Introduction
Slowly but surely, marketing became a digitally driven field.
As a direct result, the connection between marketing strategies and customer reviews is more impactful than ever before.
Businesses no longer compete based solely on the quality of the products and services they provide, but they also have to pay special attention to their online presence and how they engage and resonate with their audience.
A well-crafted marketing strategy, combined with strategic social media posts, can significantly shape the narrative around a business, which points your audience to a space where they are more likely to share their opinion about your brand.
How marketing influences customer behavior
If your marketing strategy is efficient, you should see a significant growth in your customer base which should lead directly to more and better online customer reviews.
That’s exactly what poppi and Liquid Death, two of the biggest soft drinks brands with completely opposite marketing strategies, succeeded to do.
In this article, we will analyze Liquid Death’s marketing strategy and how it influenced their customer reviews. Of course, the online feedback data will be obtained from our review monitoring tool, FeedCheck.
If you’re curious about how poppi’s marketing strategy influenced their customer reviews, stay tuned for next week’s article.
Those differences suggest that the secret of success is not stealing a formula that worked for a competitor, but finding a tone of voice that resonates with your brand reputation.
At first, your audience might be more inclined to express their thoughts on your marketing campaigns and your social media posts. But this is just the top of the funnel.
As we can see from the screenshot above, an effective social media campaign will have a direct impact on the customer behavior, as the user who commented admits that they bought Liquid Death products because they liked their online presence.
Which leads us to the question…
How does your marketing strategy influence customer reviews?
In 2024, the online presence of a brand can make or break their business.
Your marketing strategy influences the quantity and quality of customer reviews by shaping public perceptions regarding the image, features and benefits of your offering.
It’s important to remember that the customer sentiment is not only dependent on the quality of your products and services.
You should use digital channels to prove to your audience that they can relate to your values and that you differentiate from your competitors not only when it comes to products and services, but also regarding principles, humor and various causes that you stand for.
A good online presence will create and consolidate a loyal customer base that will be more likely to give you positive feedback.
Also, an efficient digital marketing strategy will help you identify and address customer needs. In return, you will get helpful insights that could be used for customer service and product developments
Bonus: if there ever happens to be a mistake on your part, your audience will probably tend to be more forgiving because you constantly proved your character to them and built a personal connection through your campaigns.
How marketing strategy influence customer reviews
- Liquid Death: the “not like other water brands” strategy
Liquid Death is a canned water brand, founded in 2017 by Mike Cessario.
Their premise is to distribute a healthy beverage alternative while making sure that their products adjust to a environmentally friendly approach (e.g.: they use cans instead of plastic bottles, because aluminum is an infinitely recyclable material).
As presented above (see How marketing influences customer behavior), their marketing strategy is based on sarcasm and dark humor, which differentiates them from other competitor brands.
For example, in June 2023, Liquid Death had two simultaneous online marketing campaigns going on.
The first one was a collaboration with the American heavy metal band Metallica for a series of limited edition drinks.
The second one was a musical album launch. They produced 10 songs that featured lyrics based on negative customer reviews and social media comments received by Liquid Death over the years.
Prior to the album launch, they teased the concept with an offline campaign that featured billboards with negative customer reviews for their products from Amazon.
The results?
According to our review monitoring software, June 2023 turned out to be one of the best months for Liquid Death when it comes to Amazon customer feedback, receiving 2 times more online reviews than the month before.
If we were to introduce their online customer reviews from Amazon, Target and Walmart into FeedCheck, we would observe that (combined) they registered a significant growth in March, both 2023 and 2024.
In spring of 2023, Liquid Death went viral on Instagram for a series of funny posts that went against pretty much everything that would make a safe marketing campaign.
However, Liquid Death loves taking risks when it comes to their brand reputation.
It’s important to point out that while the main focus of these posts seems to be the humor, a clear CTA is always integrated at the end of the copy.
For example, both of the Instagram posts inserted above redirect the audience to their Amazon page, which encourages potential customers to take online shopping into consideration. In return, the brand gets to receive more online reviews, which is more difficult to achieve if their products are bought from physical stores.
It’s also important to point out that our reputation management tool shows that March 2023 registered a slight increase in the quality of the Liquid Death reviews as well. This month averaged a 4.4 star rating, while their usual score is 4.3.
The explanation for the customer reviews growth in March 2024 is simple: Liquid Death decided to take a more direct approach and simply inform their audience that their products are back in stock on Amazon.
This announcement was published after Liquid Death launched a few new water flavors and there was so much traffic on Amazon, that the platform shut down.
This marketing strategy is called “fear of missing out” (or FOMO, for short) and it is focused on making the customer feel like they have something to lose if they don’t buy your product. This tactic is usually materialized by selling a very small amount of products which are afterwards deemed as “sold out”.
For this specific case, Liquid Death got involved in an accidental FOMO strategy, but on which they knew how to capitalize.
As a result, the number of customer reviews skyrocketed. However, we must recognize that, according to FeedCheck, the star rating on Amazon for March 2024 registered a decline, the average score for this month being 3.22.
When we analyze the content of the reviews with our reputation management software, we observe that most of the 1 and 2 star ratings complain about the flavor not being intense enough or the cans arriving dented to the customer.
Starting with April 2024, their average ratings got better and better every month. At the time of writing this article (June 2024), their average score on Amazon is 4.03.
How to efficiently handle review management
Ratings are quick-to-analyze metrics that give us just a peek to the customer sentiment regarding our offerings.
If you want to manage online reviews more effectively, the next step is to look at the content of the written reviews in more detail. You can do that by uploading your product reviews on the FeedCheck platform, which will do the analysis for you based on dozens of criteria, like the frequency of a specific word used by reviewers or the (positive or negative) context where it appeared.
If you think FeedCheck fits your review management needs, don’t hesitate to request a personalized demo for our reputation management tool.
By using the Trending topics tool in FeedCheck (you can see more about how it works in our article about how the Stanley cup became a 1-star rated product) we discovered that the most frequently used words in the customer reviews for Liquid Death products are “flavor” and “water”.
To observe the customer sentiment regarding those 2 key drivers (or any other key driver that you’re interested in), you can use the FeedCheck feature that summarizes the context where those words were utilized in the online reviews.
When measuring customer sentiment, FeedCheck uses a -1/1 scale that indicates the way your customers feel about a certain feature of your product based on objective metrics, such as the star rating that comes with the analyzed feedback and the sentiment of the other words that the analyzed key driver is associated with.
For example, as seen in the graphic above, the customer sentiment regarding the key drivers “flavor” and “water” is on the positive side of the scale, which means that these 2 words were mostly used by satisfied customers of Liquid Death.
However, their sentiment rates didn’t reach the maximum score possible (both of the key drivers are below 0.5, the best score possible being 1), which means that the words were used in a few negative customer reviews as well.
To get more insights into the manner in which a term was used in customer reviews, you can use the Topic explorer feature on FeedCheck. This tool summarizes the reviews where the analyzed key driver can be found and gives you a wider perspective on the customer sentiment related to specific aspects of your products.
Conclusions
A well-crafted marketing strategy is instrumental in shaping and enhancing customer reviews.
By focusing on understanding customer needs, delivering consistent and high-quality experiences, and fostering strong relationships, businesses can significantly influence the feedback they receive.
To keep up with review management after implementing an efficient marketing strategy and receiving more customer feedback, contact FeedCheck or get a personalized demo.