Crowd marketing is a way of increasing sales using the stimulation of suggestions and reviews. It is a kind of viral or guerrilla marketing in which the main function of SEO and SMM is to manage the company’s popularity on the Net therefore to enhance the products and services sales. You can find here information about its concept, how it works, what problems could be solved by using it and which tools can make it more efficient.

Content:
• What is crowd marketing?
• The main advantage of crowd marketing
• Who shouldn’t order a crowd marketing campaign?
• Who uses crowd marketing in their work?
• Ways of crowd marketing campaign evaluation
• How to launch a crowd marketing campaign?

What is crowd marketing?

Crowd marketing is a way to increase the popularity of a company, service or product through the focused work with potential customers or clients on the Net.

This kind of marketing contemplates activities in the next directions:
• Searching and analyzing feedback in forums
• Comments monitoring on the blogs
• Tracking mentions in social networks
• Monitoring service issues
• Communication with the loyal target audience, supply of services and products by guerrilla marketing methods

Working with such resources improves reputation and as a consequence, increases the amount of incoming direct traffic. Target audience takes such references as a piece of advice, not as direct advertising.

The main advantage of crowd marketing

The people who see messages are potential clients. Communication with the target audience will help to get target-oriented traffic, having established itself as useful and required web site.

References in the social networks and on the blogs are contemplated as recommendations but not as advertising. That’s why they are more effective. The efforts allow getting a lot of clicks to a site. And it will be quality traffic with a high proportion of the conversion.

Who shouldn’t order a crowd marketing campaign?

• Companies with a narrow range of customers which offer a particular product or service, for instance, diabetic nutrition.
• Companies with the outdated and inconvenient site. You have to start working on user involvement only after resource rework and optimization.
• B2B. You hardly need to promote construction equipment, cash registers for shops or manufacturing machines for big industrial enterprises in social media.
• Periodic goods and services. A client wouldn’t study a market if he or she needs to make a copy of the key, to fix a bicycle or to put winter tires on cars in a short time.
• Daily demand goods. Bread, light bulb, detergent, body hygiene kit, etc.

This kind of promotion causes high efficiency in all other cases.

Who uses crowd marketing in their work?

This method is actively used by:
• SEO specialists
• PR managers
• SERM specialists
• Online marketing specialists
• Business owners
• Ad agencies

During the successful marketing campaign, it is possible to obtain new clients, reputation improvement, brand awareness, traffic increasing and visibility in search results.

Ways of crowd marketing campaign evaluation

Depending on the sphere and objectives there are a lot of rates used as KPI

Brand development:
• Brand traffic increasing
• Number of direct jumps increasing (when the user enters the site in the address bar)

SEO:
• Technical indicators of links
• Position increase
• Increase of the number of users from search results (organic)

Also, work efficiency could be checked by the technical parameters checklist.

Data for verification:
• Discussion relevance
• Account-level used
• Message text
• Attendance, site activity
• Anchor

How to launch a crowd marketing campaign?

By its efforts

Crowd marketing works with possible customers. They could be found on blogs, search systems, social media platforms, and different Net communities.

You should use special tools and ricks to find doubting clients:

1. Google search. Extended searches in Google and Google search tools will help you filter the discussion by the statute of limitations.

Google search operator will narrow the search area and will allow finding thematic discussions in the necessary section of the Net.

“searchterm" inurl:viewtopic
“searchterm" inurl:forum
“searchterm" inurl:blog
“searchterm" inurl:viewforum
“searchterm" inurl:board

2. Disqus. Comfortable service for comments posting and its monitoring about your services or goods on the sites and blogs.

3. Google Alerts and Talkwalker. Free services of tracking new feedbacks and questions on topics that send notifications.

4. Tagboard, LiveTweet, Tweetdeck. Twitter comfortable monitoring.

5. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. Communication with potential customers.

6. Google Analytics. Assessment of user behavior.

After mastering the necessary tools, it remains to choose the site, download the account, create a discussion, and write recommendations and feedback.

Outsourcing

At first glance, it might seem that crowd marketing is easy. Take it and do it. But without the appropriate preparation, the desired result cannot be achieved, and if you do not have free time, it is easier and cheaper to entrust the work to contractors.

How and when the effect will become evident?

Like search promotion, crowd marketing is a long-term investment that needs time to reach results. On the other hand, the effect of a fruitful crowd marketing campaign lasts long.

The average time of advertising campaign to receiving notable results is 3 months. The rate and efficiency of campaign conducting depend largely on a lot of external indicators, including external references amount. The fact is that in highly competitive niches they can number in the thousands. Naturally, in such a situation, adding a few mentions on specialized Internet sites will not play a significant role in promoting.

Effective crowd marketing campaign means:
• Qualitative competitor analysis
• Creating the perfect reference profile pattern
• Systematic work on approaching the ideal model and tracking dynamics

If you do everything right and use an integrated approach, crowd marketing will help achieve results.