Hello and welcome to a very special issue of TouchPoints! For our first four installments of 2025, I am going to collect some common themes that we saw multiple times in websites and ad copy in 2024.

These are broad strokes tips that are usually a good idea to employ. Of course, Nothing is one size fits all.

So for the month of January, our issues will be packed with lessons and examples learned from analyzing over 200 pieces of marketing collateral.

This week, we’re going to tackle a technique I saw across several companies’ ads and websites: The Power of Social Proof

The Power of Social Proof

We saw social proof play a huge role in multiple ads, emails, and landing pages we saw in 2024.

First things first: social proof is usually helpful. I often recommend for businesses of all types to have some sort of social proof in their Hero section, above the fold, to earn some trust and get viewers to scroll further.

BUT sometimes it’s not nearly as helpful as it might have been.

That’s correct, you can have bad social proof. We’re going to look at the good, the bad, and the passable examples of social proof we saw last year.

The Good: Buffer’s Social Proof Cards

In Issue 49, I reviewed Buffer’s homepage. I was pretty impressed overall, but especially with their social proof cards they managed to fit into the hero section.

Like many other elements of messaging, social proof is best when it is simple, clear, and uses visual hierarchy to convey lots of information quickly.

Buffer’s social proof cards are about perfect for this. They convey the who was using Buffer, what they used it for, and their outcomes, super quickly and clearly.

These were so good, I actually split them off and made a separate annotation just for them.

If you’re in a pinch, logos and testimonials are great. In fact, Buffer’s little cards here would not impress me as much if there weren’t also testimonials on their site.

But these cards really hit that sweet spot of information and

The Good: ActiveCampaign’s Hyper-Specific Testimonial ad

In that same issue, I looked at a Linkedin ad by ActiveCampaign. When we talk about specific testimonials, this one hits the mark.

The two paragraphs that make up the bulk of the ad image both depict very specific automation setups that people are using to up their deliverability and engagement via email.

The testimonials double as capability statements, and show a clear connection between automation (capability) and better engagement/saved time (outcome.

The Middling: Social Proof + Fluff

In Issue 45 we looked at the following ad from Supermetrics. It’s not bad, but here is the main issue: Vagueness.

It hints at an outcome (make our lives easier) and a pain point (manual reporting) but it doesn’t connect any dots there.

This is like trying to sell a fishing rod by saying:

“It makes my life easier rather than acquiring food manually”. Ideally, you’d want something more like “The self-locking line means I can reel in fish more quickly, and that’s more food in less time”.

If you’re a small company, you might be limited in terms of testimonials. I would guess Supermetrics has more specific ones than this.

Here’s a tip to get better social proof:

When you as for a testimonial, give your happy customer some prompts like:

- how did our tool change your day to day life?
- what features do you use?
- What (if any) have been the time and money savings from using our product?

Even better, you can take one like Brendon’s below, tweak it to be more specific, and send it back to the customer for approval. If they give you permission, you can use the specific one you crafted yourself.

The Bad: Extremely Vague Social Proof

I hate to be overly critical, but when I see a problem, I try to turn it into an object lesson. In Issue 54, we looked at this ad from Algolia and I found it to be a uniquely bad testimonial to use.

The point of social proof is to earn someone’s trust.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that this testimonial made me think “Wow, I cannot trust this company”. It’s lazy, and it reeks of something that was done with little or no oversight.

The testimonial which is front-and-center for the ad image, is a sentence fragment that points so vaguely at an outcome that they could be talking about anything.

They could be talking about an advent calendar or a coffee machine and you would still be able to write “The many ways I can use ___ my daily workflow”, not to mention the dozens of software categories that also fit the bill.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to extend our thanks to the following companies for providing examples and insights that made this edition of TouchPoints possible:

• Adfolio - For their awesome repository of B2B ads, with excellent commentary.

• Founderway.AI - An awesome resource that helped me better figure out how to run this newsletter, and forever friends of TouchPoints.

• Concise Copy - Pavlo is an absolute expert at homepage copy. Check out his value prop canvas for a super useful resource.

• Growth Therapy - Amanda is more B2C than me, but her insights about paid media and growth marketing are always welcome.

I sincerely appreciate these folks for providing great content and inspiration. It's great thinkers like these that allow me to deliver the best of modern SaaS marketing to you, our subscribers, every week in TouchPoints.