What is Crowd Marketing?

Crowd marketing is a means to connect with your target audience and help your product directly by using industry specific forums and social media networks. This includes a marketer being engaged in natural conversations about the unique value offering of the company. You can use crowd marketing to get leads, get people to refer you, build your brand’s recognition, improve your SEO and get more traffic.

How does crowd marketing work?

In order to use crowd marketing, marketers should first develop a strategy, decide what they want to say to their target group, and choose the right channels. Good sites should be of these and people should be able to comment in. Important are review sites, forums, blogs, social media sites, question and answer services, etc. Brand reps come up with a plan, pick the platform and then talk to people on industry specific forums, review websites and social media to promote a product. They participate in conversations about their brands and discuss what the company has to offer.

However, businesses in forums and review sites currently discuss what makes their goods unique. These platforms are open to a lot of people and brands can reach their target groups and other people who might be interested in buying from them. This is how brand representatives are trying to create a good first impression and make people interested in a product, raise the brand awareness and bring more people to the website. Brands get a wider base and bring about more customers.

After you know how crowd marketing works, let’s discuss the benefits you can get from using it.

Benefits of Crowd Marketing

Crowd marketing is useful for both big and small businesses to get a lot of people interested in their new products or products lines. Posting reviews on websites, marketing comments and content on forums help brands to gain authority and trustworthiness and keep their name familiar. With crowd marketing methods, people have a chance to get people to stick with them. It is a low-cost marketing way for the companies to raise awareness of their brands.

An already developed brand is more likely to come to people’s minds when they think about a brand. When they go to your business website, they want to know more about your brand and a product that was mentioned on a forum, review site, social media network, etc.

It is a great way to get the people interested in your business through crowd marketing. It allows marketers to directly talk to leads, send the right message, explain how a product will help people, share their experience and back up their point of view. User reviews, comments and impressions get users to interact with the brand, leaving brand representatives to leave their reviews, comments and impressions.

Secondly, people who want to buy something will go to the business’s website. They will see a product and its information and will do what you want them to do.

Different Types of Crowd Marketing

Traditional crowd marketing: In this type of crowd marketing, marketers have to share relevant, high-quality content on various communication platforms. The aim here is to get the information to the right people.

Backlink generation: Crowd marketing of this type is aimed at generating as much traffic as possible, as the name implies. It means having to know other people who write content and encouraging them to place backlinks to your site. That is good for SEO, as well as appearance of trustworthiness.

Content distribution: You already know this content is king, marketers have to understand this. It could even have an old cliche ring to it. All these methods are irrelevant since it boils down to the message. Marketers have to consider a lot of different ways to get their products out there such as social media, email marketing, forums, blogs, websites and so on. In addition to that, marketers should combine various types of material, such as podcasts, images, videos, and infographics.

Reputation management:  In order for this type of crowd marketing to work, your business must have useful online accounts on sites such as Google My Business, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Once customers see and hear it, they will write reviews. As a responsible business, you have to stick to some ideals and beliefs to meet the needs of your customers. You should not also promote or make fake reviews.

Crowd influencer marketing: If you are a marketer, you must be aware of how influencers can influence people who buy things — crowd influencer marketing. It is a part of crowd influencer marketing. Usually, customers trust the advice of people who are well known and respected in their area.

Testing MVP (Minimum Viable Product): Testing a new business hypothesis in a forum is a good idea. To get feedback from potential customers you can create a project presentation, a brief description or a demo version. For instance, on the website reddit.com you can get free marketing research before launching the product and find a relevant audience.

The common goal of all strategies is to gain authority on topics discussed by users on the platform. In the first place, marketers add more backlinks to the web resource on authoritative sites with a high traffic and good ratings. Second, a positive brand reputation is formed.

Guerilla marketing: In fact, this method has been used in various aspects of brand promotion. Crowd marketing is placing backlinks that are aimed specifically at media savvy, popular competitors. Usually, the commentators of their publications are the active users, your potential clients, who may be ready to buy the same quality at a lower price, etc.

Different Kinds of Crowdsourcing Sites

The business world is where the majority of the target group spends its time, so that’s where I chose to put my books.

Forums

For example, a shop that sells food for kids would be interested in what mothers are saying on a forum. However, women don’t just write about taking care of kids on this site. Almost any topic about women can be found here.

Comments with backlinks sometimes get caught by review. It’s safe to write the brand or store name without the website address every once in a while.

Therefore, it is best to work on a series of replies, i.e. to start a conversation with the author of the thematic thread, so that the comment does not look too promotional or fake.

Crowd marketing can be an important component of a personal brand promotion strategy. For example, when someone in the comments recommends a specific specialist, YouTube blogger, or another person, who can be found on Google without needing a direct link.

The problem with forums for crowd marketing is that you have to sign up, it can take a while to find new and busy discussions on the subject, and you need to slowly ‘blend in’ to the conversation.

News and Blogs from Experts

You can comment what you have read on news and information sites. You can attempt to hide a link in the middle of a lot of talking and try to crowd market.

Review Sites

You can even leave feedback on any business or product in the sites like Glassdoor and Trustpilot. The review should be written by the consumer. Another approach is to make a company profile, get reviews and talk to customers.

Marketplaces

People love sites that create marketplaces as they can easily compare prices for the same item in a single platform from different sellers. Customers tend to choose the seller with the best reviews rather than the cheapest items or services.

Social Media Sites

Social media is one of the best places to use crowdsourcing because people spend a lot more time on social networks than on boards and aggregators. There are a couple of effective strategies: begin with the comments of popular posts, create a company account, and push people to write reviews.

The problem is that when business owners attempt to promote their company on social media, they tend to comment on other people’s posts without considering the bigger picture. For example, if an influencer’s blog is all about stylish clothes and they write about a fashionable outfit, followers will not want to go to a page about mental math or easy money. This sounds much more like spam.

Reddit

It’s also worth mentioning Q&A sites on their own. These tools can be used by people to find answers to questions on a variety of subjects. They are very popular in the West. Such site is definitely reddit.com, which is visited by more than 1.5 billion people a month. It is one of the 35 most popular sites in the world and the 20 most popular in the US.

Everyone talks about everything on Reddit, and among the new topics are those that have to do with finding products in the right category, like hair care products.

Key Tasks of Crowd Marketing

Increase traffic: Having review, comment, social media posts and so on with backlinks can bring a lot more people to your website. The important thing is to choose the right sources, they should be up to date and useful.

Boost your search ranking: SEO needs good number of backlinks. These are a combination of link building and crowd marketing. Crowd marketing can only do the jobs below.

Enhance behavioral factors: When you get targeted users, the bounce rate goes down and the number of deep page views go up. It is good for your ranking.

Get more conversions: Crowd marketing uses a sneaky way to boost sales. It prepares people to engage with the business in a manner that should be the same as native advertising.

Improve the marketing and product materials: Reading your target audience comments all the time and talking to them directly allows you to change the way you talk and what you say on each channel, make the service or product better, or even change your positioning depending on what potential customers want.

Improve your reputation: Brand recognition will continue to rise if you work on platforms where different types of people in your target group are present.

Find new audience: People of interest-based groups meet on thematic popular sites. If a marketer’s talk is interesting, a lot of possible customers can visit your site from these sites.

Also, crowd marketing always promotes word of mouth. Not all customers spend time in forums or talk.

Who Needs Crowd Marketing?

Crowd marketing can be used as an SEO tool by anyone in any business, and getting more backlinks is good for any website as it helps it rank higher in search engines. However, when it comes to other tasks, crowd marketing can be one of the main ways a business can promote its name.

In Which Sectors is Crowd Marketing Appropriate?

• Companies providing services in the B2C sector
• E-commerce stores (selling specific products, increasing profits during promotions)
• Event agencies, event organizers
• Startups, innovative projects

For these companies, crowd marketing becomes the key point of SEO and SERM (Search Engine Reputation Management). Crowd marketing is necessary for companies that have to deal with bad rumors, as planning and carrying it out is part of the overall effort to increase brand reputation.

What types of businesses should not use it?

B2B market: There are many different ways that entrepreneurs and business leaders know to get customers to trust them. You should use a variety of techniques to make them more loyal: case studies, suggestions, portfolios and other proofs of quality.

Businesses that receive a high volume of checks: People who are considering buying a car, a house, expensive jewelry or anything else expensive will not ask strangers on a forum for help.

An inactive small business: Cafes, beauty salons, sports centers etc. should rather concentrate on attracting local customers. Public advertising, social media promotion and contextual advertising can be used to do this.

When you post backlinks, you need to select sites where users can do things. Some platforms have too many backlinks to other websites and too few busy users, or comments that haven’t been updated in a long time. It can even hurt your ranking if you add too many links to your site.