Marketing your business isn’t always easy. You can write perfectly phrased content for your site, put together appealing email Marketing campaigns, and craft witty and relatable 140-character tweets.

But sometimes what you say just isn’t enough to sell your audience on why they should trust you. Sure, you can show them logos from your high-profile clients or partners, but that might not even be enough.

This is why we love the concept of social proof. According to Wikipedia:

“Social proof, also known as informational social influence, is a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior for a given situation.”

In other words, if consumers see or hear others acting positively or negatively towards a brand, that can have a pretty significant influence on how they feel about that brand too, even if they’ve never engaged with them previously.

That’s pretty interesting and terrifying; the fact that all it takes is a review or recommendation from someone who is not your business to sway a prospect either towards or away from your brand.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that you as a business owner or marketer are totally helpless to the effect of social proof.

Quite the contrary, actually. Word-of-mouth marketing, referrals, and Affiliate marketing can be incredibly powerful tools for every business, if you have the right tools to wield its power.

Today, we’d like to take an up-close look at these influential forms of marketing and what an affiliate marketing tool from OmniStar is doing to give businesses control over it.

Why Does Social Proof Matter?

We’re no longer living in an age where we have to rely on literal word of mouth from our friends, family, and colleagues.

We now have things like Facebook, website testimonials, product reviews on Amazon, and affiliate referrals to let us know if we should trust a brand, service, or product.

But just because social proof and word of mouth have become digital doesn’t make it any less important to the self-promotional process.

Business 2 Community, in conjunction with Nielsen, conducted an online poll last year to find out what all the hubbub was about when it came to online referrals.

Here are some of the results from that survey:

· 67% people are more likely to make a purchase if they’ve received an email or social media recommendation from a family member or friend.
· Over 80% of Americans actively seek out referrals or recommendations before committing to any purchase.

In a study done by Ogilvy, Google, and TNS, they found that word of mouth was the most trusted influential source (with 74% of consumers) for making purchases.

Then you’ve got the National Retail Federation publishing that almost 40% of marketers believe that affiliate marketing is one of their most successful methods for acquiring new customers.

We already know this is what consumers want from businesses and we know that companies are reaping the benefits.

If you’re convinced now that building trust with your consumers needs to start from outside your company, let’s talk about how OmniStar’s software solution helps businesses leverage this outside support to increase brand awareness and trust.

The Omnistar Affiliate Software Solution

OmniStar’s slogan is “affiliate software made easy” and that’s no exaggeration. When it comes to helping companies increase their business through affiliate marketing, referral marketing, and worth of mouth marketing, their software has got you covered.

Let’s explore this affiliate marketing software solution and see why companies like Cisco love it and Daren Nowak from Card Kangaroo had this to say about it:

“The OmniStar Affiliate software has helped our business a lot. Our sales have increased by 50% since we implemented OmniStar Affiliate software and we have even dropped our Google Adwords campaigns because we are doing so well with OmniStar Affiliate Software.”

To start, let’s quickly make a distinction between referral marketing and affiliate marketing. OmniStar tackles both, but it’s still important to understand where the differences lie:

Referral Marketing

A form of marketing that makes use of customers as brand evangelists. (Word of mouth is a type of referral marketing.)

Typically, companies incentivize customers to share word of their products or services via social media and other trackable means. They are in turn rewarded with discounts, freebies, or money for their time and effort.

Affiliate Marketing

A form of marketing that makes use of other companies, partners, or websites as brand evangelists. There are a number of ways this can be done.

Ads and contextual links are one way websites can help drive traffic back to a referral site. Websites can also sell that company’s products or services through their own site, tracking those referred leads through a unique code appended to the share URL.

As I said, OmniStar handles both of these and they do it very well. Here are some of the features you should be aware of:

Implementation: Lightweight solution that seamlessly integrates with your website, making it simple for customers and other businesses to start referring consumers back to your business.

Third-party Integration: Integration with third-party software like shopping cart tools, payment gateways, content management systems, e-commerce, and more.

Social Sharing: Integrates with major social media platforms to streamline the process of getting referrers to share your links there.

Incentives: Host contests, offer discount codes, and more through this tool to incentivize your affiliate partners to sell more. You can also provide pre-written email templates, banners, and other creative graphics to your partners to simplify the selling process on their end.

Email: Turn your on-site customer purchases and other enrollments into referral and affiliate leads. Every time a new customer provides you with their email, you can automatically sign them up to join your program. It’s then up to them to participate.

Management: All information related to affiliates and partners, referral link activity, affiliate sales, commissions paid, and more can easily be found and managed from within your administrative dashboard.

Affiliate Insights: Your affiliates also have an intuitive interface through which they can manage their profile and track sales statistics.

Affiliate Payments: Flexible affiliate payout options, including commissions (you set the rate you want to pay out) and rewards (like gift cards and coupons).

Terms of Service: It’s pay-as-you-go, so no lengthy commitments to use OmniStar’s software. Use for as long as you need it.

Support: Comprehensive support system available through online knowledgebase, live chat, phone, and email.
And much more.

Basically, OmniStar Affiliate software not only makes it easy for you to get started with affiliate marketing on your site. They also make it incredibly easy for your affiliates to sign up and start earning rewards, too.

Summary

If you’re worried about what word of mouth or online referrals may be doing to your business or if you simply want to amp up your efforts in this arena, OmniStar’s affiliate software is one worth checking out.

It’ll help you take back control over your brand’s reputation and overall trust while also helping to expand your presence online. What more could you ask for? Try OmniStar Affiliate software today.

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