Crowd Marketing: How to Strengthen Your Backlink Profile in 2024?

Crowd marketing is a great way to promote yourself by leveraging the power of online communities, social networks, and user-generated content.

How does it differ from traditional marketing? It’s often one-way communication (from the company to the audience) without as much emphasis on community engagement. On the other hand, crowd marketing’s focus is to tap into the collective voice of a community to spread your brand message.

Here we will discuss everything about crowd marketing, including how to build crowd links to make your backlink profile more robust and organic.

Crowd Marketing and Crowd Links

Crowd marketing, also known as community marketing or forum marketing, is a digital marketing strategy where you leverage the power of crowds or online communities to promote your brand or product.

The aim is to increase sales by exposing the product to an already available and interested audience.

Although it’s been around for more than a decade, crowd marketing is still underrated when it comes to digital marketing. But that’s more of a good news for you because that means most of your competitors are probably not considering it at the moment. So, you can make the best use of this opportunity and market yourself more efficiently.

Crowd marketing has also made a name for itself as one of the most overlooked link building strategies.

One example is a feel-good reply and a happy emoji in a social media comment with your link in between. That’s right, all you need is to post one of your links on a forum or a comment box and get some guaranteed clicks. Backlinks created this way are called crowd links.

Crowd marketing leads to crowd link-building strategies like this, which we will come to later on. The most important part of the story is that Google doesn’t mind you linking to relevant and quality content or websites in different online communities.

This is as safe as it gets when it comes to natural link building – even better if the community members recommend your links on the platforms. Your only task is to impress them with your website worth linking to.

How Crowd Marketing Works

Crowd marketing offers a two-fold advantage to whoever does it right.

First of all, when users promote your product on online platforms, you gain brand exposure and visibility. As a result, there’s an increased demand for your services in your niche and more organic and referral traffic starts coming in with a higher probability of lead conversion rates.

On an SEO level, you build a healthy and diversified backlink profile when links are contextually placed within social content. Since there is no black-hat practice involved in the process, your links look natural to Google and so search engines consider indexing your content and boosting you in the SERP.

So, crowd marketing helps with both your content marketing and SEO campaigns at the same time.

The same thing happens if you promote your product on online platforms like this. Of course, the key is not to make it look so obvious. For example, if you start commenting on social platforms with your crowd links indiscriminately without a care for relevance, you’re actually spamming, which is punishable by Google.

So, don’t push too hard. You don’t have to force anything or anybody to make a sales pitch here. Just place your links out there and convince your audience to check you out. If the product is worth it, you’ll get what you want in no time!

Types of Crowd Marketing

1. Classic Crowd Marketing

Apparent from the name itself, classic crowd marketing is what marketers usually do to promote their product in a specific community. That might simply mean signing up on a social platform and participating in relevant discussions.

All you have to do is figure out online platforms where users are talking about a topic relevant to your product and then place your content or link somewhere they can see right away.

This can help you get decent traffic through both brand mentions and backlink generation. So, you can directly paste your link out there or just tell them where to go for a solution they seek and wait for some organic traffic to flow in soon.

You’ll find many platforms for your crowd marketing campaigns. Here are the most useful ones –

• Forums
• Q/A sites
• Blogs

We have covered all of them below when discussing the different crowd linkbuilding techniques.

2. Content Distribution

When you are considering crowd marketing, you want an acknowledgment for your brand or a specific product. But how do you do it?

The simple answer is by spreading the word.

You can create an unreal amount of content and channel it through different outlets like blogs, websites, guest posts, sponsored posts, email campaigns, and so on.

This is why content marketing is an important tool in crowd marketing too with a shared goal and similar strategies to follow.

In fact, a wonderful study by Demand Metric reveals that content marketing scores 3 times more leads than traditional marketing techniques. 70% of people prefer articles over advertisements of a product and 60% seek out that product after reading about it. Not to mention, content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing as well.

The more quality content you create, the better your brand awareness and reach get. Quality is key here. Hubspot writes in their The State of Marketing 2023 report that 83% of marketers would rather focus on the quality than the number of their content.

3. Reputation Management

This one is a variant of the common crowd marketing strategies. It differs in the sense that it doesn’t particularly aim for crowd links or SEO. The idea is to consistently maintain a standard reputation of your brand within the niche.

Start being a professional and handle each business profile with care and sincerity. Don’t contradict yourself in your values and beliefs. Be open-minded and welcome different ideas and opinions from everybody. Pay extra attention to negative comments about you that can hurt your public image.

4. Crowd Influencer Marketing

You don’t need a degree in marketing to realize the impact that social media influencers have on people. So many among us look up to influencers today and marketers leverage their popularity for a mutual benefit.

Let’s look at a couple of stats to make a point here-

The State of Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report 2023 reveals that over 83% of people consider influencer marketing to be an effective campaign for promoting a brand. 82% want to dedicate an entire budget for the campaign whereas it was only 37% back in 2017.

As you can see the growth of the marketing strategy this information alone. 67% of the respondents want to increase their influencer marketing budget when compared to previous years. You should join them too!

But first, you have to take some time to choose the right influencer. Not all influencers can help you. You need to be a little picky.

Depending on your campaign, you can partner up with either a macro-influencer or a micro-influencer.

Macro-influencers usually engage with a huge number of followers and are considered what we call ‘celebrities’ nowadays. So, if you want to get the name of your brand out there in public, you should reach out to one of them and negotiate. Mind you, it might take a while for you to get hold of them for your campaign because of their unreal popularity. On top of that, they charge you a high price for a single promotional content.

On the other hand, micro-influencers are more locally based and cater to a smaller audience in comparison, but they are extremely successful at driving traffic and improving conversion rates. Micro-influencers should be your go-to solution at a reasonable cost if you want to promote your product or boost sales quickly.

5. Customer Reviews or Recommendations

Sometimes, you need to rely on your customers for passive marketing. This is more of an organic approach after you have established your brand.

However, in this section, we are indicating the practice of actively seeking out reviews and recommendations from customers. Although it sounds like a desperate move, this is actually something that marketers go for to this day. This is also recommended for start-ups with recent sales.

Just request them politely to leave feedback on your service in the form of a comment or a long-form post in forums or business sites. Most business sites now host a separate page for reviews with additional features like star ratings so the users can make the best decision about a business. You can leverage these features by inviting existing customers to write an honest review.

A detailed, personalized, and positive customer review like this promotes your product on the internet and creates a great impression on your potential customers.

Crowd Marketing in SEO

Don’t get confused by the “marketing” aspect of the technique yet. As we have said before, crowd marketing is underestimated when it comes to safe link building practices.

You can make your SEO more effective with crowd marketing. Here’s why –

• Diversified Link Profile

When you sign up on niche-specific forums, you get many different backlinks if the marketing process goes well. Google considers such a diversified link profile as natural. Don’t stop yourself from ranking on the SERP now.

• Golden Ticket for Startups

If you’re just starting out or only taking your business online for the first time, crowd marketing is an excellent strategy to go by. You can market your product and expose your brand to a huge audience easily. Your overall SEO campaign is positively affected this way.

• New Leads

With more brand awareness comes new leads. People will notice you more and start clicking on the crowd links. While it’s not possible to convert 100% of them to buyers, you should still tally a decent number if your product is worth it.

• High user engagement

Crowd marketing breaks down the barrier between the business and its customers. You can directly close the deal with your client, discuss and negotiate, and receive feedback for future growth. This practice makes your off-page SEO go smoother.

Crowd Link Building: Step-by-Step

Let’s go through a rough outline of how standard crowd link building procedures work-

Step 1: Understand the Target Audience

Any marketing process starts with analyzing the ins and outs of the target audience. Spend a good amount of time with your team to figure out what your user demand is and then take the next step. Things you should look at when examining your audience:

• Geography: The location of your niche, the culture of the people in the region;
• Demographics: Gender, age, family structure, net income, life cycle;
• Behaviors: User experience, response to change, satisfaction with products, feedback;
• Psychology: Personality profile, social status, lifestyle.

Step 2: Map Your Questions

Now, ask yourself the questions you would ask if you were a customer of your own product. List them out and see if you can answer them through your services.

Your bookshop “BookNook” should ask the following questions-

• Are there any book clubs in the area?
• What are some must-read books in the fantasy genre?
• What is a good mystery novel with a plot twist?
• Where can I find classic literature?
• What is the best bookstore in [Your Area]?

Expect questions like this from your customers and prepare yourself accordingly.

Step 3: Polish Your Product Page

Define your brand and detail your product information. Make your description stand out by showing unique features. For example, if you are selling the freshly released hard copy of a famous e-book for the first time in your area, mention and highlight it to draw attention.

Add high-resolution images or other multimedia formats such as videos. In that case, you might want to add an expert review of the new mystery novel you’re selling.

You should attach a price tag with every product and the price should be accurate and updated.

Your product page is important since you will link that page when participating in a crowd marketing campaign to drive your audience.

This doesn’t mean the rest of your website should be ignored. Structure your website effectively so search engines can index you easily.

Step 4: Find Keyword Queries Using the Map

Now is the time for some thorough research. Remember the map of questions you created. Search different platforms starting from search engines themselves to blogs and forums to monitor what people are talking about your niche or products.

The platforms you could make best use of:

• Google
• Google Alerts
• Google Analytics
• Talkwalker
• Disqus
• Tagboard
• Kribrum
• TweetDeck
• LiveTweet
• Meta Business Suite
• Social media like Facebook, X and LinkedIn
• VK.com
• Google Plus

They have different functions although you can use all of them for a shared goal. For example, Google provides blogs and forums where your question is answered while Disqus tracks down comments on that specific topic.

Social media platforms are an information hub for a crowd marketer. Tagboard, TweetDeck, and LiveTweet double down on a single application- X whereas Meta Business Suite works only on applications in the Metaverse e.g. Facebook and Instagram.

If you want to explore the overall performance of your product in the market and user behaviors at the same time, Google Analytics is the way to go.

No matter which one you choose, you’re putting all of them to good use because you want to research the best keyword queries for your campaign. Use SEO tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, or Moz to help you pinpoint the ranking keywords in your niche more easily.

Step 5: Engage with the Crowd

The whole point of crowd link building is to reach a large audience base with a relevant link back to your site or content.

Choose the classic crowd link marketing platforms because they work almost all the time when done safely and naturally.

Let’s look at some of the best ways you can go about it –

Forum Link Building

Forum is the king when it comes to crowd marketing. An unlimited space for discussion, real human interaction, open-minded communication, and supervised moderation to filter out only the relevant and helpful content to the community – what more do you need? Links from forums can give you a solid boost in your SERP ranking.

To make the best out of a forum, you need to pick a relevant and niche-specific forum with an interested audience. The forum has to be active and fairly moderated. You should check on the metrics of forums like domain authority, traffic data, and spam score before approaching one.

Although Reddit has a unique structure and features, it is the most popular among the forums or discussion sites on the internet today. That’s why we used Reddit to show you how it works.

You are selling books, so it’s only normal you would go for the related communities only. In this example, r/booksuggestions can be a great opportunity for your marketing. Join the community.

Notice anything? Users will always be looking for some educated opinions and suggestions here. It’s time for you to jump in with some expert takes (and possibly a link back to your e-book page!)

Members usually write posts with a label or tag (like “horror” and “feel-good fiction” in this case) on Reddit to get noticed easily.

This is really helpful because you now know what the readers are looking for at first glance. You should leave a link to your horror collection in the comment section (of course with context!) and expect some traffic right away.

However, that doesn’t mean you don’t need to read the whole post anymore. Read through and try to understand the intent.

Another tip for a decent turnout is to comment and reply where user engagement is high. If you leave your crowd links in a dead thread, there is almost zero chance anything will come out of it!

Questions/Answers

Your audience is always asking questions about your niche somewhere. Your job is to help them find the right answers and hand them a link back to your website.

So, sign up on popular Q/A websites and start answering some relevant questions as per your level of expertise. Answer them with authority; i.e., with a bold but polite attitude. Be confident in your reply and entice them with bits of information so they feel interested in your product even more. That’s when you strike with a link back to your product page and boost your chances of making a sale today!

You can try these resources:

• Quora
• Reddit
• Answers
• ASKfm
• Stack Overflow

Here is a Quora answer to one of your mapped-out questions.