Crowd Marketing – Definition, Basic Principles and Tools

Digital marketing offers businesses a wide range of strategies and tactics aimed at generating leads and driving user engagement long-term but it looks like crowd marketing is becoming the most dominant force of all in 2020.

It’s a relatively new concept that relies on a broad scope of features, which is why many marketers still don’t fully understand how crowd-oriented campaigns function in practice. The reason why we want to discuss crowd marketing is that it can help you to raise awareness without spending a fortune on promotional activities.

We have a lot of interesting topics to cover here, so let us waste no time anymore!

Crowd Marketing Definition and Benefits

Just like the name suggests, crowd marketing is a type of digital marketing that focuses on large audience groups. Many people believe to be a synonym for influencer marketing, but crowd-focused marketing goes well beyond social influencing in an attempt to build the professional authority of a company.

It is actually a mixture of content creation, search engine optimization, and social media marketing that results in verified lead generation. Instead of approaching a mass of more or less relevant users, crowd marketing helps entrepreneurs to reach out to highly targeted audience groups only. In such circumstances, it’s easy to figure out the benefits of this marketing strategy:

• Raising awareness: This marketing concept is excellent for low-budget promoters who want to raise awareness about new or unknown brands, products, or services.
• Traffic boots: As you keep raising brand awareness, you can expect more people to start visiting your website week after week.
• Lead generation: The most important advantage of crowd marketing is its ability to generate verified leads. Namely, it focuses on relevant communication channels in order to serve quality content to your target audience exclusively.
• Build authority: A well-placed and high-quality content helps businesses to build authority and establish themselves as the industry thought leaders.
• Drive engagement: The last benefit of crowd marketing is clear – it serves as an engagement generator and inspires the audience to take action based on your subtle promo messages.

Types of Crowd Marketing

Crowd marketing comes in many different types, but it all comes down to five basic formats. Without further ado, let’s check out each one here.

1. Classic Crowd Marketing

Just like the name suggests, classic crowd marketing is the main format in which you as a marketer publish high-quality content across various communication platforms. Of course, the idea is to approach the target audience and place the content where you know your fans will notice it.

What does it mean?

To put it simply, it means joining relevant online groups and communities where participants discuss topics that are important to entrepreneurs. This is your chance to become a major contributor and win over new followers by posting excellent comments and asking the right questions at the right time.

2. Backlink Generation

The purpose of this format is to maximize website traffic and inspire other content creators to publish backlinks leading to your site. It’s a genuine credibility booster because search engines love websites that can earn a lot of attention from other users. But in order to achieve this goal, you need to work hard and invest time and resources in the next crowd marketing format on our list.

3. Content Distribution

It all comes down to the sheer quality of the content you are publishing. There are so many distribution channels to take into account here – websites, blogs, guest blogs, social networks, email campaigns, and so on – but the key objective is to evoke public interest with amazing pieces of content.

According to the report, content creation generates over three times as many leads as traditional marketing and costs 62% less. It basically means that you ought to invest in article writing and combine in with many other content forms such as images, videos, infographics, memes, podcasts, etc.

Such a strategy will help you to raise awareness and improve search engine ranking, thus making sure to approach tons of new users in the long run.

4. Reputation Management

Another very important type of crowd marketing is reputation management. It’s a precious feature because it allows marketers to build credibility and enhance professional authority among target users. How is this possible?

First of all, reputation management requires you to create all the relevant business accounts on the Internet. From LinkedIn and Twitter to Yelp and Google My Business, you need to establish a foolproof profile on each platform and let the customers find you quickly.

Secondly, you need to behave as a responsible organization and promote certain types of values and beliefs that match the expectations of the target audience. The point is to minimize risks and prevent negative comments that can jeopardize your public image.

5. Crowd Influencer Marketing

You don’t have to be a crowd marketing guru to understand the impact social influencers leave on today’s audiences. Crowd influencer marketing is a big deal these days because consumers tend to trust reliable niche figures much more than brand and their promo messages.

A quick overview of stats and facts will prove our point perfectly:

• More than 90% of marketers rely on influencer campaigns.
• 80% of consumers have purchased something after having seen it as a recommendation by a social influencer.
• A typical company earns $18 for every dollar invested in crowd influencer marketing.

There are tons of influencers out there, but we recommend you to select carefully and hire the most appropriate figures only. Generally speaking, you can choose between two sorts of influencers:

• Macro influencers who are very popular individuals with thousands or even millions of followers. It’s a good strategy if your goal is simply to raise awareness, but keep in mind that the average macro influencer will charge you a lot for a single campaign.
• Micro-influencers engage with a much smaller audience, but they are very successful at driving user engagement. It’s a better solution if you want to drive conversions and convince people to buy your products or services.

Common Ways to Plan and Administer a Crowd-Focused Campaign

The next question we want to discuss is: How can you plan and run a successful crowd marketing campaign? Once again, it is impossible to give you one straightforward answer, so we’ll need to divide it into three common approaches.

Do it Single-Handedly

The most common approach is rather obvious – you can handle all crowd marketing activities alone or in cooperation with other members of your team. Of course, this is also the most challenging and time-consuming tactic as it forces you to take care of everything single-handedly and keep the highest level of focus 365 days a year.

This means taking care of things like idea generation, planning, scheduling, administration of multiple online accounts and resources, and so many other functions. While it is possible, such an approach will certainly take the vast majority of your time.

Outsource all Activities

The second solution is giving you greater flexibility because you get to hire someone else to take care of crowd-oriented marketing instead of you. After all, finding skilled remote workers is simple in the world full of amazing freelance platforms such as Upwork.

Keep in mind, however, that this strategy will also take you some time before arranging everything perfectly. You will have to find ideal candidates for the job and then explain everything there is to know about your project, which is always a challenging procedure.

The biggest benefit is that you don’t have to hire employees full-time, while freelancers’ fees can also be significantly lower compared to local staffing costs.

Use Crowd Marketing Tools

The year is 2020, which means that you can find a productive tool for almost all sorts of plans and activities. Crowd marketing is by no means an exception here, so you should definitely test some of the popular digital apps, programs, and plugins.

There are tons of options currently available online, but we can suggest checking out some of our favorite tools such as:

Sprout Social

Since so many crowd marketing activities take place on social networks, you could use this platform to understand and approach your audience groups.

Mention

No human being is capable of monitoring all brand-related comments and activities online, but Mention can do it on your behalf and keep you informed whenever there is a new piece of content about you and your business.

Active Campaign

This is yet another tool that enables users to plan campaigns, identify social influencers, schedule activities, and analyze marketing performance in real-time.

Basic Principles of Crowd-Oriented Marketing

Now that you’ve seen pretty much everything there is to know about crowd marketing, we only have one more thing left to share with you. It is a brief list of the basic principles that you need to embrace in order to organize successful crowd marketing campaigns. These are the rules you’ll have to follow:

1. Marketing Campaigns Authenticity

Authenticity is by far the most important principle of crowd marketing because your messages need to look unique, authoritative, and convincing. Remember that your objective is to build trust and inspire the audience to check out your business, which is only possible if you take care of every single detail.

What are we talking about?

Well, first you need to optimize each account on the Internet to make it look professional and trustworthy. Use high-resolution logos and product images and make sure to write a concise business description.

Of course, it is even more significant to create and publish lots of amazing posts and comments across all communication networks. Don’t get too promotional, but rather try to win over the audience with expertise and highly relevant insights.

2. Potential Customers Engagement

Bear in mind that online communication is not a one-way process. This is exactly what makes the Internet so powerful – it gives everyone the chance to speak up for themselves, so you’ll have to engage and encourage two-way communication with the audience.

The tools we mentioned above will help you to track users’ insights and answer whenever there is the opportunity to strengthen relationships with your target customers. Such a mindset will make you look more credible in the eyes of a typical consumer and it will result in long-term cooperation based on trust and understanding.

3. Community Building Practices

The last principle on our list is community building. The Internet is packed with relevant niche groups that you ought to join and contribute regularly. If you are not sure which way to go, we can give you a hand once again – test online communities such as Quora, niche-related Facebook groups, Reddit, and similar. These platforms generate a lot of traffic daily but don’t forget that you can stand out only if you publish useful and practical articles, answers, comments, and proposals.

The Bottom Line

Crowd marketing is a relatively new but extremely powerful concept that can help your business to generate leads, inspire user engagement, and drive conversions in the long run. In this article, we discussed the following topics:

• Crowd marketing definition and benefits
• Types of crowd marketing
• Basic principles of crowd influencer marketing
• How to approach crowd marketing
• Crowd marketing tools

Have you ever thought about adding crowd marketing to your digital marketing strategy? Why would you consider doing it? Feel free to share your ideas and suggestions in comments – we would love to see what you think about this trendy topic!