Your best salespeople don't work for you
Your CEO wants more sales, your ad costs are about to hit their Black Friday peak, and every new campaign starts with the same question: what do we say this time? So you brief another round of creative, test a few angles, and hope one of them makes a stranger stop scrolling and buy.
What if I told you your next best ad is already sitting in your community? Right now, in Reddit threads, reviews, comments, and DMs, your customers are telling each other what made them buy, what nearly stopped them, and what they’d say to a friend, and those are the exact words it needs.
So before you brief another round of creative, let your best salespeople help you write it. Your customers have already made the decision you’re trying to win, they either bought or they didn’t, and they’ll tell you exactly why, which to me is a better brief than anything your team can come up with in a meeting room. When one online course company rewrote its homepage headline using the exact words its customers gave in surveys, its course conversions went up 9.2% in three weeks. Now imagine what that could do for your brand, when your customers are already posting that language for free.
Dove let its customers write the ads
Dove did exactly this with its new hair mask. It listened for what customers really thought, found a conversation on Reddit where people were already sharing honest results nobody had asked for, and turned that sentiment into its campaign. It invited Redditors to try the mask, promised to publish the first 50 reviews exactly as written, good and bad, and put all 50 on billboards across New York City and all over social, and the campaign drove more than 1 billion impressions. I love this, because Dove didn’t have to guess what would convince people. Its customers told them, and a real person’s review does the convincing your ad can’t. See how Dove turned 50 reviews into a campaign →
How to let your best salespeople brief your next ad
Step 1 · Listen: Look past your notifications. The most honest conversations about your brand are the ones you weren’t tagged in, so search Reddit, your reviews, and the comments on other people’s posts for what customers really think.
Step 2 · Copy: Copy their exact words. Write down the reasons people give for buying, the doubts they had first, and the lines they use when they recommend you. That’s your brief, already written in your customers’ language.
Step 3 · Feature: Give them a stage. Ask the customers who keep showing up if you can feature them. Then use their words and stories in your ads, emails, and product pages, and test them against what your team wrote.
And you can start this week. The Ecommerce Olympics, Black Friday through Cyber Monday, kick off on November 27, and your BFCM creative is probably being briefed right now, so pull three lines your customers keep using, put them in your ads next to what your team wrote, and let the results decide before you’re paying peak prices for the same attention. When someone asks why your Black Friday creative should work, you’ll have an answer, because your customers wrote it.
Giving your best salespeople a stage is the third of the three signs in our free guide, Community Is the New Funnel, and the guide shows you where to start.
Sources
- Barfoot, E. (2026). “How Dove turned Reddit’s unfiltered honesty into unmissable marketing”. unilever.com
- Havice, J. (2024). “How to use voice of customer research to boost conversions”. cxl.com
