It has always been a somewhat difficult job to create engaging and relevant content for marketing professionals tasked with having to come up with new and interesting material for their company’s digital marketing campaigns. Not only is this a very time-consuming activity, but it involves tons of research before actually even getting to the point where content can be created.
There has just never been an easy way to accomplish any of the tasks related to digital marketing, especially the part involving the production of new topics, and digital content which will be of interest to targeted users. Crowdsourcing is something that has the potential to ease the burden on a digital marketing specialist because it actually involves your target audience in the whole process of creating digital content.
Along the way, it also has a very useful quality of establishing built-in interest for some of your digital posts and generating the kind of results that digital marketers can be very happy with.
Traditional marketing versus crowdsourcing
In the not too distant past, digital marketing amounted to a one-way conversation, but that all changed during a social media revolution which completely upset the status quo for digital marketing. At that time, consumers were asked to take a role in digital marketing for their favorite brands, thus giving consumers a much more active voice in determining the kind of marketing that was created.
Digital marketing today includes the very necessary aspect of reaching out to your target audience, so as to significantly improve engagement with all the posts made to the social media and elsewhere. Crowdsourcing has become a major component of most companies’ digital strategies and is an absolute must for those companies wishing to maintain a highly interactive digital marketing presence on social media.
The days of traditional marketing in which advertisers and marketers simply pushed out content in the hopes of generating interest among their targeted users is quickly going by the wayside. Instead, modern digital marketing strategy recognizes that users are a major component of overall marketing efforts and that their input is crucial for establishing and maintaining interest.
Creating a crowdsourcing strategy
Crowdsourcing is a fantastic tool which should be added to every digital marketer’s overall strategy, simply because it incorporates active involvement from your digital audience, and because it goes straight to the heart of what marketing is all about. It finds out what is on the minds of consumers, including all their wants, needs, and pain points, which is basically the entire thrust of what a digital marketing campaign should include.
In order to get started with your own crowdsourcing initiative, here are some steps you can take:
- Establish a goal – before crowdsourcing your next major social media post, it’s very important to establish what your goal with that post will be. You should identify a precise target audience, and how you will reach out to them.
Understand your target audience – after you have established your crowdsourcing post goal, your next step should be to narrow down exactly who your target audience is and to try to understand them. If you can get inside the heads of your targeted users, you will be able to identify their interests, where they get their information from, and how they spend most of their time online.- Develop a strategy for reaching out – in order to conduct an effective crowdsourcing campaign, it will be essential for you to actually connect with your target audience, which means you’ll have to do some research in order to find out what will motivate your chosen audience to respond to your posts.
- Create your posts – using the information gained from all the steps above, you should now be ready to create content which will appeal to your chosen audience. If you have correctly assessed your audience’s wants and needs, you may hit the jackpot and have them share your post among all their friends and acquaintances, thereby making your campaign much more effective.
Understand your target audience – after you have established your crowdsourcing post goal, your next step should be to narrow down exactly who your target audience is and to try to understand them. If you can get inside the heads of your targeted users, you will be able to identify their interests, where they get their information from, and how they spend most of their time online.Importance of active communication
The key to making crowdsourcing work as it was intended, is to constantly maintain active communications with your target group. This will provide you with feedback from those people you are most interested in, and it will maintain interaction between you, your audience, and your company brand, which will be essential in the creation of your various social media posts.
From the standpoint of a digital marketer, crowdsourcing can be used in any number of ways, for instance in market research, communications, new product development, product testing, and a number of other initiatives related to marketing in general.
Important crowdsourcing points to keep in mind
The way to start any crowdsourcing initiative is to communicate with your existing customers, regardless of what your strategy might be for acquiring new customers. In most cases, your existing customers will be quite willing to become involved, because everyone is flattered when their opinion is valued and their input is solicited.
Another very important thing to keep in mind is that you should use all channels available to you for communicating with your target audience. This means you should be active in all the social media that you’re planning to use, as well as your website, and any other channels which will provide you with access to your chosen audience. In order to get the best results from crowdsourcing, it’s essential that you make use of all channels at your disposal.
One last critical point in crowdsourcing is to attempt to identify subject matter experts from within your target audience. If you can connect with very knowledgeable individuals who have a special familiarity with your main marketing topic, their feedback will be far more valuable to you, and it can boost the significance and reliability of all posts that you make. Involving your target audience in the creation of digital marketing posts is something that can take away much of the stress of digital marketing, and it can also make your posts much more in tune with your target audience.
