Crowd Marketing

Crowd marketing is a marketing technique that relies on the direct influence of several personalities on the target market for a particular product. As the name implies, crowd marketing focuses on large audience groups and uses different techniques to build referrals, generate leads, and increase website traffic.

Crowd marketing is a cost-effective strategy for brand promotion and product marketing. While it also leverages social media’s power, like influencer marketing, it works uniquely.

The difference between crowd marketing, social media marketing, and other organic digital marketing techniques like SEO is that crowd marketing focuses directly on the target audience (people who are most likely to patronize you) instead of a general audience. It is more like a hybrid of SMM and SEO.

People who want to buy your product are drawn in by the professional opinions, reviews, and comments of those who have already patronized you. Different reviews can be done on themed sites, special forums, social media, and all other places where you can find your target audience. Therefore, the likelihood of hitting engagement targets and generating more leads is higher.

A crowd marketing strategy focuses mostly on building brand awareness, improving SEO positions, and increasing website traffic. And it achieves these simply by narrowing the focus to an industry-specific audience. For instance, a business could leverage the influence of mass support for its product or service on a particular platform with its target market to showcase its brand and generate interest from prospective customers.

Some businesses achieve this by creating several accounts on such a platform. With these accounts, they create a buzz centered on the quality of their product or service. Effectively, the audience gets to know about the brand.

Additionally, you can easily measure and monitor the reach of crowd marketing on your target market. You can pay attention to such indicators as likes, shares, direct messages, reviews, feedback, etc.

What is Crowd Marketing For?

One of the major goals of crowd marketing is to manage recommendations and feedback from internet users so that as a result they would lead to increase of sales. Besides, crowd marketing can affect the brand image and also increase the website traffic and its positions in search results, notably in Google.

Using typical “pepper bombing” of media and posting on Facebook won’t help you achieve similar results – it is simply impossible, because information shall be delivered to “proper set of ears” and in a proper way. This is the main difference between crowd marketing and traditional SEO, SMM, PR, etc., as it is initially aimed at those users willing to buy your particular product. They just need a little push towards the sale, and the best way to do so is to provide them with an expert opinion and a link to your website, or by showing your product “to full advantage”.

How does Crowd Marketing Work? 

1. A Company that aims to increase sales of a particular product (such as a roof paint, for example) registers several accounts in social media and on competent websites related to the segment. Such actions shall take into account the region, where sales are planned.

2. Using these accounts, the company or its representatives act as experts by providing practical and useful advice on abovementioned platforms. At that, an expert advertises a product covertly. In other words, he or she doesn’t say “buy this or that”, as the discussion isn’t initially focused on “fast-talking” someone into buying the product, but rather suggests or recommends to try or to learn more about this or that material, slightly pushing the user towards the selection process or studying the issue in more detail, which should lead to predicting consequences.

Recommendations shall be published on a website, from which sales will take place directly. As a result, if everything is done correctly and if recommendations are useful and justified, users will do what’s expected from them and act in accordance with the designed scenario: publish links on other sources, which guarantees reposts.

3. As a result, user will see the same pages with the required content supported by the opinion of the respected expert. As a result, image will grow fast. And user facing the problem will know where to find a solution; in our case it’s the website that does not only answers the questions, but also sells roof paint.

Advantages of Crowd Marketing

Below are the benefits of crowd marketing as a marketing technique.

• Raising Brand Awareness
• Lead Generation
• Build Authority
• Drive Engagement
• Website Traffic Boost

As the brand’s reputation grows, your website gets more referral traffic and links from other resources. This shoots your SEO positions upwards, thereby growing your website traffic.

Types of Crowd Marketing

Crowd marketing can take different forms, but it can be generally categorized into five main types.

• Classic Crowd Marketing

This approach involves seeking out the target market exactly where they are and engaging them with quality, relevant content.

• Building Quality Backlinks

Search engines have programming that favors websites with lots of credible links. Google, for instance, boosts the ranking of websites with backlinks from websites with high domain authority. Your website also enjoys an increased number of visitors. As your site’s ranking and credibility grow, it encourages other content creators to publish links leading to your website.

• Content Distribution

Continuous content creation aims to build positive engagement and lead generation. Studies so far have shown that content creation is a cost-effective and efficient method for generating leads. It costs way less than other digital marketing techniques and is more effective than paid advertising. People are always looking for quality information across many different platforms.

If you can reach them with proper content on these platforms, they’ll start following you and will keep an eye on your website. So the best way to improve your website ranking is to make your website the first and final stop for quality content.

• Reputation Management

Reputation management is the type of crowd marketing that focuses on building your brand’s social and public image while eliminating anything that portrays you in a negative light.

To achieve this, your presence on all social media platforms must be tangible. Your social media accounts should promote ideas and values that help your business by drawing people in.

• Crowd Influencer Marketing

In this circumstance, crowd marketing leverages the influence of several trusted figures in your niche to promote your brand. This could be in the form of celebrity endorsements or reviews from people who have used your products before. You may ask people to share their experiences with your brand.

Crowd Marketing: STEP BY STEP 

1. First of all, we need to know the ropes about our target audience:

• geographic principles – region of residence, regional market structure, market dynamics in the segment;
• demographic characteristics – gender, family status, familu structure and life cycle, level of income and occupation;
• behavioral characteristics – loyalty to a product, motivation factors, information level about a product and overall satisfaction with products;
•  psychographic principles – life style, social status, personality type.

2. Draft the map of questions:

For example:

• How to choose roof paint?
•  What paint to use for a roof?
• How to paint a roof?
• How durable is roof paint?
• How to prepare a roof for painting?

3. “Cleanup” of the website:

• create detailed descriptions of products and services provided;
• add high-quality photos and, preferably, videos representing the product;
• make sure prices are up-to-date;
• add quality certificates, licenses, and other materials that may affect the image.

An example of good design of the product page:

4. Tracking keyword queries among those specified in the map of questions

To solve this task, one shall use a number of tools:

• Google. Search websites and forums for reviews and questions regarding the promoted product;  
• Google Alerts andTalkwalker. Systems to receive notifications about new questions or reviews; 

• Disqus. A tool to track comments regarding the promoted product in blogs.

• Kribrum. Monitoring of social media and forums;

• Tagboard, LiveTweet, Tweetdeck. Monitoring of Twitter social network;

• Facebook, Google Plus, VK.com, Twitter. Means of communications with potential customers;

• Google Analytics. . Analysis of referals to the product website as well as customer behavior on the website.

Depending on specific goals and queries, list of tools can be amended or updated with necessary services and applications, or you might want to shorten it by deleting those irrelevant instead. For example, if you don’t plan to communicate with clients via Twitter, you can turn off monitoring of that network.

5. Assisting your target audience in finding answers to their questions.

There are a number of tools, so-called services, to do so as well:

Quora 

Yahoo Answers 

Google Answers

These are the services people use to find answers to their questions, so why skip the opportunity to help them find a product or service they need?

6. Quotation and recommendation of your brand. 

7. Follow-up on your work.

Here you shall pay special attention to the following characteristics:

• number of brand mentions and references to it;
• number of link click-throughs and their quality;
• traffic growth for selected queries.