The term was coined in the 1984 book Influence, in which psychologist and author Robert Cialdini defined social proof as: “The greater the number of people who find any idea correct, the more the idea will be correct.”
Many people like Bieber russian numbers because other people do. Many people like football because other people do. We are social animals and we want to fit in. We use the affirmations and interests of others to influence our own because we are short on time, we can’t analyse everything and, well, our brains are quite lazy. Luke Summerfield is a Product Go-to-Market Lead at HubSpot working in the Product Leadership Team for CMS Hub. We spoke with him to find out about how the HubSpot CMS is helping businesses to create successful websites with optimal user experiences that are in line with industry best practices and developments.
Q&A With Luke Summerfield From Hubspot: The Future of Websites
Q: HubSpot has been at the forefront of CMS technology and has made website building easier for marketers and businesses. What makes the HubSpot CMS such a stand-out in the eyes of marketers and business owners, Luke?
A: I think there are 4 unique benefits that come with the HubSpot CMS that are important to consider:
1) Businesses that succeed are the ones that create world-class, personalized experiences. In the past, it was mainly about who had the best methodology or technology but in 2021, it is about how you take methodology and technology and bring it together on behalf of your customers.
Essentially, the CRM and CMS are joined at the hip and work together to help empower marketers and businesses to create those world-class personalized experiences, in ways that are very difficult, if not impossible, in other systems.
With this in mind, the first thing that stands out about our CMS is that the system is a CRM powered CMS, meaning that all the rich customer data and interactions you have to give you a fully rounded view of who your customer is paired directly with the experiences that that customer has. This allows you to craft those experiences based on all the information that you have. So, the HubSpot CMS is designed to help you create the ideal personalized customer experience.
2) The second thing that makes the CMS so unique is that we recognized that a website should not just be a brochure, it is an asset that can help a business grow. And the CMS is designed to turn a website from a static brochure into a growth investment. The CMS comes with everything a business and marketer would need to drive business growth including SEO tools, conversion optimization tools, reporting tools, contact attribution tools (to measure ROI), etc.
3) In the past CMS’s were very difficult for marketers to “own,” they always had to work through someone to make any changes to the site. And because of this, the sites could end up becoming stale. This can quickly become an issue as marketers are at the mercy of other people and these other people can inevitably hold up sales and business growth.
What makes the CMS stand out is that it's built on SaaS infrastructure which means no one has to worry about security or updating plug-ins and you can just spend your time focusing on the customers and building those experiences without the headaches of third parties, maintenance, and security issues. The system is designed to empower marketers to get their work done, and to own the website, and have autonomy on using the website to drive better results. And this is not to say that developers aren’t a part of the process, they are absolutely important, but now the developer is able to work together with the marketing team, allowing them to edit elements together in real-time, giving the developer the opportunity to set the system up to empower the marketer.
In much the same way, our online behaviours and buying habits are almost always influenced by social proof. Amazon understands this when they make it easy for us to read the reviews of others who have bought a certain product (they also recommend sellers acquire a ‘critical mass’ of at least 25 reviews for a listing before they start scaling advertising).