Why do people copy a room full of strangers doing something with no explanation at all?

In this episode Alex Curtis is joined by Stephanie to talk through a classic conformity experiment filmed in an opticians' waiting room. An unsuspecting visitor sits down with a group of actors. A beep sounds, everyone stands up and sits back down, nobody speaks. By the third beep she is standing up too, with no idea why. The actors leave, she keeps standing on her own, and every new person who walks in ends up doing the same.

From there we get into what this means for mortgage brokers, protection advisers and any financial services firm trying to turn website visitors into enquiries.

What we cover:

• The experiment, step by step, and the moment she stands up alone in an empty room
• Why the brain feels resistance to being the odd one out, and why going with the flow is easier than thinking it through
• Conformity vs social proof, and why social proof beats a logical argument almost every time
• The mistake to avoid: negative social proof. Don't highlight that most people skip protection, or that most people wait for rates to fall. You are showing the crowd doing the wrong thing and the crowd is what people follow
• Staying compliant while using it. Don't invent numbers or claims, use what is genuinely true
• Why Google reviews are the strongest, cleanest form of social proof, and why we show them three or four times on a single page
• Consistency beats volume: recent, steady reviews create a chain reaction, dribs and drabs don't
• You will never convert everyone. Use these principles and you convert more than average

If you want more leads from your website and your ads, this is the mindset shift: show people what the crowd is already doing, don't try to argue them into it.

Brought to you by the team at The Lead Engine who specialise in generating mortgage leads.