How you can use crowdsourcing in your digital marketing strategy
Creating digital marketing content is a labour intensive when done regularly many marketing professionals often feel overwhelmed by having to create interesting and relevant content constantly. If you are executing your digital marketing strategy and sometimes feel like this – you are not alone.
Crowdsourcing is a new way to look at digital marketing and is a handy solution to eliminate difficulties that go hand in hand with coming up with new topics and interesting digital content.
What is crowdsourcing?
In a nutshell, crowdsourcing is the act of involving your audience in the process of digital content creation. It’s an effective way to drum up interest in your digital posts and drive the results you want from your posts.
Crowdsourcing vs traditional marketing
Not so long-ago Digital Marketing was a one-way conversation. Then came the social media revolution which changed everything, and consumers were given a voice and asked to take an active role in their favourite brand’s digital marketing. Now digital marketing involves reaching out to your target audience to improve engagement with your social media posts.
Crowdsourcing should now be a part of your digital strategy and is a must in the social media interactive digital marketing. It’s a good idea to complete a digital marketing course to enable you to create an expert crowdsourcing strategy.
So as a digital marketer you will be asking, ‘how do I include crowdsourcing as an important part of my digital marketing strategy?
The basics of creating a crowdsourcing digital marketing strategy
Crowdsourcing is not only about creating interactive involvement with your digital audience, executed well crowdsourcing is a great tool to add to your strategy.
Here are a few guidelines to getting started with crowdsourcing:
- Determine your goal – It’s crucial to figure out what your ultimate goal is before crowdsourcing your next big social media post. You’ll need to determine who you want to reach out to and how to do it.
- Understand your chosen crowd – After determining the goal of your crowdsourcing post, it’s time to start refining your crowd. It’s important to understand your crowd – including their interests, where they source their information from and where they spend most of their time online.
- Create a reach-out strategy – To execute a crowdsourcing strategy effectively it’s important to actually connect with your chosen crowd. You’ll need to do some research to find out what interests them enough to respond to your post.
- Create and post – Keeping in mind the content gained from your crowdsourcing interaction you are now ready to promote to the masses. Using your feedback, you are ready to post, remember to include your list as they will likely share it among their networks as well.
Active communication with consumers is key
From a digital marketing perspective crowdsourcing can be used in various marketing methods such as market research, communication, new product development and testing as well as many other marketing related initiatives.
Actively communicating with your targeted audience through crowdsourcing creates interaction with you and your brand and enables your audience to contribute actively in your various social media posts.
Crowdsourcing points to remember
- Talk to your existing customers – Start by communicating with your existing customers no matter what your digital marketing strategy’s end goal is. You will be pleasantly surprised at just how much they’re willing to get involved and communicate.
- Use all existing communication channels – It’s important to actively use all your social media channels when embarking on a crowdsourcing campaign. There is little use in posting on only one social media channel asking your audience to get involved, if the same is not added to your website or all of your social media channels.
- Identify subject matter experts – Connecting with a subject matter expert on your chosen topic is a key point in your crowdsourcing strategy. Getting quality interaction will boost the importance and reliability of your post.
Crowdsourcing conclusion
Involving your customers and your target audience in your digital marketing is critical to the success of your posts. It’s a great and convenient way to create engagement, product improvement and your overall online reputation.