’ll do wonders. Moiz was the first to mention “10,000+ 5-Star Reviews” on the Target shelf when he launched Native there. It works!
  6. eRetail Listings — Your Amazon, Nordstrom, Walmart, etc, listings should all include elements of social proof from above. You can sync your reviews (if you sell your kidney to pay for Bazaar Voice), and carry over UGC, certifications, and/or awards.

Okay, enough talk about social proof. Now, let's move on to some fun stuff!

Vendor of the Week:

Archive — The influencer and community platform used by 1k+ brands like Feastables, HexClad, Vita Coco, Kitsch, and others.

Archive makes influencer marketers’s lives easier, plain and simple. With their tool, a brand like Feastables can collect every single piece of content they’re tagged in (even with IG stories), organize it into a library, find it later with Archive’s Super Search, and see the value each influencer drives.

The platform makes it easy to view reporting and generate reports in seconds. It also allows you to organize and showcase the customer content on your website with Shoppable UGC Feeds. Seems like a no-brainer. 

Collect all mentions. Organize, tag, and highlight content you like. Display it on your website. Increase conversion rate. Why wouldn’t you do it?

The only other thing I’ll say about why you should use Archive is that they don’t miss content. Most platforms they compete with miss 30-50% of the mentions, have no reporting, nothing around acquiring usage rights, and no way to quickly turn the content into shoppable feeds. 

Archive had a customer who got Kim K’s usage rights through the Archive platform — no lengthy paperwork and contracts with agents and lawyers. Pretty sweet. 

If you are looking for another great lever of social proof, I highly recommend taking a demo of Archive (it’s also a beautiful landing page). If you have 50k+ Instagram followers and you’re not using Archive, you’re leaving money on the table. 

Book your demo with Archive today!

That's all for this week

I hope you had a relaxing weekend that led right into today’s newsletter. I spent the morning playing tennis in New York City’s heatwave, but nothing better than getting some groundstrokes in on the weekend. 

I hope today’s newsletter was a fun read — tried to switch up the format a little bit. If you liked it, shoot me a reply and let me know!

Tonight is Sunday night, so get those 9 hours of sleep in, and get ready for a big upcoming week. It’s my birthday this coming Friday, so if you want to give me a birthday gift, you can either send a brand to Sharma Brands or just ask someone to subscribe to my newsletter using your referral link below!

Have a great upcoming week — see you next Sunday!