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Crowd Marketing
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Crowd marketing is aimed at increasing sales or interest in your business through involving a large number of people. This marketing technique is especially useful if you are on a lower budget. Crowd marketing provides an opportunity for you to be able to narrate the story of your business and engage in a larger conversation with real people on different social platforms.
Be authentic: Crowd marketing encourages transparency. Similar to any social network, what you write will have a bigger impact when people can put a face to the name. That’s why you should consider using a headshot image of yourself as a profile picture. In addition, we also highly recommend filling out as much personal information as possible to highlight your real-life experience and credentials..
Write a concise biography: Be as precise and on point as possible. No matter which platform you choose, your concise biography is your identifier. Examples of a good short bios: Full-stack developer for 3+ years or Small business owner @[name of your business] for 7 years, or worked 2+ years as a marketing consultant, etc. If you have a hobby or other interests outside your direct field of expertise, include those, too.
Write about topics in your expertise: Stay authentic, avoid spam, make sure you are answering questions you are an expert on, and if you find your experience is limited, be honest and state that you are sharing your opinion.
Participate in the community: Finding the questions and writing the answers depends on you, but the upvoting depends on the community. To earn authority, you must become a part of the community itself. This means that you should ask questions, give other people upvotes and comment on the answers that you like or want to know more on. You should also follow relevant industry influencers and other professionals whose answers you think would resonate with your audience.
In this crowd marketing guide, you will learn how different communities can help you expand your customer segment and raise awareness about your business. Facebook Groups, Quora and Reddit are among the most popular crowd marketing platforms.
Everything you need to know about crowd marketing and how to make it work for your business is waiting for you in this chapter.
Be authentic: Crowd marketing encourages transparency. Similar to any social network, what you write will have a bigger impact when people can put a face to the name. That’s why you should consider using a headshot image of yourself as a profile picture. In addition, we also highly recommend filling out as much personal information as possible to highlight your real-life experience and credentials..
Write a concise biography: Be as precise and on point as possible. No matter which platform you choose, your concise biography is your identifier. Examples of a good short bios: Full-stack developer for 3+ years or Small business owner @[name of your business] for 7 years, or worked 2+ years as a marketing consultant, etc. If you have a hobby or other interests outside your direct field of expertise, include those, too.
Write about topics in your expertise: Stay authentic, avoid spam, make sure you are answering questions you are an expert on, and if you find your experience is limited, be honest and state that you are sharing your opinion.
Participate in the community: Finding the questions and writing the answers depends on you, but the upvoting depends on the community. To earn authority, you must become a part of the community itself. This means that you should ask questions, give other people upvotes and comment on the answers that you like or want to know more on. You should also follow relevant industry influencers and other professionals whose answers you think would resonate with your audience.
What is Quora?
Quora is a question-and-answer website where questions are posed in the form of opinions. This is one of the most popular opinion websites. Quora will allow you to achieve tremendous long-term results generated by your users. After you master content creation, Quora should be your second focus for sharing opinion-based content, with your website remaining your top priority.
When you market on Quora, you will create a buzz around your website and stimulate discussion about your business. Besides being a great place where you can acquire knowledge, read useful tips and tricks and get the latest news, Quora can be a valuable channel to build brand awareness. By answering questions related to your niche, you can gain popularity and position yourself as an industry expert. What makes this platform different from the others is the fact that you need to provide real value to the community. In order to succeed, your answers need to be helpful. This way, Quora self-regulates content and neutralizes spam.
What are Facebook groups?
Facebook groups provide a space to communicate about shared interests, causes and business. Anyone can create a group for anything. If you're a group admin, check out this article from Neil Patel to grow your community.
To create a group:
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Click on the top right of Facebook and select Create Group.
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Enter your group name, add group members and then choose the privacy setting for your group.
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Click Create.
To discover new groups you might be interested in:
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Click Groups from your News Feed.
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Click Discover at the top.
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Scroll down to search Suggested, Local, Friends or other groups.
What is reddit?
Reddit - the "Front Page of Internet" is home to thousands of communities, endless conversation, and authentic human connection. Members submit content such as links, text posts, and images, which are then upvoted or downvoted by other members. Whether you're into the latest news, sports, TV fan theories, or a never-ending stream of the internet's cutest animals, there's a community on Reddit for you.
What is medium?
Medium taps into the brains of the world’s most insightful writers, thinkers, and storytellers to bring you the smartest takes on topics that matter. So whatever your interest, you can always find fresh-thinking and unique perspectives. Unlike the other crowd marketing platforms, users cannot share pictures of their food or short statuses here. Medium offers a variety of tools to write introspective content with visuals and interact with your readers.
How to answer questions?
The main purpose of crowd marketing is to offer great answers to relevant questions and build brand awareness. To be able to do that, you first need to learn about all the factors that influence the success of your answer.
To have the biggest impact with your posts, you need to go through these three steps:
Find a relevant question
Write an informative answer
Rank first and get traffic
As you are likely to see for yourself, there are tons of questions in different categories, and they all may seem confusing at first, but obviously you don’t need to read and answer every single question on your platform. Your feed will be populated in relation to topics that you’ve chosen as your interests, but may also include other trending topics. So, what this means for you is that you can find questions regarding your niche right in your feed and instantly write your response.
The other option is to find good topics using Google. Try to think of search queries that your target audience would use to find a solution to some problem they encountered. You will see that those answers that come up in Google search are usually the best in terms of popularity and relevance. If you combine these approaches, you’ll find many questions, but the following dilemma arises: What is the best one that will help my brand to get noticed?
You can’t know for sure which question will have the biggest success, but there are a few characteristics you should take in consideration:
The popularity of the question
Number of comments
and shares
When was the last time this
question was asked
Relation to your niche
When you find the question that fits you, you should outline your response. The most important thing that you need to know is that these communities are trying to stay spam free. If you want to recommend your product or service to someone, it’s best to disclose that you are the owner of that company (or an employee) and not pretend to be an unbiased user. These communities hate spam advertising, but they appreciate when someone wants to offer them a solution to their problem. Plus, they appreciate small business owners, entrepreneurs and startups, so don’t hide your affiliations. Your text needs to be detailed, explanatory and on point. You need to provide actual value to readers in order to succeed. Don’t hesitate to share your knowledge, real-life experience and useful resources - the more you give to others, the more popular you’ll be.
Stick to the subject and give your honest opinion. Don’t just state the facts that are considered common knowledge or can be found on every website - try to give your unique perspective and interpretation.
Don’t be lazy when it comes to formatting. Use subheadings, bold and italic letters and bullet points to make your answer easy on the eyes. Add images where that can be helpful or screenshots of the process you are trying to explain. All of this will impact the ranking of your answer. These platforms favor well-written, neatly formatted and genuinely helpful content, so it’s best that you stick to those guidelines.
How to rank higher with your answers?
Now that you know how to find a good question and write great answers, it’s time to uncover how you can make the most of it. We have already mentioned that bragging and aggressive advertising don't perform well in crowd marketing, but this doesn’t mean that you can’t link to your website or point to useful resources on your blog. You can leave a link to your website if you think that the person reading your answer would benefit from it. If people find your links useful and your website is what they were looking for, then you’re on the right track. You can also link to the content/useful resources that you write for your blog. You will find new readers for your blog and possibly establish long-term connections, which will turn readers into actual leads, and hopefully convert them into paying customers.
So, we have covered everything content related, but there’s still one thing left - the upvotes and likes. Like all other social networks, crowd marketing platforms allow the community members show their appreciation or disapproval. The more engagement you have, the better your answers will rank. There’s also a commenting option. Make sure you reply to comments and stay in touch with people who left them. This will influence the performance of your answer.
Quality Content
Write in-depth, valuable answers, add images, take extra care of your formatting.
Legitimate Profile
Use your real name, list your real experience, add your picture and connect other accounts.
Earning Real Reviews
You can start off by involving your friends, but strive for the community feedback.
Crowd marketing is a long-term process
Here’s the twist: Facebook Groups, Quora, Reddit and Medium will bring you results ONLY in the long run. Don't expect immediate action. You have to build it up. Other social media networks are all fantastic promotional channels with a lot of potential, but they all have one shortcoming - the content that you post now gets lost in the feed, regardless of how good it is. When you post something of value that is highly relevant to your audience, that piece of content has a short shelf life before it gets lost. Of course, you can invest some money to increase the reach of your post and push it out to more people, but that also doesn’t last very long. This is where crowd marketing comes into play. Something that we've emphasized throughout this crowd marketing guide is the quality of your answers. What does this mean for you? It means that you’ll get traffic from all of your answers, and the older they get, more and more people will see them and interact with them. To keep this flow going, you should look back on your old answers from time to time and see if some info needs to be updated or changed.
Great content that withstood the test of time, but is also updated with the new info, will be the winning combo that will get you all the benefits crowd marketing can bring to your website. We recommend using crowd marketing strategies alongside e-mail marketing to maximize the benefits of both. Good luck!
