Crowd Marketing:
Get Someone Else To Do
Your Online Marketing

By Matthew Yeoman

Many businesses immediately think that the best way to market via endorsements is with celebrities: Beckham, Messi, A-Rod, LeBron, and countless other sports stars can tell you this. But what about you, the average company who doesn’t have the marketing dollar that Nike or Adidas has?

An affordable variety of celebrity endorsement marketing is called crowd marketing. Crowd marketing is when you take the idea of marketing via famous personalities, and focus it on a key viral influencer. This is a strategy that a leading Los Angeles SEO agency heavily considers as part of their digital marketing campaigns.

Crowd Marketing Defined

Crowd marketing is when a business connects with an important influencer. A viral influencer is someone who has a large online audience that they engage with. Working with these people helps a business cut down on the amount of time they spend building up their own social media followers – they borrow the audience from the viral influencer.

The benefit is that instead of paying Leo Messi large amounts of money for a whole bunch of people who may be completely unrelated to your marketing goals, you pay a smaller amount for the viral influencer who speaks directly with an audience relevant to you.

Look at it like this: you pay Peyton Manning to endorse your new smartphone because Peyton has a lot of people who respect him, and perhaps a million or more fans. You know that a certain percentage of those fans will want to buy a smartphone at some point. The problem is that you pay five times NFL MVP money, but he isn’t throwing touchdowns for you with every fan of his.

Crowd marketing focuses on having a better ROI by getting around the shotgun approach of celebrity endorsements. You focus on a viral influencer who has already connected a part of your target market. This makes it possible for a crowd marketing campaign to be cheaper as you’re not paying for 13 Pro Bowl appearances, you’re paying for an audience that is much more focused.

An Actual Example of Crowd Marketing

Here’s an example of crowd marketing in action with Philip DeFranco, a well known YouTube personality. In this video he is sponsored by For Human Peoples, an online retailer that is just perfect for Phil’s audience of young, well connected Internet users who love the type of nerdy/geeky merchandise that they sell.

Phil’s involvement with them has already done its exact job. I just recommended something off the For Human Peoples site to a friend of mine who was immediately interested “Matthew, U just made my week. I must have this poster!!” was his exact quote! Phil and For Human Peoples working together is a perfect example of crowd marketing.

 

Other Strengths of Crowd Marketing

Crowd marketing borrows from Google’s Page Rank concept. You’re essentially doing what I’d like to dub “social optimization.” Take a look at this cartoon image of Page Rank:

 

In it, the viral influencers are the larger balls. Ideally, you’ll want to go with the largest one within your budget and target market. To use the example above, Phil is the big yellow ball. I am the blue ball telling my friends about products by For Humans Peoples. The green balls are the people that are the ultimate target audience.

As you can guess, crowd marketing frequently butts heads with viral marketing. Incorporating viral marketing into your crowd marketing is a must as your message will spread even faster.

Examples of where you can use crowd marketing are:

  • YouTube
  • Facebook
  • Vimeo
  • SoundCloud
  • Twitter

You’ll know that you’re doing it right when you see your subscribers, followers, shares, likes, retweets, views, and other social engagement increase. Oh yeah, your sales will go up too!

How Do You Connect With The Viral Influencers Who Speak With Your Audience

This can be a time consuming process as you first have to research your target market, and then you have to research the people who speak to this target audience. It’s similar to figuring out TV demographics and the best time to air your commercial.

  1. Look through your follower lists on your social media platforms. Start with the most popular account, or the one that you want to use for your crowd marketing.
  2. Look for trends in who they follow. Are many of them interested in a certain vlogger? An Instagram account? Track them so that you have actual data.
  3. Once you have a list influencers, look at which of them has a platform and audience that is relevant to your goals. For example, if you are trying to increase your Twitter followers, but find a popular YouTuber, it may be better to keep looking for a Twitter user rather than hope for cross promotion.
  4. This is the truly hard part – approaching those viral influencers and getting them to work with you. Some won’t ever allow for sponsorship, others will work with you but make certain demands on what’s allowed. This is the part where you have to have some negotiation skills, and know your budget and ROI goals.

The first three parts will not be as difficult as you think. Time consuming, but manageable. Finding viral influencers that actually want to work with you, however, can be the real challenge. You could have spent days finding the perfect influencer, located them, and then been told that they’re not willing to allow for sponsorship. Some YouTube users may make more money than you do, why would they give up their platform if their ROI doesn’t make sense?

With some work, some great content, and keen negotiating skills you can make crowd marketing work for you. You’ll see an increase in your social signals, brand exposure, and your bottom line.

 


Matthew Yeoman is the writer over on the Devumi.com Social Media Marketing Blog. You can find him there every Friday writing about ways to increase your Twitter followers, maximize your YouTube, and get your SoundCloud pumping, along with general social media news, views, and commentary.