CROWD MARKETING: WHAT IS IT?

Crowd marketing skillfully combines the concepts of crowd and marketing to increase brand or website awareness. It leverages social media, forums, marketplaces and various platforms visited by target users with feedback comments that offer nuanced recommendations. 

Organically incorporated crowd-links in comment texts are seen by search engines as natural, not promotional, boosting site rankings without risking Google penalties. The more quality backlinks a site has online, the more search engines trust the web resource.

What is it about?

• How does crowd marketing work?
• Who needs crowd marketing?
• Types and Strategies of Crowd Marketing
• Crowd marketing tools and its principles
• Types of platforms for crowd marketing
• Conclusions

Frequently asked questions

How does crowd marketing work?

Crowd link placement is managed by a crowd marketer or a person responsible for the company’s reputation. An SEO specialist can place backlinks on various platforms, provided the publication is thoughtfully planned in terms of the quality of these platforms and the value of the comments. Many confuse crowd marketing with link building, although link building is a broader concept and the tool itself is significantly more expensive.

The more backlinks to a web resource, the better it should rank in search results. Primarily, crowd links should work on the brand’s reputation and help potential clients.

Effective crowd marketing requires the executor to have a creative approach, understand the target audience, and be able to express ideas concisely, interestingly, and without overt advertising. The specialist posting such backlinks must also understand where, when, and in what format to make publications.

A crowd specialist focuses on:

• selecting communities on social networks, forums, and other platforms with large coverage of the company’s target audience;
• searching for relevant discussion threads (in some cases, creating new ones);
• writing reviews about the company or a specific product in the form of a response to a user’s question, offering advice, and sharing experiences;
• adding links to the text in a way that looks harmonious and isn’t the central part of the comment;
• monitoring activity on the page and communicating with users who have responded to their comment.

Before starting crowd marketing for a company, it’s essential to thoroughly understand the business’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP), target audience profile, and market positioning. Instead of talking about everything at once, it’s better to promote a specific feature of a product or service, inform about discounts, or free opportunities (lead magnet).

For example, if smartphones are being discussed on a forum, one could suggest a model and add a link to the store or just mention its name. It’s unnecessary to list all the product and company benefits; the comment format could be something like this:

“I bought the iPhone 14 Plus at site.com. It came with a free screen protector, they set up the programs for me, and I liked everything. If you’re looking for one in Berlin, you can check out ‘Store’ on X Avenue, and there are a few more centers around the city”.

The goal of crowd marketing is to help the person, provide an expert answer, and invite them to the website or a physical retail location. This differs from spam, where the user’s inquiries are not considered, and all efforts are solely focused on spreading backlinks. This type of marketing is comprehensive, combining the benefits of sales stimulation, SERM (Search Engine Reputation Management), and SEO.

Key Tasks of Crowd Marketing

• Increase Traffic. Posts on social media, reviews, and comments with backlinks can significantly boost your website’s visits. It’s important to choose the right sources—they should be relevant and regularly updated.
• Improve Search Ranking. A lot of backlinks positively affect SEO. This and the previous point combine crowd marketing with link building. The following tasks are specific to crowd marketing only.
• Enhance Behavioral Factors. Targeted visitors decrease the bounce rate and increase the depth of page views, which is good for ranking.
• Boost Conversion. Crowd marketing involves a subtle way to stimulate sales. It prepares users to interact with the company in a way similar to the correct application of native advertising.
• Improve Product and Marketing Materials. Direct communication with your target audience and constant monitoring of their comments allow you to adapt content and communication style for each channel, improve the service or product, or even change positioning based on potential client requests.
• Enhance Reputation. Brand recognition will continuously grow if you work on platforms where different target audience segments are present.
• Reach a New Audience. Popular thematic platforms gather people by interests. A large number of potential clients could come to your site from such platforms if they find a marketer’s comment interesting within the scope of crowd marketing.

Additionally, crowd marketing constantly promotes word-of-mouth. Not all consumers spend time on forums, not all communicate in thematic communities.

Who Needs Crowd Marketing?

Crowd marketing, as one of the SEO tools, is suitable for everyone, regardless of the industry. Any website will benefit from increasing backlinks, improving its promotion in search engines. However, when it comes to other tasks of crowd marketing, it can be one of the main directions in the brand promotion strategy for such a business.

In Which Sectors is Crowd Marketing Appropriate?

• companies providing services in the B2C sector;
• e-commerce stores (selling specific products, increasing profits during promotions);
• event agencies, event organizers;
• startups, innovative projects.

In such cases, crowd marketing becomes the main direction of SERM (Search Engine Reputation Management), not just SEO. Since its planning and implementation are part of the overall efforts to improve brand reputation, crowd marketing is essential for companies that are subject to negative rumors.

Which Business Categories is it Not Suitable For?

• B2B sector. Entrepreneurs and company leaders are familiar with various methods of gaining consumer trust. To increase their loyalty, different methods should be used, including case studies, recommendations, portfolios, and other proofs of quality.
• Companies with a high average check. If a potential client is choosing a car, real estate, expensive jewelry, or another costly item, they will not seek advice from strangers on a forum.
• Small offline business. For cafes, beauty salons, sports centers, and other physical establishments, it’s better to focus on attracting local consumers, namely through contextual advertising, social media promotion, and outdoor advertising.

It’s important to carefully select platforms for posting backlinks, considering user activity. Publishing a link to your site can even harm ranking if the platform has too many backlinks to other web resources and too few active users, or if comments have not been updated for a long time.

Types and Strategies of Crowd Marketing

Crowd marketing includes content creation, communication with potential clients, promotion on social networks, search engine optimization, and lead generation. It’s a powerful tool for influencing specific target audience segments without reaching an unnecessary number of readers, allowing efforts to be focused exclusively on those interested in the product. It can take various forms. Let’s name the main types of crowd marketing.

• Comments on forums and in social networks with an active link.
• Comments on the same platforms without a link, but with the name of the brand, product, specialist, or establishment.
• Publications on behalf of users on review sites and question-and-answer (Q/A) platforms.
• Communication with users on behalf of the company. Depending on where your target audience spends time, you should create business accounts on LinkedIn, Twitter, Yelp, Google My Business, etc.

Crowd Marketing Strategies

Classic Crowd Marketing

A marketer joins communities and registers on online platforms where participants discuss topics related to the company’s product. For example, if a forum thread is titled “Base and top for gel polish. Your favorites”, it would be appropriate to recommend a specific brand in the comments. A quality comment should include a brief justification of the opinion and highlight a particular feature of the product.

Backlink Generation

This strategy also involves responses on forums or other platforms, though they may be less informative. The selection of platforms is not as strict as with classic crowd marketing. The main goal is to create link weight for the site. This positively affects site traffic and ranking in search engines.

Placing backinks where competitors are already present

After analyzing platforms for backlinks to your direct competitors, it’s wise to place a backlink to your site on popular resources.

Guerilla Marketing

This method is well-known in various aspects of brand promotion. When it comes to crowd marketing, it involves placing backlinks specifically targeting media-savvy, popular competitors. Typically, the commentators of their publications are active users, your potential clients, who may be looking for the same quality at a lower price, etc.

Content Distribution

The main task of a marketer is to regularly generate quality texts, videos, etc., and publish all this across different channels, including blogs, social networks, email newsletters, and so on. The content being distributed should be unique. It’s advisable to include hyperlinks in UGC (User-Generated Content) type texts.

“Creating content generates three times more potential clients than traditional marketing, and costs 62% less. This means you should invest in writing articles and combine them with other forms of content, such as images, videos, infographics, memes, podcasts, etc.”

“Crowd Marketing—Definition, Basic Principles and Tools“, Alice Jones

Reputation Management

It’s necessary to create a reliable profile on several platforms, subsequently promoting brand values that meet the expectations of the target audience on them. It’s crucial to promptly respond to questions and complaints from clients, thanking those who write positive reviews. This strategy is more functional, as it offers additional benefits. In particular, surveys can be used on these platforms to study the target audience and improve the product, and contests can be conducted to increase reader engagement.

Testing MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

A forum is a great place to test a new business hypothesis. You can create a project presentation, a brief description, or a demo version to get feedback from potential customers. For example, on the website reddit.com, you can find a relevant audience and get free marketing research before launching the product.

All strategies share a common goal—to establish authority on topics discussed by users on the platform. Firstly, marketers increase the number of backlinks to the web resource on authoritative sites with high traffic and good ratings. Secondly, a positive brand reputation is formed. At the same time, information about the company or product or service is placed on behalf of a consumer who is not interested in advertising the product.

Crowd Marketing Tools and Its Principles

The best and simplest way to find thematic platforms for posting crowd content is to “google” it. To select relevant pages, you should enter your key query into the Google search bar. In the “Search Tools” menu, it’s essential to specify time limits—a week or a month.

For example, if we’re looking for users searching for a lawyer in the capital, we enter “forum lawyers Kyiv” into the search. The first results are advertisements. Scroll down, and we see forums and sites with questions and answers, reviews.

There are special search constructs for finding discussion threads on various topics:

keyword + inurl:forum;

keyword + inurl:thread.

Crowd Marketing Automation

If you don’t have time to search for suitable platforms for crowd marketing, you can use special programs and services:

• Google Alerts;
• BuzzBundle;
• Disqus;
• Mention;
• Zenlink.

Crowd marketing does not yield quick results. It involves the continuous publication of backlinks, and thus, the continuous generation of content for them. For an online store, this could mean over 100 backlinks for each product category.

How to Make Your Backlinks More Valuable

• Authenticity of Comments. A common mistake by crowd marketers is copying their own texts and reposting them online. All posts must be original, otherwise, search engines and users might perceive them as spam.
• Engaging with the Audience. Responding to user questions is key to building strong relationships with the target audience. It’s important to react to both negative and positive comments.
• Non-Commercial Format. Avoid commercial words in backlinks (like “buy”, “order”, etc.).
• Use of Ordinary Links, without UTM tags or shorteners. Ordinary users do not use link-forming services; they simply add a URL to their text.
• Testing Platforms. Try all platforms that generate a lot of traffic and are popular with your potential clients. Determine where you get the most feedback and focus on these platforms.
• Community Building. It’s not enough to just comment on other people’s posts—you should register your company on relevant aggregators, ensure your brand’s presence in various rankings, and professionally manage profiles on social networks.

Types of platforms for crowd marketing

Choosing Platforms for Publishing Crowd Content depends on the business sphere, as it determines where the majority of the target audience spends their time.

Forums

For example, for a children’s food store, monitoring discussions on a forum for mothers would be relevant. At the same time, women write not only about child care on this platform. Here, you can find almost any women’s topic.

Sometimes, comments with backlinks do not pass moderation. To be safe, we recommend occasionally writing the name of the brand or store without the website address.

To ensure the comment does not appear too promotional or fake, it’s worth working on a series of responses, i.e., initiating a dialogue with the author of the thematic thread.

Crowd marketing can be an important component of a personal brand promotion strategy. For example, when someone in the comments recommends a specific specialist, YouTube blogger, or another person, who can be found on Google without needing a direct link.

Among the disadvantages of forums for crowd marketing are the need for registration, the lengthy search for fresh and active discussions on the topic, and the importance of gradually “blending in” to the conversation.

News and Expert Blogs

News and information sites allow commenting on content. Amidst lively communication, you can try to disguise a link for crowd marketing.

Review Sites

On platforms like Glassdoor, Trustpilot, you can leave an opinion about any product or company. Reviews should be published on behalf of a consumer. A separate strategy is creating a company profile to receive reviews and communicate with customers.

Marketplaces

Sites that allow comparing prices for the same product from different sellers—like Amazon, Best Buy—are very popular. In many cases, potential clients choose a seller with the most positive reviews, not the one with the lowest cost of goods or services.

Social Networks

Users spend significantly more time on social networks than on forums and aggregators, making it one of the most effective platforms for crowd marketing. Effective methods include initiating discussions in comments under popular posts as well as creating an official company account and encouraging writing reviews.

A common mistake by business owners trying to promote their brand on social media is commenting on others’ publications without considering the context. If a post is about a fashionable look, and the overall theme of the influencer’s blog is related to stylish clothing, subscribers are unlikely to be interested in switching to a page about mental arithmetic or easy earning. This is more reminiscent of spam.

Reddit

Separately, it’s worth mentioning Q/A sites. These resources are designed for users to get answers to questions on a variety of topics. They are very popular in the Western market. The most striking example is reddit.com, with traffic of over 1.5 billion per month. This platform ranks among the top 20 most popular sites in the USA and top 35 in the world.

On Reddit, absolutely everything is discussed, and among fresh topics, one can find those related to searching for products in the needed sector, such as hair care products.

Informative comments contain substantiated advice. Often instead of backlinks, only brand names are mentioned. A marketer can easily take on the role of a user and describe the advantages of their product in relation to the discussed criteria.

In second place is quora.com. The list continues with platforms like stackexchange.com, answers.yahoo.com, slant.co, gutefrage.net, and others.

Conclusions

The key difference between crowd marketing and traditional SEO, SMM, SERM, and PR lies in the fact that content simultaneously performs several functions, and its presentation style is soft and informative, without advertising and direct calls to action. Recommendations are directed at users who want to purchase a specific product. That is, a crowd marketer works with a “warm” base, which only needs a slight push towards making a purchase by providing expert opinions and backlinks to the site.

Crowd marketing is an effective tool in SEO promotion. It allows increasing the weight of backlinks, improving the behavioral characteristics of the site, and increasing targeted traffic. From a PR perspective, crowd content raises brand awareness, helps to capture potential customers who were already half a step away from turning to competitors.

This method is not suitable for business owners and marketers who want immediate results, or sell very expensive premium-class products. However, it is an optimal and budget-friendly approach for B2C representatives with a small average check, for bloggers and private entrepreneurs who want to develop a personal brand, as well as for event agencies and startups.