With the emergence of the Internet and social media platforms with the audience of thousands and thousands of people, the concept of crowd marketing is seemingly a better marketing solution for a lot of companies.What is Crowd Marketing?A popular marketing technique in which a business connects to an influencer, who is in direct contact with the target market of the product that the business is marketing. The proliferation of social media networks including the Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google+ and many other, crowd marketing has gained increased popularity among marketers as being a cheap, effective and the easiest way to reach target consumer. Unlike many other marketing strategies, the target market reach of can be monitored in terms of measurable indicators such as likes, shares, reviews, retweets, feedbacks etc. In essence, crowd marketing techniques are focused on increasing website traffic, lifting search engine rank and strengthening the brand position. The main difference between techniques like Social Media Marketing (SMM), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the crowded marketing technique is that the later technique directly approaches to target consumers rather than focusing on the general public. One of the good examples of crowd marketing may be the celebrity endorsement technique. In this technique, a business identifies celebrities that already have a large fan base among the target market niche of the business; the business pays the celebrity to endorse its product among its target consumers. It is an effective way because people tend to be influenced by celebrities, their lifestyles and what they recommend. Such marketing technique is also used to approach the target market directly as long as the influencing celebrity personality, as well as his fan base among the target market population, are properly selected.Crowd Marketing TechniquesThe most popular techniques most recently rely on the social media platform and utilize the power of content marketing to enhance target market reach. Since social media has become an integral part of people’s lives, one of the most effective platforms is Facebook, which has over 1,500 million active users. Targeting Facebook as a platform to reach the target market has been popular these days. The technique is straightforward -leveraging content marketing method to attract the target market population among Facebook users. In this method, the business creates a compelling content, mostly product or brand-related videos, and finds an effective way to publish it over the Facebook that will ensure most return on investment. Usually, celebrity pages, celebrity accounts where many people keep their attention and the paid advertisement that is boosted by the Facebook to help reach increased customer base are utilized as crowd marketing technique over the Facebook. The number of likes, shares, and comments can be used as a measure of the success of the campaign. The most effective way to reach target market is to utilize the key influence of the business niche. Identifying target consumers, their behaviors and whom or what they follow can make the difference. If the key influencer of the target audience can be identified and can be used to endorse the product or brand, the success of convincing the audience about the reliability and superiority of the business goes higher.The Power of Social MediaAnother effective technique that warrants success is to use tools that help the business with key insights of the marketing as related to social and content marketing wings of crowd marketing. For example, few web applications help the business identify the target audience of a product, their key influencer, their position and location within web domain and provides with the best crowd marketing strategy starting from content recommendation to target markets locating. These tools make implementation of your marketing strategies easier and more effective.The Lego Group, children’s toy builder company, has been leveraging the concept of crowd marketing since the 90′s; it has used the Internet effectively to transform website traffic into effective customers and revenues. The key idea to engage target customers from around the world is novel and simple – it asks toy builders and idea-makers to share their ideas about new toys. These ideas are published on the website and are open to million enthusiastic audiences. Any builder can upload his unique design built out of the combination of thousands of different block pieces. The models are placed to audiences for marking and the models that get highest marks are chosen for the award. Moreover, the company uses fans’ ideas and models to build its toys from. Recently, it has created builds from the theme of the movie “Star Wars” and “Lord of the Rings”, which are the most popular builds from the company for years. The company has been adopting social media-based marketing campaign to increase its audience reach and enhance revenues. Last year, the company has earned about $4 trillion in revenue, most of which can be attributed to the crowd marketing strategy. Crowd marketing has also enabled it to become a global brand. The success of the company may be set as an example for all businesses who wish to adopt crowd marketing strategies.
Build Your Brand With A Marketing Strategy
The majority of small-time online businesses do not bother with branding, thinking that the latter is only for large companies or those with a big marketing budget. However, applying the habits of a big business to your own small website by developing a brand marketing strategy can help your sales to climb, and help you to make a bigger profit this year than in any other year. By designing and applying a brand to your own company, no matter whether you are selling products or offering a service, you can encourage potential clients into your website, and persuade them to stay long enough to make a purchase. Brand building can also help you to develop long-term relationships with your clients, a significant step when you want to make a living from a business website.
The first steps towards promotional branding of your product involves developing an action plan and setting aside a reasonable budget. This often means creating a brand marketing strategy, beginning with working out what your customers want from your brand, and moving towards an appropriate brand for your website, complete with a ‘brand promise’, a set of ideals and values which visitors to your site will associate with your brand. In most cases, it is a good idea to employ an expert to create this brand for you, as they are more likely to be able to spot gaps in the market which your products can fill, and will also ensure that the brand matches your website’s themes.
One of the most important early stages in your brand building strategy will involve the creation of an image. Many small businesses start with a picture. This can be a photograph of yourself, or perhaps of a pile of books, or maybe even a hand-drawn image by a friend or relation. This picture should represent exactly what you want the clients to think about you, and represent the products or services that you are offering. For example, if you work from home and offer IT services, you may want to consider a brand marketing strategy image that involves a photograph of yourself sitting at your computer, perhaps with books or computer DVDs on a shelf behind you. This image will help to represent you at your work, and your client will not have to look at the text to understand that you are offering a from-home internet based service.
Short and simple messages like this form the basis of any great brand marketing strategy. You should not need a lot of text or content to get your brand’s message across to the client, and if you are finding it hard to create a brand that does this easily, then you may want to consider talking to an expert and asking them for advice or tips about how to create the brand perfectly. Once you understand how to get your message to the client without having to write them an essay, you should find that your brand evolves naturally to suit your own needs and what you want to offer to potential customers.
There are so many different ways to extend your brand marketing strategy once you have developed the design and color scheme of the brand that you can sometimes be spoiled for choice. You might want to look into promoting your website through audio and video messages, and there are plenty of places on the web that provide free hosting sites for these brand messages. With this method, you can get attention for your website from people who like to use video hosting services or listen to audio broadcasts.
You should also concentrate upon the basics of any brand marketing strategy, including regular creation of different content for your website. Content for your site is essential, and you will have to make sure that you regularly write new texts in order to be interesting to visitors of your website. Once you have rewritten content for the site itself, you can also work at spreading that content to other areas, including writing essays for article directories, with a link back to your site.
Any modern brand marketing strategy should also try and make an impact through social media networks. These allow a brand greater access to the general public, and can also bring in new clients through connections to your social media pages.
Digital Marketing to Promote Businesses to Greater Heights of Success
Conventional or off-line marketing has existed since the beginning of history. But, these days, if a business is to achieve success then, there is just no better alternative to on-line marketing. To put it in short, on-line or digital marketing is all about promoting a business across the virtual domain of the Internet. Some of the core strategies for this line of marketing include web designing, email marketing, social media promotion, search engine optimisation, content marketing including videos and others. This modern marketing concept is potential enough to make or break major international brands and small-scale startup businesses, along with everything that range in between.Overlapping domains of conventional and digital marketingAny marketing approach through digital media channels is digital or on-line marketing. The domain of digital media is fast expanding. Presently, social media channels, websites, TV, radio, mobile handsets and even non digital media like billboards and transit displays are considered as digital marketing components. In other words, at present, conventional marketing include aspects like P2P (person to person) marketing, elements of direct marketing that on-line marketing does not cover and print advertising. Actually, the domains of off-line and on-line marketing are fast overlapping each other. Elements of traditional marketing like on-line directories, URL landing pages, web banner advertising, QR codes and others have a strong connection with on-line marketing.Reasons to assign greater importance to digital mediaIt is not just marketers and business owners who are driving the shift to digital media. Even consumers are contributing to this phase change. The majority of digital media channels, including various social media platforms and websites, can be more easily tracked. Whereas, print media and other traditional marketing approaches are hardly easy in that aspect.In contrast to traditional advertising, its on-line counterpart is much cost-effective. Unlike running conventional advertising, one does not need to invest a fortune in running on-line advertising campaigns. The modern advertising approach is equally ideal for small, medium and large-scale businesses, as well as for startup brands.These days, consumers do not flip through yellow-pages or directories anymore, to find any business to avail its products or services. They Google the required information, either using their hand-held mobiles, laptops or desktops. Thus, businesses hardly have any better alternative other than depending on on-line marketing using the platform of digital media.Dependable web solutions companiesIn this vastly changed landscape, businesses need to hire reliable web solutions-providers. Actually, modern marketing efforts for businesses revolve around building smart and business-friendly websites. A corporate website should ideally represent both the business and the brand. It is also important to ensure that it is easily navigable and user-friendly. Last but never the least, businesses need to invest on optimising their websites, so that the sites rank higher in SERP (Search Engine Result Page).There are many freelancers, providing web design, development and SEO services at reasonable rates. It is better to pay a higher price and hire a professional brand that provides comprehensive web solutions than working with freelancers. There are many brands that provide a wide and impressive range of services including web design, search engine optimisation (SEO), content marketing, PPC advertising, social media marketing and many more. Hiring such companies will give better mileage in course of time.