Ep. 41 The Circus, Social Proof and Raising Your Prices

Have you noticed there are companies that have hundreds of reviews, where others in the same industry have only a handful? It’s not by accident. Torie Mathis and her cohost Sean talk about the importance of social proof and how to create the processes to skyrocket your business.

Imagine more clients, more reviews, and the ability to raise your prices with just a few simple steps.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION –

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SAF 41

[00:00:00] Torie: Even my favorite Mexican food. I haven’t reviewed them. I probably should because I love them. 

[00:00:05] Sean: But I guarantee you would though if on their menu it said, leave us a review. 

[00:00:12] Torie: Give me free guac.

Hey, welcome to Smart AF I’m your host Torie Mathis we’ve got a great show for you today. So let’s get started. Bella and I went to the circus and when we went in, the announcer guy said, Take as many pictures as you want, take as many video as you want, just be sure to share them and put them on social media and tag us.

And I thought that was the greatest thing. So many places do not let you take photos and videos, which I can understand, like, especially with like performers and stuff like that, that people are like flashing and stuff like that. Then that could be, you know, a little bit annoying or unsafe. Like that’s not cool.

But if you are going to let people take photos at your event, at your museum, right? Tell them they can and then tell them to share it and tag them. Like I thought that was so smart because social proof is so super important for businesses. 

[00:01:23] Sean: And that compound effect of the circuit. Trying to share pictures of themselves and having, you know, X amount of reach versus all these people coming and then sharing to all their people and tagging the circus as if they shared it themselves.

It’s huge, especially like people are doing, they’re going to take those videos and photos anyways. So, but then they’re like, they’re not allowed to, so what do they do to kid? Because then you’re going to wind up. They’re like, well, I don’t want to tag them. Cause they’re going to be like, take that down or Sue or whatever the case may be, where in this case they were like, just tag us so that people can link back and go, like, I want to go see that in person.

Like most things like video and photos down to a justice. Right. So you want to, you want to go experience it live? 

[00:02:15] Torie: Yeah. If you saw the pictures that we took or the videos that Bella check from the circus, it’s not like, you’d be like, man, I saw those videos. I’m cool. I don’t need to go like you, it would make you want to go. To experience at all, not the opposite. 

[00:02:26] Sean: That simple tag allows people to then at least have an opportunity to click a link that takes them to where that circus is you know, like who, who it is, how, how can they go then more about that circus. Whereas if they didn’t tag them and they just shared it and they’re like, oh, that’s cool, but who is it?

[00:02:48] Torie: Right. So if you tag them on Facebook and then you click the tag, then it goes to their Facebook page. If you’re on Instagram and you, you know, it’s the same thing, then you go, oh, you see all their pictures or all their tags. Like it’s building your own little army of marketers out there for you. Cause they’re promoting your business for you when, when you do get to.

Yeah, I went to that. I don’t know if you remember when I went to that Tony Robbins event, that Gary Vaynerchuk, Tony Robbins event that I went to Atlanta for and they, I don’t remember exactly what the policy was, but I know one time I got told, knock it off. People were trying to take, like, you could take a quick picture, but I don’t think you were supposed to take a video.

And I got one of those, like, like they didn’t want you to take anything from it. And I think in that kind of sense to me, If they would have been more forthcoming for it and got people to tag because that event, whatever that event was, comes around all over the place. And if you’ve got people to tag them, then when it came around to your town, you’re like, oh, Torie went to that and she’s shared that video clip and it looked awesome.

I want to go, like instead I got some look I don’t think I really shared very much from it because it wasn’t. Like, they kind of missed out. I mean, I it’s Tony Robbins and Gary Vaynerchuk. Maybe you don’t really need that much, but still it would have been good to put that social proof out there for those things.

And, and don’t tell your people not to take pictures, encourage it. 

[00:04:12] Sean: I get asked all the time at the museum. Hey, can I take pictures in here? And I’m always like, absolutely. And it changes so often and there that it’s, it’s really neat for me even to go back and see all the different pictures that people have taken and see how much it’s changed. And again, you know, you can see all kinds of cars and neat stuff online, but it’s, it’s actually going there. That’s the experience. So I’d rather have somebody take a bunch of pictures, tagged the museum, share it with their friends and then have their friends go. We should go there. 

[00:04:45] Torie: Right? Right. I think that’s more likely I’ve seen a million pictures of the grand canyon.

[00:04:50] Sean: Nothing will go there. 

[00:04:54] Torie: Oh my gosh. When we came over the hill and there was the grand canyon, like it’s, it’s not the same. So you’re not taking away anything from, you know, having people share pictures of whatever your, your business or your event is. Giving people that opportunity is super awesome. And that’s the same with reviews.

Like you really have to ask for reviews or people probably aren’t going to review you and they might just give you a bad review. Like people review bad stuff. 

[00:05:22] Sean: And they’re more likely to review something. And that was that negative experience then that was great. I’m going to make sure I go give them a positive.

[00:05:31] Torie: Yeah. Even my favorite Mexican food. I haven’t reviewed them. I probably should because I love. But I didn’t. 

[00:05:37] Sean: I guarantee you would though, if on their menu it said, leave us a review and get free. 

[00:05:44] Torie: Give me free guac. 

[00:05:47] Sean: Even if it was like a free drink or something that we wouldn’t normally, like, it just gives you a reason.

Some people need a little bit of encouragement to do things that. 

[00:05:58] Torie: The best way to do it. And the circus did not do this and they should have. Italia listen up. Okay. I took Riley and Bella tree climbing for Riley’s birthday. The kids had done it before. They had a great time. I was like, I am, I am going to do that too, because I didn’t realize how cool it was going to be.

So we did a day of tree climbing where you’re in a harness and you actually use ropes to climb up the tree and you can like jump off the tree and swinging. It was amazing that I don’t know if it was that day or the next day I got an email and because I registered for three of us, I got three emails to review the event immediately.

Like they had it built into their process, so well, and I had the best time. It was soon enough. I remember the instructors names. And so I was able to, you know, say nice things about them by name I had just got back. So I was still excited about it. And for them to have built that into their process was like the greatest thing.

[00:06:57] Sean: And then that business probably has a ton of reviews. Right? 

[00:07:02] Torie: Oh, I’m sure. 

[00:07:02] Sean: And it’s because of that. So you could probably look at any business that has just a ton of positive reviews and I buy something from them and S and see what their system is. I guarantee they’re asking for those. Cause there’s even like Amazon products that have 10,000 reviews. Like people didn’t just do that. 

[00:07:25] Torie: No, they were either incentivized or that company has a super processed for sending an email out in order to collect that review, like that’s how these companies get it. 

[00:07:36] Sean: I’ve ordered stuff from Amazon specifically, and there’s like a card inside. It says to leave a review or we’ve had headphones and they’re like, you want another set of headphones?

[00:07:47] Torie: Just leave us a review. We’ll give you the set of headphones. And just all you have to do is leave us an honest review. And I did, I took pictures. I, and I never do that for anybody else, but I liked them already. So of course, I’ll get another pair and review it. 

[00:08:01] Sean: I would have done it on your own, especially to go take pictures. We don’t have time for that. 

[00:08:08] Torie: It’s obviously not a priority for me to go and review every single product I get. But if you ask me, like, I definitely am going to do it. Especially if I had a really good time, like the tree climbing, we have some new HVAC companies that we work with that have recently started their business.

And so we’ve been trying to work on getting it so that they have a system to get reviews because HVAC is incredibly competitive. So the more reviews and the more social proof you have on Google, definitely the better it’s going to get. And man, some of these companies have so many and you know what else? I bet they have. Process to get reviews. Like you gotta figure it out. It’s yeah. 

[00:08:54] Sean: There’s no way that many people are just going on their own and leaving positive reviews. There’s no way it just does. It doesn’t happen that even all the clients that we have that have had no reviews and we’re like, you need to get reviews to even be shown any reviews, like if you need to get at least five on Google, right? Like they had to go ask for those and they, they’re not like, well, I’ll give it a, you know, then a few years pass, maybe a couple of random people will leave reviews. It’s like, no. Now go start asking, go backwards to clients that you’ve worked with and ask them to leave a review.

I mean, depending on what industry, think of an incentive, like anything. Just ask. I mean, a lot of times people don’t, they don’t even need anything really. They just, it’s not top of mind. That’s not what they’re thinking of doing unless you piss them off and then they want to move it. 

[00:09:55] Torie: They’ll be quick to leave a bad review. 

[00:09:58] Sean: And the bad reviews are inevitable. At some point, somebody is going to leave a bad review. I mean, it’s just, it’s going to happen and it could be an employee. It could be anything. All you can do is respond to it and make sure you have a lot more positive reviews. 

[00:10:15] Torie: Well, you know, thinking of the circus, who said, Hey, tag us, Hey, you know, do all these things though. They may not have had reviews. If you did see a bad review for them, but you search them, you would see all of these people. Like this was great. Here’s my pictures. Here’s my video. Here’s my like social proof, social proof, social proof. 

[00:10:32] Sean: I see those, like when there’s that many. Obviously like they’re real positive reviews, not generic, like spammy, fake bot type reviews.

[00:10:45] Torie: That’s great. 

[00:10:46] Sean: Yeah. Like, but then I see that one where like, they were awful. This place is shit. And I’m like, they’re disgruntled angry people and I’m not listening to anything that one review says because. It’s not the majority. Like they could have had an awful day already. They could just be a miserable person. And all they do is leave negative reviews everywhere, you know? So like that’s not going to give me any kind of feedback on what I’m going into.

[00:11:21] Torie: So setting up a process for anybody’s reviews, isn’t that hard, you can use something like Kartra like, we use that for a lot of our clients. We use that for ourselves. And that way, once you get, like, once that client is done and you collect, you know, you have their email address. So you know that you can, you know, cause you’re collecting email addresses for every single customer.

Right, right. You would just put them into the process. Like an email sequence that would automatically send them out an email and then direct them where to go to leave the review because that’s another thing you can’t just go leave us a review. 

[00:11:54] Sean: We talked to Google, Facebook, TripAdvisor.

[00:11:58] Torie: We talked about this before with people updating their social media with like their Facebook. And they’re leaving, like doing a post that says, Hey, if you haven’t already leave us a review and then there’s no link. Where would you like me to put this review? Do you want me to write them a letter? You have to be very specific, like write me a review on Google, click here to do it. You know, you, you need to be specific so that people so that it’s easy for people. 

[00:12:24] Sean: And usually all the places that you want a specific review, like there’s a. Let’s go find a URL link for it and give that so that when somebody clicks it, it goes straight to the page where they, that there’s no other place. They have to go there right there, where they needed to be, to give whatever star rating and description they may need. 

[00:12:43] Torie: So if you need reviews on Yelp, send them the link, not like the Yelp don’t go yelp.com and send them directly to where to leave the review. Right. If you need them on Google, And you can do different campaigns that maybe like this month, we’re working on Yelp and this month we’re working on Google and this month we’re working on. So you, you get them a little bit around, cause you don’t really want to ask the same exact person.

Now, can you do it here? Now can you do it here? You got to kind of stagger it maybe a little bit though. We have done for clients. We’ve talked about this before the dentists did this and it worked very, very well that they had a campaign that they did and we did an email campaign and then we did it also on Facebook where, and it would have been really great actual mail, like snail mail out because they have our everybody’s addresses already. So they sent out emails and posted on Facebook to go and leave them a review and to leave them a review on Facebook, Google and I don’t remember where the other one was, but however many reviews you left, you got an entry into winning this fancy toothbrush.

So are they incentivized to just like the headphones like that? They were sending free headphones to everybody for review. They incentivize them by having some type of drawing for like a $300 toothbrush. And within a short period of time, A whole bunch of reviews for that. So that’s a really great way that if you don’t have reviews and you need to go back and get your old clients, hopefully you have their email address, their contact information.

Maybe you have a lot of followers on your social media. That’s the way that you can go back and get reviews from them. But going forward, like you need a process. You need to put it into process. 

[00:14:17] Sean: Automate it. You know, if you want to spend the time to go out there and hunt each one down one by one, like that’s great. But in general, you should just automate some sort of process that you don’t even think about it. And then emails come in and said, Hey, you got to review. Hopefully they’re good, you know. 

[00:14:37] Torie: But there’s a lot bigger chance that they will be good if you have a process to add and reviews. 

[00:14:44] Sean: I mean, really the volume-based again, like people are looking for those big numbers, you know, do you have five reviews or do you have 5,000 reviews like.

[00:14:54] Torie: And going and looking for the HVAC company and one HVAC company has 800 reviews and one has seven. I might go with the 801. 

[00:15:02] Sean: Like they got something to lose is how I’ve always. Kind of looked at things. I want somebody who has a reputation. Yeah. 

[00:15:09] Torie: So if you’re the one with seven, like you may have to hustle, hustle a little bit for awhile because that’s what that other company did to get all those. They hustled, they had a process, they did what they had to do to build that up one by one.

Just like you can do. 

[00:15:22] Sean: It’s going to take some time. But you gotta do it even in the museum. Like I, I focus on tripAdvisor reviews because it’s a museum and TripAdvisor has a lot of stuff built in already. So like, if you are looking at Clarksville, Georgia, for instance, where Miles Through Time is you, and you’d be able to see like the top, all the different things you could do in and around Clarksville say you did nothing, but you were logged into your account looking at that stuff, TripAdvisor is going to automatically email out to people. Saying, Hey, are you still interested in visiting Clarksville? Here’s the top five or six things you could go see and do in that area? Well, if I’ve got enough reviews, I’m in that top list that I’m automatically getting sent to all these people.

Free advertising, essentially. So, and then when people are looking at things to do, you know, someplace, that’s got once one star or one review or whatever versus a place that’s got a ton of reviews and they’re all like, Hey, this is the place you need to go. That’s like, it’s just going to keep going. Like once you get it going, it’s going to keep going because people are going to keep noticing it and going, yeah. 

[00:16:37] Torie: And then once you get those reviews, you can use them in other things that you do to, you know, I hear people all the time say like, I don’t want to get reviews on Yelp because I don’t like Yelp. Well, it doesn’t matter that you don’t like Yelp, like customers like it. I think a lot of those review sites have those top 10, or like you said, the TripAdvisor that has those top five. So any of those things that you can get reviews on, like you, you should probably know what your clients go to because everybody’s looking at reviews.

So like for Sean and the museum, he knows that people go and look at TripAdvisor reviews or they’re going on there to look for things and then, you know, reference the reviews. If you’re a restaurant like TripAdvisor, Yelp, like that’s where people are going to go. So wherever you are. Customers are at getting their reviews and getting their information, like that’s where you want to go. And most people like if you have clients that are over 35, like Facebook is always like a really great place to go and get people to leave reviews because people are going to look on. Or Facebook is a great place so is Instagram to get tagged just like the like Sean’s museum, just like the circus, just like Tony Robbins and Gary V could have done, you know, and have people tag you so that when people go and look for you, they can see all those tags and whatever those people tagged you as, which is where you’re going to get like videos and pictures and things like that.

You know, maybe the tree climbing thing someplace, that’s something they could have done to take it a little bit further is, Hey you know, everybody’s taking pictures and videos already hae tagged us on there. And, you know, share it to social media, but you got to encourage people yet tell them, you know, what to do. And that way more people know about it because the more people that know about your business, the more people you have that will buy from you, the more people that will go to the circus, the more people that could go to tree climbing, you might say, well, you know, tree climbing can only be 12 people at a time.

Well, they charge, you know, $45 to do it. If only 12 people can do it. Well, now you can charge 50. Or 65 because there’s more of a demand for it. That’s how that works. And the more people know, and the more people really want to do it because they’re excited because they saw all these other people doing it more, or you can charge for it. That’s a really great way that you can raise your prices. Like just by getting more reviews, just by getting tagged or, you know, they open up another day, they’re able to do it, you know, a couple more days a month or, you know, whatever the thing is. And that is a great way to grow your business. Social proof is, is amazing.

And I think some people maybe dismiss it or just don’t understand the importance of it, but the psychology behind buying and the psychology of, of wanting to do what other people have done is, is huge. Yeah. That’s why people, like, if you think about like cruises and stuff like that, that’s why they have videos and they have pictures of people in them, because then you see those people and you want to be like that and you want to go to those places if they just showed you the boat, you know, and they just showed you the places it’s like psychologically, it’s not the same.

[00:19:30] Sean: And it’s like, when you first get off and get on there, and then they take your photo and stuff in front of some background, and then they sell you the photo at the end, you know, it’s another, it’s another opportunity for them to that now, now it’s like a digital thing like that you could, you’d be able to share it, but back in the day, like that picture, you know, that you frame and stuck on your mantle was, was that, that was the old school review, right.

That was like, oh, you went there. I want to do that. But without that picture that they took that says, you know, whatever Carnival Cruise Line or something that that’s on there, like they, they may have never entered their mind. That’s just thinking outside the box on that kind of stuff. Okay. 

[00:20:13] Torie: Any way you can build social proof into your processes already. Because just like I say, like, people want to buy, well, people want to share too. They want to share their pictures. They want to share videos. They want to share their experiences with their friends, with their family. They want to brag a little bit. They want to say, this is my favorite Mexican food restaurant.

And you should go there, they get lunch specials all the time. 

[00:20:34] Sean: Right. 

[00:20:35] Torie: So there’s a way that everybody can do that. I think that’s pretty cool. So if you liked this episode, Hey, why don’t you subscribe to our channel? Why don’t you subscribe to the podcast and maybe, you know, somebody that might like this, share this with them and give us a like.

We’d appreciate it. 

[00:20:53] Sean: Leave a review. 

[00:20:54] Torie: That’d be great too. We’ll see you next time.

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