What Is Crowd Marketing and Why Should You Care About It?

There is crowd funding. There is crowd-pleasing. And there is crowd marketing and it’s good for ya – find out how by reading this article.

Chances you are not exactly new to the Internet marketing and all things related, which means you’ve probably heard the term «crowd marketing». What is crowd marketing?

Crowd marketing is a sales promotion technique that suggests increasing your brand awareness and reputation (and, therefore, sales) by creating, publishing, and spreading positive brand-related content on the Internet.

Why Crowd Marketing Is Great and What Exactly It Gives Your Business

A list of everything that is great about crowd marketing.

• It increases your sales
• It assists in lead generation
• It yields great ROI (if done right)
• It helps your traffic grow, both organic and non-organic
• It works positively for your reputation
• It increases your brand recognition
• It ranks you higher on search engine results page (SERP)
• It involves backlinks, and backlinks are great for your SEO

Why Crowd Marketing Is Such a Hot Topic These Days

Major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo have all released their updated algorithm versions recently. And guess what? Things aren’t looking great for those websites that thrived on buying links and other black-hat SEO techniques. These methods are not only not effective - they’re subject to penalty from Google and company.

It’s about time we reconsidered our tactics and learned something new. Things are looking good for those who are ready to invest their time in money in usability, mobile adaptation, quality content, and great user experience.

You Probably Shouldn’t Do Crowd Marketing If…

Crowd marketing techniques and strategies are quite universal and can suit almost everyone - it’s equally great for small business and for b2b. However, it requires more than just a will. If you’re not ready to show full commitment and integrity, you’d better not start the whole thing.

Here’s why you probably shouldn’t start doing crowd marketing:

1. Your business is too specific and niche-based
2. You run a delivery company - well, you might try but you will have to be very careful about choosing the right platform
3. You are a part of heavy industries - a huge industrial factory or plant producing special equipment, or any other specific non-mass market product. In this case, the target audience mostly relies on the actual product or service rather than reviews and mentions. Plus, it’s not always easy for hired crowd marketing specialists to get into the company’s often specific type of business.
4. You run a poorly designed, non-optimised or otherwise primitive website. Even if you manage to lure some visitors on your site, they will flee in terror after experiencing your monster of a website. Make sure it looks good and works properly first, and then proceed to crowd marketing.

Where Should You Look for Target Audience?

Of course, you should set your eyes on the platforms that are spam-free, respectable, and have something in common with or related to your business. Good PR (Page Rank) is a must as well.

What fits these criteria? Various communities, forums, blogs, social networks, and even online news media. If the news is related to your business, why not? Look out for the best practices out there.

Important Steps to Follow

Let’s list the main steps you may need to go through - here’s how it works.

Set your role

First, you need to make a decision on whether you’re going to be an expert or a peer to your users. This is a turning point - once you’ve chosen a role, you can’t change it so give it a long thought.

If you’ve managed to find communities or forums dedicated to specific topics, it would be wise to hang around there, talk with people, earn some stripes, and then start offering your products/services very carefully.

Allocate enough time

No matter what your choice was in the previous step, you’re going to need a lot of time to develop your account properly.

You’ve got to understand that people are not fools - they either want an expert opinion or a friendly advice. You don’t want to fall somewhere in between because that’s what regular ads do, and people hate ads (or simply dismiss them).

Additionally, you should keep in mind that it may take quite some time just to find the platform for placing your links. You will sift through the list of platforms later leaving only the most valuable resources.

Manage links

The links that you place on the chosen platforms, should look as natural as possible. It will allow for better page indexing and increase your website’s visibility in the organic search (keywords with low relevance). It will also help increase your brand recognition and may boost your sales due to the incoming targeted traffic.

Here’s what you should know about crowd marketing links:

1. Most links are «nofollow»
2. Links are usually without anchor text
3. Links lead to theme-based posts and provide users with the information they are looking for
4. All links are placed manually, no spam of any kind is acceptable

This kind of links will never get you banned or de-ranked.

The Ultimate Goal of Crowd Marketing

Ideally, you should get a list of the links you’ve submitted that actually proved valuable to users, not the list of how many links you’ve placed all around the Internet.

Only in this case, your links will remain where you left them, and moderators won’t even dare remove them. Value first, advertising second - that’s a motto to live by.

Some Bumps You Might Experience Down the Crowd Marketing Road

Finding the right places to submit your links is a very long and tedious process. If you neglect the most common principles of crowd marketing, the outcome would be quite disappointing.

This is the type of job you need to do yourself. If you’re not experienced enough or don’t have enough time, leave it to the professionals - a qualified web studio like Zwebra.

Our specialists have enough knowledge and expertise to produce amazing results for your and your business. Plus, the studio boasts rich experience in working with various crowd marketing cases and can recommend you the one that fits best for your business.

When it comes to analytics and statistics, we’re hands-on and constantly monitoring so nothing good (or bad) will happen without us noticing it. 

How much is Crowd Marketing?

Well, it all depends. Usually, it’s anywhere from $40 to $80 per link. The final price depends on many factors such as time to complete and the difficulty of the subject.

Many web studios often set a monthly budget for a certain amount of work or a campaign - for example, the limit in our studio is $1000.

If you’re from Canada or USA and still have doubts about way of making it on the Internet with your business in 2017, do contact us for a professional consult and friendly advice.

Write your comments or questions below – let’s talk about it!