Crowd Marketing: What it is/How it works
Crowd marketing is a cost-effective website promotion technique used to boost brand awareness, increase search rankings, and skyrocket sales. To achieve the previously mentioned goals, crowd marketers use recommendations and reviews on relevant social media platforms. (forums, Q/A sites, blogs, etc.)
It is a kind of hidden marketing that seeks to manage the brand image of a company by using social proof effect.
Let’s take a closer look at what crowd marketing is, how it works, what tasks it solves, and what tools will help make it more effective.
In this article, we will cover the following topics:
- Crowd Marketing: What it is?
- What are the benefits of crowd marketing as a marketing technique?
- Crowd link building for SEO:
- Who is crowd marketing not suitable for?
- Who needs crowd links?
- Advantages and disadvantages of this promotion technique:
- Crowd Marketing vs Link Building: What’s the Difference?
- Common ways to plan and manage a crowd marketing campaign:
- A simple 4-step algorithm for implementing forum link building
- Ways to evaluate your crowd marketing campaign:
- How long does it take to get visible results from your crowd marketing campaign?
- Conclusion:
What is crowd marketing:
Simply put, crowd marketing involves the promotion of a website, product, or service. This is done by posting customer reviews on thematic resources. (blogs, forums, and other crowd platforms.)
Crowd marketers participate in discussions, offer solutions and recommend the product/service or website they are promoting, by mentioning its benefits and features.
Each comment includes a link to the client’s website. Crowd links not only boost brand awareness and customer trust, but also increase referral traffic, sales, and help get higher search rankings.
This SEO technique is extremely effective for your link-building campaign. Using it, you diversify your backlink profile, which is positively rated by search engines’ filters. In addition, do-follow backlinks allow you to get “link juice” and thus guarantee search rankings elevation.
What are the benefits of crowd marketing as a marketing technique?
Communication with your target audience will help you get “meaningful” (referenced) traffic. Mentions on social media and forums are perceived as recommendations, not as advertising, so they are more effective in promoting.
The effort spent allows you to get site traffic in a short time. Moreover, it will be a high-quality traffic with a high conversion rate.
Quality referral traffic. Through natural-looking reviews, the advertiser gets the interested audience. In addition, real and detailed reviews or recommendations increase customer trust.
Positive reputation. With the right approach, crowd marketing is the best technique for creating a positive brand image. Reviews and recommendations on forum discussions increase customer loyalty, as well as the desire to buy the product/service.
Promotion of individual pages. With the help of crowd marketing, you can purposefully drive traffic to specific pages of your website. In addition, you can test a specific product/service and get constructive customer feedback.
Personalized and unobtrusive marketing. Netizens are tired of annoying “follow the link” ads. By using posts, reviews, recommendations, and speaking the language of the target audience, you effectively promote your brand and still, don’t make it annoying for the network users.
Forum link building for SEO.
“Warming up” a new site. Once launched, the site falls into the so-called sandbox. It’s up to you how long your site stays there and how it gets out of the sandbox.
Forum link building is extremely effective for a website that has zero domain authority and “link juice.”
Unlike purchased anchor and non-anchor backlinks, crowd links are far more secure. The likelihood of falling under search engine filters is very low. Crowd links help sites get out of the sandbox faster and get a foundation on which to develop and improve the backlink profile. For more information, check out our article on How To Use Crowd Marketing To Promote New Websites.
Since crowd links are the most natural backlinks that do not pose a serious threat from so-called search algorithms, their role as a stabilizing component is irreplaceable. By diluting such links with explicitly commercial anchor and non-anchor links, you can hide their effect and protect yourself from the possible filters’ penalization.
Thus, the role of crowd marketing for SEO is mainly auxiliary. It can’t completely replace commercial backlinks, but it acts as a mechanism to enhance the effect of the link-building campaign and reduce the risk of falling under search engine filters.
Who is crowd marketing not suitable for?
If the main goal is to increase brand awareness, then crowd marketing is not the best option for the following business categories:
– small regional businesses;
– highly specialized companies;
– owners of irrelevant, uninformative resources;
– specialty goods businesses: (luxury goods, jewelry, expensive cars);
Who needs crowd marketing?
Without considering the above-mentioned categories, crowd links are suitable for all niches:
Mainly they are suitable for:
– service providing companies. Through positive reviews, you get a higher conversion rate.
– online stores – to directly attract buyers;
– event agencies and event organizers – to increase awareness and audience interest;
– startups that aim to provide innovative products or services.
– companies with a negative reputation or no reputation on the Internet;
– online casinos;
– SEO specialists (digital marketing and link building agencies);
Crowd marketing VS link building: what are the differences?
These concepts are often confused, although the difference between them is the same as between cheese and cottage cheese.
Link Building is a pure SEO tool aimed at creating one-way hyperlinks (also known as backlinks) on a website to improve its ranking in search engines.
Crowd marketing is a part of link building. One of the ways to increase the backlink profile, but its functions do not end there.
Link Building is a broader concept. It includes:
– crowd links;
– content marketing.
– email outreach
– link advertisements
– etc.
Accordingly, crowd marketing and link building are two different concepts, each of which performs several unique functions.
You can check out our article to learn more on how to get safe backlinks.
Common ways to plan and manage a crowd marketing campaign:
The next topic we want to discuss is how to plan and conduct a successful crowd marketing campaign? Again, it is impossible to give an unambiguous answer, so we need to divide it into three general options.
Do it Single-Handedly
You can apply crowd marketing on your own. This SEO technique isn’t that complex. The most difficult is to find the right platforms to post on. You have to pay attention to the platform’s audience engaged, the website’s DA, and DR. Besides, you need forums where you can get do-follow backlinks. Finally, it is important to write helpful and informative comments that won’t look like advertising as spam content is banned on moderated, high-quality forums.
Hire a freelancer
You can find professional freelancers on various exchanges. Freelancers, generally charge less than agencies. However, there are some risks and disadvantages to consider. First, the work of freelancers is more difficult to monitor and track. Also, you will not receive any guarantees. Comments containing links are often deleted, and freelancers won’t replace them for free.
Hire a crowd marketing agency
Of the minuses – the cost may be higher. However, the agency’s specialists already have sufficient experience and understanding of which platforms to use, often guaranteeing free replacements. In addition, the agencies can build a promotion strategy so that crowd marketing will bring visible results in the future.
A simple 4 step algorithm for implementing forum link building
1. We select relevant forum discussions. You may check our complete guide on how to pick the forums for crowd marketing.
2. Register an account, or use a pre-prepared one, the lifespan of which should be at least 2 weeks. Also, it’s recommended to leave at least 20 messages before posting the link. In this case, the likelihood of deletion is significantly lower.
3. Understand the question and the issue.
4. Suggest a solution and mention the promoted site or brand.
Ways to evaluate your crowd marketing campaign:
Based on your business objectives, the following indicators may be used as KPIs.
Brand development parameters:
– branded traffic increasing;
– direct traffic increasing;
SEO parameters:
– search position increasing;
– organic traffic increasing;
We recommend using Google Analytics to view website traffic sources.
Technical parameters:
The quality of the work carried out is also assessed by a checklist of technical indicators that affect the result:
– discussions’ relevancy;
– site attendance, user activity;
– account’s rating;
– quality of the published texts;
– anchors.
How long does it take to get visible results from your crowd marketing campaign?
While there is no definitive answer to the question of how long it will take before you see an improvement in organic traffic and search rankings as a result of your crowd marketing efforts, you can expect to see that result within 3-4 months.
Obviously, we need to consider the number of links that you will publish on a monthly basis.
If you have a competitive niche and your competitors have hundreds and thousands of links, then a few mentions on the forums won’t help you much.
However, if you analyse your top-ranked competitors’ backlink profiles and get backlinks from the same platforms, then crowd marketing will help you achieve the desired result.
Still, it is important to understand that only through an integrated approach you will get significant results.
Crowd marketing is one of the best SEO tools that you can use to promote your brand and rank higher in search results.
It is straightforward to analyze the performance of your campaign using Google Analytics or any other website tracking tool.
With the right approach, you will notice the first results in two to three months.
However, if you really want to increase your referral traffic and popularity of your brand or product, you need to get crowd links all the time.
You can do it all single-handedly, hire a freelancer or a crowd marketing agency. Each of the options has advantages and disadvantages. The most important thing is to be aware of your primary goals and set clear priorities.
CrowdMark provides strategic, creative, and performance services to consumer-oriented businesses. We help companies increase brand awareness, raise sales, create community, drive interaction and improve site rankings through innovative SEO techniques.