Most users, before making a final decision on the purchase of any product or service order, actively study the unbiased opinions of other buyers (comments, reviews), this gives rise to crowd marketing. Today we’ll look at what is it, its types, advantages and basic rules.
Crowd Marketing: What Is It?
What helps a person determine the choice of purchases? Here can be listed a lot of factors, however, there is one very weighty, which clearly stands out from the others: this is an opinion from the outside. Yes! The opinion of another person who has already bought a thing or used service is one of the strongest arguments in choosing. It was always, if earlier it happened within the framework of live communication, word of mouth, now it has moved to the Internet. Fortunately, for this, there is a huge number of sites.
The formation of advertising appeals with the help of such resources is called crowd marketing. This is quite a popular advertising tool now. This is the study of needs and the identification of preferences of the audience in social networks, various forums, blogs related to certain topics. The purpose of such an analysis is to promote a different product or service to the “masses” of the Internet communities.
Speaking absolutely simply, this is the placement of interesting and attractive comments. With the recommendation of a certain company on the sites where its target audience lives, for example, write a review on the forum mom about baby shampoo.
If we talk about the purpose of crowd marketing, you cannot miss such a component detail, as public opinion. Marketers who post reviews and recommendations for a certain product in the relevant online communities, sites are pushing people to the right opinion on the product they are interested in. It does not use direct hyperlinks. The effect of crowd marketing is aimed at attracting the audience to the goods and creating the necessary environment for buying and a positive attitude to the product.
Qualitative crowd marketing needs time: only long-term work will bring results. On average, this takes from three months, depending on the project and the conditions. It is worth noting that the most effective way to implement the crowd marketing campaign will be to outsource it. This saves a lot of time and results in a quality result. In specialized services, marketers work, which are engaged in this on a regular basis and have a base of earned sites with pumped-up accounts.
Crowd Marketing Tasks for SEO
- Increase the popularity of the site in search engines.
- Providing the growth and distribution of site links on the Internet.
- It helps to increase the overall popularity of the site, the reputation, the reliability of the company product or service.
- Formation of the right opinion about the advertised product.
- Expansion of the target audience and coordination of new clients.
Types of Crowd Marketing
The type depends on which site the text is placed. Crowd marketing is divided into the following types. Work on the services of questions and answers, commenting on topical blogs and sites, forums, review websites.
The competent strategy is to analyze the target audience, look for suitable ones and discard those that will not be of use.
Strategies also differ in their principles and tasks. Depending on their approach to work, they can be as listed below.
- Classic crowd marketing – registration of accounts and writing comments.
- Getting natural links – building up mass in the form of publications on sites, favorable SEO promotion of the site.
- Getting references from sources where competitors are already posted.
The Advantages of Crowd Marketing
The main advantages of implementing crowd marketing strategy:
- The growth of traffic for given requests.
- Creation of brand recognition and positive image.
- Lead generation.
- Improving the site’s link profile.
- The safe growth of positions in Google – if crowd marketing for content projects is carried out correctly, with a qualitative selection of sites for publications.
Basic Rules of Crowd Marketing
- Excellent knowledge of the product being promoted. It is necessary to know thoroughly what you are selling or promoting you need to emphasize the advantages of the product or service and also motivate the reader to follow the link.
- Create a trust profile. To enter the credibility of users and administrators, your profile must contain all the information about the owner (name, photo, contacts), the age of the profile (preferably from 1 month) is in great importance. It is necessary to be active and participate in discussions and on other branches of the forum.
- The date of the topic creation in the discussion and the date of the last communication are of great importance. No need to post comments where the last message was published a long time ago, most likely it is an abandoned “dead” branch, the benefit of which will not be.
- Choosing the right region (you need your target audience). If you post your comments on not on the right forums, you will end up with only failures on the site, this may lead to a worsening of behavioral factors.
- Make a useful comment, you need to understand the problem of a person and try to help solve it, and not just insert a link.
- Use the name of brands and companies in the comments. Links in the comments can be clickable or not, at the same time, the non-anchored links have better survival rates and better conversion rates. The presence of non-reference mentions contributes to a certain activity of users who will search for the name of the site or brand by means of a search. For you, this can contribute to increasing the site’s trust and improving behavioral factors.
When using crowd marketing, you should pay attention to the following points:
- Definition and detailed description of your target audience, which can include demographic, social, economic and other characteristics.
- Selection of resources that are popular with the selected target audience.
- Analysis of user needs that the product satisfies.
- Determination of the correct style of communication.
- Drawing up a list of performance indicators.
- Summing up, developing recommendations.
Crowd marketing is a labor-intensive modern brand promotion technology that can (if properly used) increase sales and raise brand reputation. The main disadvantage of crowd marketing is the investment of the most expensive resource – time. Creating a suitable comment and link design is a very laborious process. If we consider narrow topics, then a fairly large amount of time is spent studying them. In combination with other promotion methods, it will give a visible result in the form of traffic growth and recognizability.