Crowd Marketing: What It Is & How It Works

Crowd marketing is an SEO & marketing technique used to promote brands or sites through comments and reviews on relevant social media platforms.

Each comment includes a link to the promoted website.

Comments of this type usually look like a positive personal experience that the user seeks to share with the target audience and attaches a link.

Crowd marketing isn’t a spam technique, as the reply must fit the context, be useful and natural-looking for the users. Each link is organically woven into the reply and brings value to the response.

The main goal of this marketing technique is to boost brand awareness and build quality backlinks.

Let’s talk about crowd links in more detail!

How do crowd links work?

From a marketing perspective, the goal of crowd marketing is to boost brand awareness and attract leads.

Crowd marketers use reviews and recommendations to promote a brand and show its advantages to other users.

From an SEO perspective, crowd links help to generate traffic and build quality backlinks. As mentioned above, each reply includes a link to the promoted resource.

By using high-quality resources, you’ll get natural backlinks that will improve your website’s authority.

What tasks can crowd links solve:

Crowd marketing combines PR and SEO benefits.

• brings referral traffic to your site;
• boosts brand awareness, enhances reputation;
• increases conversion rate;
• improves the behavioral factors.
• boosts rankings

Search algorithms consider links from social media platforms natural and do not distinguish such replies from ordinary comments.

Therefore, crowd links are among the most effective backlinks out there. The more high-quality do-follow links a site has, the higher it ranks.

Crowd marketing: who is it not suitable for:

If you use crowd links for link building, then it is suitable for almost all niches.

Recommended reading: SEO techniques to boost traffic;

The only caveat is that you need to monitor the quality of the sites where the links are placed. Abandoned public and spam portals are a sure way to drain your budget.

If the main goal is PR and brand-boosting, then crowd marketing is not the best option for the following business categories:

• Online stores with a large average check. It is very unlikely that someone would want to buy a house based only on a review from the Internet.
• Small offline business. Usually focused on a narrow circle of customers living in the same city or even district. The probability that they will see the review on a forum is close to zero.
• Sphere B2B. There are completely different sales rules here.

In these industries, the crowd marketing strategy is considered exclusively in the aspect of link building.

Who need crowd links?

Besides the above-mentioned categories, crowd marketing is for everyone:
Mostly it fits for:

• service companies. Boosts company trust and the conversion increases;
• online stores – attract target leads and turn them into customers.
• event agencies and event organizers – to increase awareness and audience interest;
• startups – crowd links are a must for innovative products or services.
• companies that have a poor brand image.

Popular platforms for crowd marketing

Each niche will have its own optimal options for crowd marketing. It can be social networks, forums, reviews, blogs, press.

Still, forums are a fit for most of the niches.

There is a general set of requirements that are put forward for all platforms for crowd marketing, regardless of the niche.

Make sure the resource:

• has over 50k users monthly.
• is relevant
• isn’t spammed
• the domain authority is 25+

Recommended reading: how to pick the forums for crowd marketing.

Summing up

Crowd marketing is an effective but sometimes dangerous technique.

With a poorly thought-out strategy and implementation, you can simply drain the budget and run into negative feedback on the Web.

What is the difference beetwen a quality crowd link and a harmful one:

It is critical to know the art of writing organic posts, the ability to advertise as if the information is not advertising at all.

Poor quality platforms won’t help you anyway. Make sure you use only high DA platforms that have traffic and aren’t full of spam.