How to Improve Trust & Profits with User-Generated Content (UGC)

The 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual global survey that ranks rising and falling levels of trust by consumers in several institutions, government, and information sources, has found that overall, trust is at an all-time low.

This may be why people are now, more than ever, turning to online communities and consumer-generated content to find unbiased feedback and trust signals for brands and products that they’re interested in.

Spokespeople Are Losing Credibility

Below is a chart showing spokespeople in various roles, and the perceived level of credibility that they currently have (percentage based out 100).

Trust in spokespeople is falling-even inside your own organization. This is also true for celebrity “influencers”, where there is a trend to unfollow these disingenuous celebrities who endorse products for money.

Trust In All Information Sources At Record Lows

Below is a chart showing the perceived level or credibility of different types of media, regarding news and information(percentage based out 100, with 60% or above being ‘trusted’).

Trust in all information sources is falling, including traditional media, owned media, and social media. This may be directly related to the recent onslaught of political polarization, fake news, and conspiracy theories that have plagued virtually every communication channel.

TRUST IS FUNDAMENTAL

Behavioral and social psychologists and even economists agree that trust is the most fundamental element of personal, professional, business, or political relationships, along with every single type of interaction or transaction. And in fact, without trust, everything fails, including the government, the economy, and commerce itself.

Trust is the fundamental glue that holds it all together; every culture, economy, relationship, and transaction. In fact, the real reason to build a powerful brand preference is to establish a name that people can rely on and trust, in order to facilitate loyalty, and fast and easy decision making.

Sure, a brand may stand for certain attributes, characteristics, beliefs, or causes, but if they don’t also actively incorporate trust as the absolute foundation of their brand, they will eventually lose-especially today.

In a competitive market, fueled by instant access to data, where the consumer is empowered by technology to quickly and easily research all their options, they no longer have the time or interest to do the research to find out if you’re a trustworthy company. Instead, consumers look for reliable trust signals (mental shortcuts) to determine their confidence level in the brand, and if they don’t find them, they leave.

THE 5 TRUST SIGNALS

In this pursuit of faster, more effective ways to establish trust, shoppers look for five main trust signals, both on and off of your website.

These five trust signals include:

1. Consumer ratings and reviews across a number of review sites, paying particular attention to the quantity, quality, and source of your ratings and reviews. In addition, what types of reviews you collect and display, where your reviews show up in search, and how you publicly respond to your reviews-especially negative reviews, all play an integral part in how consumers perceive your trustworthiness.
2. The look, feel and usability of your website are a visual representation of your company’s trustworthiness. Consumers instantly judge your site on how up-to-date your design feels, the quality and layout of your product images and content, how easy it is to use, and what kind of contact, shipping, and return options are available.
3. Your brand's business reputation or BBB ratings and letter grade, as well as industry or 3rd party awards or accolades. They may look at where and how you are mentioned in the press, blogs, forums, or social media. And, they may want to know what trusted experts, insiders and influencers are saying as well.
4. The content you create and publish indicates your perceived level of expertise, thought leadership, innovation, vision, network, insights, or solutions. They may want to see your level of engagement or commitment to your social media community, how committed you are to your customers, and how you solve their problems.
5. Security measures that you have put in place to protect their information from credit card or identity theft. With hundreds of highly publicized security breaches making headlines each year, it’s no wonder that 1 in every 6 customers abandon their shopping carts right before they buy, due to security concerns. (A great website security option that can help you add instant 3rd party trust and credibility to your site is Trust Guard.)

By looking for these 5 main types of trust signals, shoppers are able to skim through large amounts of content, clutter, and noise in order to quickly determine how trustworthy a business is, which allows them to make better overall decisions, while simultaneously mitigating their losses by avoiding less trusted options.

Not surprisingly, trust signals work both ways. A great example of this is banks. When a financial lender considers giving someone a loan, one of the primary trust signals they look at is a person’s FICO score (credit score), which essentially represents the individual's trust score. The higher the FICO score, the higher the trust, and the lower the interest rates, down payment, security deposit, and the higher the loan limit.

Along these same lines, consumers look at a brand’s trust signals in similar ways. How many ratings and reviews does a company have? What is their overall star rating? What do their customers think about them? Do they take care of upset customers when they have a problem? Do they live up to their claims? Were the majority of their customers happy with their products and/or service?

What this all comes down to-and this is a critical concept for brands to understand-is that the more trust signals you have, and the easier they are for consumers to find...

• The more confidence they will have in your company and your products
• The more likely they will buy from you-the more money they will spend on average
• The more frequently they will buy
• The more likely they are to recommend you to others

In fact, because of the online world that we live in, trust signals have become so important that they are one of the most important and most profitable assets you can possibly have.

TRUST SIGNALS START WITH REVIEWS (SOCIAL PROOF)

If you consider your own shopping and research behavior, it’s almost an automatic, unspoken reaction to ‘stack rank’ and prioritize potential vendors, options, or products based on ratings and reviews from trusted sources. In fact, as consumers, we scour for reviews so automatically and so often, that we don’t even think about it anymore. It’s almost like a subconscious checklist that automatically precedes a purchase.

It’s a lot like how we look people up on LinkedIn or social media before we meet with them, to see how legitimate they are, who they know, what their background is, what they say, and what others are saying about them (social proof). And coincidentally, this is why a lot of gurus talk about the importance of building your personal brand. These days your personal brand is just as important as building a business or product brand. The process of building consumer trust through honest, authentic, and verified reviews has become vital for consumers, individuals, and marketers alike. Lee Reams, wrote this in his recent Forbes article titled, “Trust Isn’t Just An Asset: It’s The Foundation Upon Which Everything Else Is Built”:

“I coach my own clients on the value that reviews bring to the table, both in terms of an increased level of online awareness and with regards to establishing trust, all before a prospect ever has a chance to walk in the door. In reality, these reviews are a psychological trigger. They help you migrate more prospects from the ‘search’ mode to the ‘buyer’ mode in the most efficient way that you can.”

As vitally important as building trust through verified ratings and reviews is for both companies and professionals today, there are many who are not taking an aggressive and proactive approach to establishing their online reputation and growing their brand through an effective review collection, management, and promotional strategy.

DO REVIEWS BUILD TRUST? Absolutely! Definitely! YES!

More than ever before, people rely on reviews and ratings because they make decision-making easier and faster, and they are often the first and primary type of analysis a shopper will use when researching a new brand, seller, or product.

In fact, statistically, 95% of consumers read online reviews, and 91% trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.

Ratings and reviews-like a credit score, or any other objective score, rating, or standard of performance-are essentially an efficiency tool that helps us to facilitate faster and easier decision making.

Consider star ratings at hotels for example. Would you seriously consider booking a hotel that you have never stayed at, without looking at their ratings and reviews? Of course not! More than ever, we depend on those ratings to determine things like where we’re going to stay, how much we’re willing to pay, and what we can expect as far as cleanliness, service, and quality. In fact, just having reviews readily available saves us an incredible amount of time and stress, because we know that we can depend on them to make sound, reliable decisions that accurately reflect our wants and needs-all in the shortest amount of time possible. 

However, before you can effectively influence a customer’s buying decision, you first need to collect and promote ratings and reviews online that are both authentic and credible. In today’s world, the easiest, fastest, and by far most effective way to do this is with a well-established, highly trusted rating and review platform, like Shopper Approved.

Ratings and reviews are a unique type of User-Generated Content (UGC), that you can leverage both on and off of your website, in order to build and establish trust, credibility, and social proof into your brand, to influence significantly more people to buy from you.

Not only do search engines love this type of UGC and display it virtually everywhere in search, but potential customers love it as well, and base a large portion of their buying decision on it-just like in the hotel example above-to save them time and stress, while increasing the probability of a positive outcome.

The bottom line is that when others endorse you, it’s far more believable and credible than when you endorse yourself. And when you market that customer-driven endorsement, you highly influence other consumer’s buying decisions.

YOUR DIGITAL PROFILE IS CRITICAL

A brand's digital profile mainly consists of the primary search results that a shopper may find online when doing their research, and UGC and 3rd party content is often the foundation of the search results that carry the most visibility and credibility.

In fact, a recent study found that “66% of buyers use sources outside of vendor materials during the research phase.” (Content Marketing Institute and SmartBrief, 2017).

In order to really capture a potential customer’s trust and attention, your digital profile needs to include things like social media channels, apps, maps, directories, merchant ratings and reviews(also known as Seller Ratings), product ratings and reviews, video reviews, media and blog mentions, awards, and recognition, expert opinions, and product Q&A. In other words, what other people are saying about you online is critical to building your digital profile, and your overall success.

Over time, if done properly, your digital profile will create more consumer relevancy, influence, and traffic than your own website, as the following graph explains.

A Seismic Shift In Where People Find Critical Business Content

Because of the influential nature of ratings and reviews on your digital profile, reputation management as a marketing and growth strategy has become a critical component of success. In fact, without an effective reputation management program in place, a business may stall, and even fail.

REVIEWS IMPACT THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY

Every shopper goes through some type of process or “journey” to find, research, compare and settle on a brand, product, or service. And depending on the price and complexity of the purchase decision, or how much the decision will impact their money, health, or life, this journey may entail extensive research. The Google ranking algorithm says that any site or content that impacts someone’s money or life, which they call YMYL-Your Money or Your Life, must have ahigh degree of EAT: Expertise, Authority, and Trust, otherwise, it will not rank well in search.

The typical customer journey includes the awareness of a need or want, followed by online research, where they are actively looking for the optimal solution and value, with the least perceived risk.

The research phase is followed by the purchase or conversion phase, where shoppers a reconverted into buyers.

One of the most unique benefits that ratings and reviews have, that no other type of UGC or social proof has, is that ratings and reviews highly influence buyer behavior at all 3 stages of the customer journey.

The Customer Journey Funnel

1- Awareness
Ratings and reviews can increase your website traffic, product visibility, awareness, and preference in organic search results, social media, review sites, paid ads, and all traditional marketing collateral.
2- Research
Ratings and reviews can improve your online visibility, search engine optimization (SEO), and brand image, which increases your click-through rate by an average of 17% (Google).
3- Purchase
The credibility and trust created through the social proof and popularity that ratings and reviews provide can increase conversion rates up to 380% (Spiegel Research Center).This is a common customer journey that depicts just how important reviews and ratings are at every stage of the journey, from the initial awareness, through the research and purchase phases.

 

In fact, a comprehensive study conducted by Northwestern Universities Spiegel Research Center found that “...as products begin displaying reviews, conversion rates escalate rapidly. The purchase likelihood for a product with five reviews is 270% greater than the purchase likelihood of a product with no reviews.” And the higher the price, the more critical reviews [are],with reviews for high-priced items increasing conversion rates by up to 380%

Another study by Marketing Sherpa, an independent e-commerce testing company also found that the purchase conversion rate of a test website went from 0.44% before having any star ratings, to 1.04% (a 136% increase) in one part of the study, and from 0.47% to 0.88% (an 87%increase) in another part of the study after the site received its 5-star rating.

• 0.44% Purchase Conversion Rate Without Stars
• 1.04% Purchase Conversion Rate With Stars (136% Increase in Conversion)

These two independent studies using a scientific approach conclude that reviews drive conversions, from an 87%increase up to 380%.

VOLUME MATTERS

A Stanford University study published in Psychological Science found that “people tend to favor a product that has more reviews, even when it has the same low rating as an alternative product.” In other words, the sheer volume of reviews creates credibility by itself, because people prefer to buy “popular” products or buy from popular vendors or stores. In essence, it’s a popularity contest, and creating a mechanism to get more reviews than your competitor can become a winning strategy.

This research is supported by a study by the University of Arizona: “Contrary to what you’d expect, higher product ratings don’t always translate into better sales. Instead, the quantity of product reviews—regardless of whether those reviews are positive or negative—is often much more important in the consumer’s decision process. Simply put, lower-quality products can outsell higher-quality alternatives as long as they collect more reviews.” Assuming, of course, all the reviews are not terrible.

BEING TOO GOOD, IS BAD

A Northwestern University Study found: “When consumers see all five-star reviews, they become skeptical that it’s too good to be true, that there’s some manipulation happening, Therefore... if you have an average star rating in the mid-fours, the purchase probabilities are higher than if it’s at five, which means having some negative reviews in there actually adds credibility.” And in fact, “Purchase likelihood peaks when the average star rating of a product is between 4.2 and 4.5 stars and starts to drop as the star rating approaches a perfect 5. ”

TRANSPARENCY, AUTHENTICITY, AND HONESTY MATTER

A recent study by Review Meta also found that the proliferation of millions of fake 5-star reviews(unverified customer reviews) on Amazon has backfired for the brands using them, and their sales actually decrease with all 4 and 5-star reviews. The review weight, impact, or credibility decreases as the brand gets closer to having all 5-star reviews.

Credibility matters, and as we said from the beginning of this article, consumers are looking for a brand they can trust, which often translates to transparency, authenticity, and honesty. If they smell a skunk (i.e. fake or manipulated reviews), they will run.