What is crowd marketing and why is it needed

What is crowd marketing and why is it needed
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Crowd marketing is a form of hidden advertising in which a brand or its products are mentioned on social media, forums, or question-and-answer sites to promote the brand. This method is a universal promotion tool that allows you to effectively increase organic traffic and orders.

The essence of this method is that it does not look like regular advertising, but is disguised as product reviews or suggestions for solving a particular problem. Crowd marketing can be used to effectively promote a website, attracting interest, increasing brand awareness, and increasing organic traffic. Such mini-publications are created by ordinary users who are brand advocates, as well as by company employees who mention the brand and leave a link to the site.

This method helps the company achieve various goals:

  • increase brand awareness;
  • increase the amount of traffic to the site or landing page;
  • improve SEO performance;
  • stimulate sales;
  • increase competitiveness, especially when a large number of potential buyers discuss the problem that the brand offers a solution to.

Types of crowdsourcing platforms

To maximize the effect of crowdsourcing, we recommend using a variety of platforms to engage people in discussion.

Posting links on online media, social networks, and forums helps to increase the referral weight of the site and attract a new audience.

Thematic forums/platforms

Find forums or platforms with your target audience and actively participate in discussions, share your knowledge and experience. For example, if you sell baby products, find forums for moms and discuss your products with them, using crowd-sourced links to promote them through comments, recommendations, and reviews.

Social media

Create company pages on social media, post interesting content, respond to comments, and ask questions to your followers. For example, run an Instagram contest to encourage users to share photos of themselves using your product.

Blogs and websites

Find blogs that write for your audience and invite them to write an article about your brand. For example, if you sell home appliances, find a blogger who writes about this topic and ask them to write a review of your products. As an example of crowd marketing: “I just bought a new vacuum cleaner from [Brand] and I love it! It’s so powerful, quiet, and easy to use. You can see all the models here [link].” Consider outsourcing your crowdsourcing services to specialized platforms or agencies for better results.

YouTube

Create a YouTube channel and post videos about your brand, respond to comments, and ask questions to your subscribers. For example, create a video demonstrating how to use your product.

Use various crowd marketing strategies, such as analyzing your target audience, posting links on relevant resources, using specialized tools for monitoring and searching for keywords, forum marketing, reputation management, types of crowd marketing – building link profiles and using customer reviews and recommendations to improve your online reputation.

Review sites

Encourage your customers to leave reviews about your company on specialized sites. For example, offer them a discount on their next purchase for leaving a review.

Crowd marketing is a great opportunity to engage your audience and create a community of ambassadors for your brand. You can order crowd marketing through specialized platforms, advertising agencies, freelancers, or online marketing studios to generate reviews.

Who is crowdsourcing for?

Crowd marketing, based on the trust and recommendations of real people, is especially suitable for businesses that need to rapidly develop or monetize content and audience. These can be startups and new companies that need to quickly attract attention and gather an audience, as well as brands with unique offers, such as vegan businesses.

In addition, crowdsourcing helps projects with limited budgets and those that need to quickly test ideas to optimize a product, such as online delivery services. It also helps companies that create informational content by monetizing traffic and audience through sponsorship.

At the same time, this method is not suitable for businesses with a negative reputation, exclusive brands seeking to maintain their elite image, as well as medical and financial institutions that should be very careful when using crowdsourcing to avoid risks to their image. Crowd marketing is not a one-size-fits-all solution for promotion, so it is important to consider its risks and minimize them.

Types of crowd links

There are four main types of crowd links used in crowd marketing strategies:

  1. Anchorless links – links without keywords in the anchor, which look like pointer words (“link”, “here” or “on the page”).
  2. Non-clickable links – text mentioning a site without an active hyperlink.
  3. Nofollow links – links with the nofollow attribute that do not convey the weight of the site, but improve its ranking by diluting the number of links.
  4. Links-mentions – a mention of the company without a direct link to the site, but using the queries for which the site is ranked.

Forums most often use anchorless links because search engines can apply filters to anchor links. Anchorless links help to “dilute” the link profile, so it is desirable that their number exceeds the number of anchor links.

Conclusion: is it worth using crowd marketing for SEO promotion?

Crowd marketing can serve as a catalyst in the process of website promotion, contributing to faster growth of positions in search results, improving indexation and ranking indicators. However, crowdsourcing is not a panacea for SEO promotion, and it is not advisable to use it as the main promotion tool. Simple placement of crowd links, even on the most authoritative resources, will not provide high results. The best results are achieved only through a comprehensive strategy that includes the use of both permalinks and crowd marketing.

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