There’s no question hiring professionals to improve your online presence can oftentimes bring results. On the other hand, it can also generate massive expenses due to their high talent fees. Not to mention, numerous deliberations and discussions, that they unconsciously make everything quite confusing and complicated when all you want is to plan and launch a simple campaign. And let’s be realistic here, much to the desire of those relatively new online business ventures, acquiring an internet marketing guru may be one of the first things you want to do to market your business via social media, and also the last thing in your prioity because of financial and connection matters.
This is when and where you should thank friends, families and other influencers – regardless if they have yet to LIKE and FOLLOW your company’s social media entity account or not. These aforementioned social network staples can help you switch on the “lightbulb moment” to increase the profitability and visibility of your online business. This is called “Crowdsourcing”.
Crowdsourcing: Simple and Effective
Permission to skip the “Jeff Howe’s Wired article” approach to provide the coining and the origin of the word, as it has been repeatedly discussed on numerous blog posts. Instead, we’ll give you our own definition and understanding of the word.
Crowdsourcing is an act to seek help and services from other people/general public whom are not a direct employee of the company to be able to achieve a certain task. To simplify, it is an open call for solicitation of any form of voluntary contribution in order to achieve a certain goal – be it for business, charity, information dissemination or setting of trend. A good scenario of this is when Habitat for Humanity asks volunteers to help them build houses for the homeless.
In business, crowdsourcing is when you ask the people to render their time/services in order to perform a specific task, that of a traditional worker or employee. In the age of Internet, crowdsourcing is an effective way to capture the interests of the public, and most especially your niche, through considerable participation in certain activities, and at the same time, drawing traffic to your business website.
Get the Job Done Right
The use of crowdsourcing to draw more results in terms of input, traffic and sales is relatively achievable, especially when done right. One does not simply ask the public to simply deliver any form of work or favor. To be able for the public to render their participation, your overall “invitation” must be compelling or intriguing enough for the crowd to be engaged to. Here are some ideal strategies:
A. Say it by asking it – Think of it as a random research team/product endorsers. This is normally used to gather information from a niche or the entire netizens. Whether using the “Ask Question” feature on Facebook or simply by posting a tweet via Twitter, you will be able to acquire specific answers that vital for the marketing improvement of your business, its online nature, content refurbishing, as well as to know what your audience really wants in terms of the goods/services your offer and the satisfaction they’ve experienced with it. This usually works on petition calls, invites, survey-type marketing strategies, photo/video submissions and quiz-type posts.
B. Throw a Contest – Contests are usually online marketer’s weapon of choice, as it can easily draw attention, especially when the coveted price is worth the participation. In addition, this gives participants a sense of belongingness and gratification just by simply being a part of the project. Some examples of this are can be seen on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter entity accounts, most notably designing contests, “Caption This” games and other interactive marketing schemes.
C. Recognize! – Apart from the price and/or anything in exchange for their services, one of the reasons why your audience accepts your brand’s challenge is that they want recognition and credits for their work or contribution by including their names on the credentials of the team, as well as some limited merchandize that comes with the sponsor package. This is pretty much common for those crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter, ArtisteConnect, IndieGoGo and Spot.Us to name a few.
D. Use Crowdsourcing Services – Using crowdsourcing sites can oftentimes bring you the right people for a specific work. More so, it can even extend the reach of your brand in terms of web traffic, higher SEO rankings and acquiring wider range of ideas. This is ideal for attending to a much-detailed project, and needs a more sifted and detailed set of skills.
Why the need to crowdsource for your online business?
Aside from having direct communications with your audience – which is essential for the online presence of your business – crowdsourcing can be cost-effective in terms bypassing personnel to do marketing research. This strategy can immediately deliver results coming straight from your audience. Another thing is that in crowdsourcing, ownership of works, trademarks and copyrights can be owned mutually by the creator and the company, depending on the mechanics imposed by the latter.
Moreover, crowdsourcing may improve the performance of your business online by means of obtaining ideas from the audience through constant online participation.
All in all, crowdsourcing can go hand-in-hand with strategizing your next online marketing move. It may take a few tries to perfect this model. In the end, this will benefit most online businesses. After all, “Two heads are better than one”, as they say.
Want to dig deeper about different online marketing models that will suit your online business? Simply visit Cybertegic’s official website to get an online business marketing consultation for FREE!
