In today’s landscape, the most effective marketing doesn’t come from flashy ads or forced campaigns—it comes from your audience. The feedback they give you, whether it’s a review, a comment, or a suggestion, holds the key to authentic, engaging marketing that doesn’t feel like marketing at all.
What’s the strategic edge here? Your audience feels heard. People trust their peers more than brands, and when they see their voice reflected in your content, the result is a sense of ownership and trust that no ad can buy.
Turn Customers Into Your Creative Team
We’ve all heard the phrase, “Let your customers be part of your story,” but the truth is, most brands don’t go far enough. You can’t just repost a few user photos. This tactic is all about inviting your customers to co-create with you.
Your Complete Guide to Spotify Wrapped 2023
Take Spotify’s Wrapped campaign—an annual marketing initiative that turns user listening data into shareable, personalized stories. By allowing users to share their music habits, Spotify transforms its audience into brand ambassadors, showcasing their personal connection to the platform. The impact? In 2020, Spotify Wrapped led to a 21% increase in app downloads in the first week of December. By 2022, Wrapped was shared over 100 million times on social media, and 400 million posts were made on X (formerly Twitter) in just three days following its release—a 15% increase from the previous year. Beyond the buzz, in 2023, Spotify saw a 17% increase in total engagement around the Wrapped campaign.
Here’s How You Can Apply This:
- Step 1: Create a branded hashtag that encourages your customers to share their unique experiences with your product. Make it something fun and relevant to their everyday lives, not just the brand.
- Step 2: Incentivize participation by featuring the best submissions in your next campaign. Don’t just feature images—tell the story behind the content. Why does this customer love your product? How does it fit into their life?
- Step 3: Develop a narrative around these user stories. Create video content or social media posts that blend together several stories, showcasing your customers as the heroes.
Why This Works: Customers feel a sense of pride and ownership when their content is featured, leading to higher engagement and shares. Research shows that user-generated content is 42% more effective and 6.9x more engaging than branded content because it’s more authentic and relatable.
Stop Looking for Stars, Start Looking for Stories
Reviews are often viewed as a way to manage your reputation, but they’re also an untapped treasure trove of inspiration for your next campaign. Instead of just managing the feedback, you should be analyzing it for insights—especially the unexpected comments.
Why 3-Star Reviews Actually Matter More
The most valuable insights often come from the three-star reviews. These reviews tend to offer constructive criticism or unique perspectives that you can use to differentiate your brand. Let’s say you run a fitness studio and your reviews consistently praise the quality of the workouts but mention how difficult it is to book a class.
Instead of dismissing this, use it to fuel innovation. Launch a campaign around the introduction of a new booking system. “You asked, we listened: Our new app makes booking easier than ever.”
Expert Tip:
- Gather reviews from multiple sources—social media, Google, Yelp, etc. Export them as a CSV file or copy them into a document.
- Clean up the data by removing irrelevant or spammy reviews.
- Upload the document and ask ChatGPT to extract key themes from the reviews, such as common product issues, frequent praises, or specific feature requests.
- Based on the insights from the sentiment report and AI analysis, create a list of actionable steps. For example:
- Improve: Address recurring issues that show up in negative reviews.
- Amplify: Focus on promoting what customers love by featuring it in your next campaign.
- Engage: Respond to key reviews, especially if they offer valuable feedback or contain unresolved complaints.
Ask Directly—and Build a Movement, Not Just a Poll
Sure, polls are great. But what if you treated your audience’s input as the start of a conversation, rather than just a one-time interaction?
Instead of running one-off polls, think of polling as the foundation of an ongoing series of interactions that build anticipation and excitement over time.
A restaurant chain, instead of just asking once, “What do you want our next special to be?” took it further. They turned their audience’s votes into an interactive process. After each poll, they gave sneak peeks behind the scenes of the winning recipe being developed, taste-tested, and finalized. By the time the dish launched, customers felt like co-creators.
How You Can Build This:
Run a Multi-Stage Poll Series: Start with a question, like “Which dessert should we feature this fall?” After the vote, show behind-the-scenes glimpses of development, test kitchens, or your chef’s creative process.
Build Anticipation: Share updates regularly, allowing people to follow the journey from idea to final product. Tease exclusive offers or pre-order options only for those who participated in the polls.
Follow Through: When the product finally drops, celebrate the contribution of your audience in the campaign, showing that their voices shaped the final outcome.
By integrating your audience throughout the process, you’re creating a deeper emotional investment. They’re not just clicking a button on a poll—they’re part of a narrative. Research by Sprout Social shows that 76% of people expect brands to use social media to foster engagement, not just broadcast messages. This method taps directly into that expectation.
Find Campaign Ideas in Your Comments
Comments on your social media posts aren’t just chatter—they’re mini focus groups that give you insight into what your audience really wants. The best part? You’re gathering feedback in real time without even having to ask for it.
Look for trends in the questions or suggestions your audience posts. For instance, if several followers ask about a specific product feature or request tutorials, that’s your sign to dig deeper.
When Fenty Beauty first launched its Pro Filt’r Foundation line, it made waves with its inclusive offering of 40 shades, catering to a wide range of skin tones, particularly for women of color who had long been underserved by the beauty industry. However, as the brand gained popularity, customers requested even more shades to suit their unique undertones and complexion needs. In response, Fenty Beauty didn’t just expand the foundation range—they launched 10 additional shades, bringing the total to 50. To accompany this launch, Fenty released a series of tutorials aimed directly at helping customers, especially those who had difficulty finding their perfect shade, understand the nuances of undertones and the buildability of the product.
Show that you’re acting on the feedback you get by creating content directly based on their comments, and call out the commenters in your posts. As more people see that their comments can influence your brand, the engagement snowballs. Each piece of content builds a stronger community of invested followers.
Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools in marketing. Studies show that our brains are wired to connect more deeply with narratives than with facts and figures alone. By focusing on customer stories, you not only humanize your brand but also create highly shareable content that resonates emotionally.
The secret lies in the stories, comments, and feedback your audience is already giving you. By turning their input into authentic campaigns, you’re building a community. The more you involve your audience in shaping your brand, the more invested they become.
With the right strategy your campaigns that won’t feel like marketing at all—they’ll feel like conversations, connections, and stories worth sharing.
Takeaways:
- Empower your audience to create content and become part of your brand story.
- Use reviews to uncover hidden opportunities and unmet needs.
- Turn polls into long-term engagement rather than a one-off question.
- Mine your comments for campaign inspiration and show that you’re listening.
- Tell customer stories through a visual series to build emotional connections.
Chatterkick Team
The Chatterkick team is made up of envelope-pushers, big thinkers, brainstormers, and conversation starters. We live and breathe social media advertising and all its analytics and data. We love to create engaged, happy social media communities around businesses, and we are dedicated to creating a glowing brand reputation, culture, and voice for our clients. This blog was brought to you in collaboration with multiple Chatterkick team members. Follow me on Twitter