If I had to boil down my entire job as a marketer into one sentence, it’d be this: I listen to customers and then build campaigns that sound like them.
Voice of customer (VOC) isn’t just a tactic. It’s the strategy. It’s the thing AI can’t fake, dashboards can’t predict, and competitors can’t steal. It’s also where all my best ideas come from.
Here are 10 detailed ways I collect, activate, and scale the voice of a customer across everything I do.
When I joined ContactMonkey, the very first thing I did wasn’t digging into attribution models or revamping landing pages. It was scheduling as many customer and prospect conversations as I could fit into my calendar.
I even made it part of my official 30-60-90 plan.
In those early weeks when your brain is still fresh and your to-do list is short, there’s nothing more valuable than hearing firsthand what people love, hate, and don’t understand about your product or category.
One of my favorite moves?
Posting on LinkedIn asking if anyone in my network is willing to get on a quick call. In this case, I posted asking if anyone in my network owns internal comms and would be willing to chat (our ICP at ContactMonkey).
I offered to buy them a coffee in exchange for a chat (no sales pitch).
I got 12+ responses. If you don’t have a network in your space yet, no problem.
Shadow your CS or AM teams. Listen to support calls. It’s not about volume, it’s about patterns.
When I start hearing the same pain points and language again and again, that’s when I know I’ve struck gold.
Years ago at Chili Piper, we ran one of our most successful landing page tests using a stat pulled directly from a customer.
The control copy said “Double your meetings”. A nice round promise. The variation said “Book 48% more meetings”. Not as flashy, but 100% real results from a real customer.
And it crushed. Why?
Because people can smell BS. “Double” sounds too good to be true.
But “48%” feels like someone actually ran the numbers. The same logic applied to our newsletter sign-up. We swapped “Join 15k+ marketers” for the actual number, like “14,889 marketers”, and updated it monthly. Way better engagement.
I’ve learned that authenticity beats hyperbole every single time.
Whether it’s landing pages, ads, or CTAs, I always ask: can I anchor this in a real result? If I can, that’s the copy I go with.
Most marketers want more testimonials. But very few make it easy for customers to give them.
That’s where tools like testimonial.io come in. At Chili Piper, we used it to collect both video and text testimonials at scale.
What I loved is that it wasn’t just a form. It created a nice-looking landing page where we could showcase quotes, filter by industry or persona, and make it dead simple for sales to grab proof on demand.
We even layered in rewards: For example, $10 for a written review, $20 for a video.
It made the process feel fun, not transactional. If you don’t have the budget for a tool, you can still make this work with forms and folders. It just requires more manual work.
But either way, the key is removing friction. Make it easy, incentivize smartly, and watch the social proof roll in.
I used to be hesitant about asking happy customers for quotes or reviews. It felt too much like asking someone who’s already paying us for more favors.
Now I’ve learned that timing is everything and when you get it right, people are actually eager to help.
At Chili Piper (and coming soon to ContactMonkey!), we built simple workflows around high-NPS scores.
If someone gave us a 9 or 10, they’d get an email asking if they’d share a quick testimonial (with an incentive if we needed it). Renewal time is another great moment. If the CSM is having a positive QBR, that’s your window.
And if you have an in-app experience, even better. Prompt people when they’ve just hit a milestone or seen a big win.
These are the moments when they’re feeling the value and that’s when you should make the ask. Not months later in a generic email blast.
If your sales team uses Gong, Clari, or any call recording tool, you’re sitting on a goldmine of unfiltered customer language.
At Chili Piper, I set up custom alerts for keywords like “love this,” “so helpful,” or “amazing”.
Whenever a prospect or customer said something positive, I’d get an alert. Sometimes we’d clip those and turn them into ads. Other times we’d just use them for internal messaging work.
At ContactMonkey, I’ve taken it further. I created an alert for the word “chaos” because we were testing a new homepage copy around that theme.
Now I can see in real time if that word is spiking in conversations. It’s like a heartbeat monitor for customer sentiment.
Pro tip: Make sure your alerts only track customer speech, not your reps. Otherwise, you’ll get a lot of noise. This is one of the lowest-lift, highest-impact VOC tactics I’ve ever used.
In one of my previous companies, we ran a bunch of Facebook ads targeting college professors. We tested beautifully lit, high-production images.
We even went to a local university campus and took our own photos.
But the creative that won?
A grainy, dimly lit shot of a real professor with a projector half-illuminating his face. It looked like a scene from a low-budget documentary and it worked like magic.
Why?
Because it was instantly recognizable to our audience. They saw themselves in that ad. That lesson stuck with me.
I now prioritize real customer images (with permission, of course) over generic visuals, especially on social platforms like LinkedIn.
Even if the photo isn’t perfect, the context is. It builds trust faster than any stock model with a laptop ever could.
One of the most underrated ways to capture and activate the voice of a customer is through small, curated in-person dinners.
At Chili Piper, we’d pick anchor events, like INBOUND or SaaStr, and then build a dinner party around them. We invited a mix of customers and high-fit prospects. No pitch. Just dinner.
But the magic was in the seating chart.
When a prospect ends up next to a customer, the VOC starts flowing naturally. It’s not a case study. It’s a conversation. And it’s way more persuasive than sitting them beside someone from your sales team.
These dinners don’t have to break the bank. We’d partner with other Martech brands targeting the same ICP, split the cost, and divide the invite list. We typically budgeted around $200 per head depending on the city (this can vary wildly).
But if you can’t swing a dinner? Start by gifting tickets to customers so they can attend the event. That alone builds goodwill and puts your brand top of mind.
One of my favorite VOC plays was when we ran a billboard that was not about us, but celebrating our customers.
People took selfies with it. It created a moment.
You can apply the same principle with award nominations, speaking opportunities, or simply amplifying your customers’ successes.
These aren’t transactional gestures. I don’t do them expecting a quote or post in return. I do them because they’re the right thing to do.
People remember how you made them feel. When you make your customers feel seen and valued, they’re more likely to become your advocates.
Reciprocity is real but only when it’s authentic. Whether it’s putting them on stage, giving them swag, or celebrating their wins, this kind of VOC is quiet but powerful.
Once you start collecting VOC, don’t let it sit in Notion or your testimonial page. Use it. In your retargeting campaigns especially.
At Chili Piper we ran video snippets from customer calls as YouTube pre-roll. We sliced a single testimonial video into six different LinkedIn ads. We even ran static image ads that are just screenshots of nice LinkedIn posts or tweets.
If someone says something amazing about you on LinkedIn, screenshot it and run it as an ad. That’s what I used to do before Thought Leader ads were even a thing.
Don’t worry about fancy production. Don’t wait until you have a full video library. Start with what you have.
Voice of the customer doesn’t always need tons of polish. It needs visibility.
This one is super meta, but wildly effective.
If a customer writes a post about your event, product, or company, don’t just repost it from your brand page.
With LinkedIn’s Thought Leader ad type, you can run their post as an ad from their account. It’s voice of customer, directly from the customer’s mouth.
Chili Piper is doing this with people who attended their ChiliPalooza event. They encouraged them to post their takeaways, then promoted those posts with paid. I haven’t tested it yet at ContactMonkey, but it’s high on my list.
It’s a modern version of influencer marketing, except the influencer is your actual user. Just make sure they’re comfortable with it, and always get consent.
Bonus: If you can’t run it as an ad, screenshot it and use it in your retargeting. It still works.
The voice of the customer isn’t a box I check. It’s the lens I try to apply to everything I do, from homepage headlines to how I design event experiences.
Because at the end of the day, no copy I write will ever be more compelling than something a real customer says when they don’t know they’re being marketed to.
That’s the voice that cuts through the noise.
Hope you found this article helpful!
If you’re looking to pick up an advertising course, check out these free courses that will teach you how to launch, optimize, and scale ad campaigns effectively.
And if you have any questions about using the voice of the customer in your campaigns, feel free to send me a message on LinkedIn, I love connecting with fellow marketers!
One of the most overlooked but crucial aspects of running a successful Google Ads campaign is our naming conventions.
I’ve worked with countless clients optimizing their ad performance, and I can tell you that this is the one thing that makes everything easier — or breaks everything.
A naming convention is the process I follow repeatedly when naming my campaigns.
And from my experience, having a consistent and logical naming convention is essential for my organization and productivity when managing them.
A messy campaign structure makes performance tracking, reporting, and optimization significantly harder.
I feel like trying to find something in a cluttered room — wasting my time and effort. And it can be even worse.
Think about this like sharing a room with a messy roommate. If everything is disorganized, I’ll struggle to find what I need, and so will anyone else trying to help me. But if everything has a place, everything is easier to manage.
A strong naming convention ensures that I, my team, and my tools can quickly understand and filter campaigns without unnecessary frustration.
Here’s my recommendation to create a naming convention that makes everything easier, based on tests on my campaigns:
Replace spaces with an underscore ( _ ).
Connect words with a hyphen (-).
This structure allows us to quickly filter and analyze data in Excel, Google Ads, or any reporting tool.
I came up with some examples of how to apply naming conventions to your campaigns:
A campaign targeting North America, focused on non-brand searches in English, using exact match keywords, and targeting all devices would be named: NA_NonBrand_Search_EN_Exact_AllDevices
A campaign targeting Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, focused on content searches in English, using phrase match keywords, and targeting only mobile would be named: EMEA_Content_Search_EN_Phrase_Mobile
A campaign that targets the Asia-Pacific region, focused on brand searches in English, using phrase match keywords, targeting desktops would be named: APAC_Brand_Search_EN_Phrase_Desktop
A campaign targeting North America, focused on competitive searches in English, using phrase match keywords, targeting desktops would be named: NA_Competitive_Search_EN_Phrase_Desktop
And finally, a campaign targeting Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, focused on RLSA searches in English, using broad match keywords, targeting all devices would be named: EMEA_RLSA_Search_EN_Broad_All-Devices
A well-structured naming convention helps in three major ways:
Absolutely!
Naming our campaigns the same across all platforms helps us maintain consistency, simplify analysis, and easily compare performance across different channels when reporting on your overall campaign results.
Please notice that slight platform-specific details might need to be added to the campaign name to account for unique targeting options or features on each platform, but as a whole, having consistent names allows us to easily group data and compare results without confusion.
A good naming convention costs you nothing — but the benefits are enormous.
Get it right, and you’ll make everything in your Google Ads campaigns easier to manage, optimize, and scale.
So don’t wait. Go set up your naming convention and start running smarter campaigns!
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I’ve spent a lot of time wrestling with tracking form submissions in Google Tag Manager (GTM), and I know how frustrating it can be when things just don’t work as expected.
Forms behave in all sorts of unpredictable ways. Some refresh the page, some stay put, and others redirect users to a "Thank You" page.
And because there’s no universal rule for how developers build forms, you and I need different tracking approaches depending on the situation.
And since chances are you’re using form submission to also track how your Google ad campaigns are converting, it becomes super critical for us to get this right.
That’s why in this guide, I’ll break down the most effective ways to track form submissions, step by step, so you don’t have to figure it all out the hard way like I did.
Before we dive into the methods, let’s quickly cover the basics. GTM relies on two key components:
To track form submissions properly, you need:
At this point, the tag exists but doesn’t do anything because there’s no trigger.
Now, let’s set that up based on how your form behaves.
In an ideal world, GTM’s built-in Form Submission trigger would work for every form.
But in my experience, it rarely does. This trigger only works if the form fires a native submit event, which many modern forms (especially AJAX-based ones) don’t.
If your form redirects users to a confirmation page after submission, this is the easiest and most reliable tracking method.
The one mistake I see folks repeat often is they link to this thank you or add it in your sitemap.
The way this method works is it sends an event every time this page is loaded.
So you want to double check to ensure that people don’t land on this page through other sources.
This method is foolproof as long as users can’t access the "Thank You" page without actually submitting the form.
If you have multiple forms on your website, tracking just a generic "form submission" event isn’t enough.
You need to capture more details that help differentiate between each form submission, such as:
If you want to use this data in GA4 reports, you’ll need to register it as a Custom Dimension:
By implementing this setup, you ensure that every form submission is attributed to the right form, providing clearer insights into form performance, lead quality, and conversion attribution.
Form submission is just one step in the buyer’s journey.
To truly track and optimize for conversions, map the entire journey. Start from initial engagement to the final revenue event, and track each step.
By tracking and feeding all these data points back into ad networks, you help the algorithm prioritize high-intent users.
Here’s an example of how the buyer journey might look like:
Sales-led Company:
Product-led Company:
We covered how to set it up in detail in this free Google Ads course, which also walks you through full-funnel tracking and measurement strategies.
The right tracking method depends on how your form behaves:
Test everything thoroughly in Preview Mode to ensure you’re capturing data correctly.
I’ve been through enough form tracking struggles to know that what works on one site may completely fail on another.
Hopefully, this guide saves you a lot of time and frustration!
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The community is where you can ask the questions you wouldn’t post on LinkedIn and get insights that you wouldn’t find on Google.
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