The Success of Crowdsourcing Content
In my previous posts, I have established the importance of identifying and understanding your audience in order to create the right social media strategy. However, it is equally important to identify and create a strong, unique, and engaging brand presence through social media that will help reach a larger audience. A brand has to establish their purpose, why they exist. What is their purpose on social media going to be that will differentiate them from their competitors? Social media platforms have created a more “intimate, conversational environment,” where “consumers [can] connect with brands in a more human way than traditional advertising” (Atherton, 2020). Do not get this confused with a brand's vision! The purpose is the passion that lies within your brand (Atherton, 2020).
This is where crowdsourcing comes into play for this week’s blog post. Crowdsourcing is “the act of collecting services, ideas or content through the contributions of a large group of people” (Sprout Social, 2020). You are typically gathering this content/information through third parties that are unrelated to the business, such as customers and/or online communities, as opposed to employees or shareholders (Sprout Social, 2020). I find this to be an interesting concept, and it goes hand-in-hand with marketing. While you are getting a large crowd to help market your brand or products for free, you are also making your way into a potential new customer base. It specifically ties in with content marketing; brands are not directly trying to sell their products, but rather trying to attract consumers in a way that is distinct and contemporary. This can be done specifically through “relevant, useful and timely information” that is providing more value and you are pulling them in and engaging with them by answering a “specific need”; It is not your usual outbound, push-marketing method (Atherton, 2020). Crowdsourcing can play a big role in “establishing and maintaining your brand personality, increasing trust and building a bonded brand-consumer relationship”…“social media enables brands to tell honest, authentic stories about their beliefs and values, and when their audiences share the same beliefs and values a stronger and more loyal partnership follows” (Atherton, 2020).
Crowdsourcing is growing at a rapid rate, so it only makes sense that there be subsections to it. Depending on the outcome a brand is looking for, the types of crowdsourcing include crowdfunding, crowdwisdom, and microtasking. Crowdfunding involves a “large group of people [coming] together to fund a project” (i.e. GoFundMe), crowdwisdom “seeks out the input and opinions of large groups of people” (i.e. Reddit), and microtasking “breaks a massive project down into multiple small tasks ready to be assigned to a crowd” (i.e. Starbucks white cup contest) (Sprout Social, 2020). If executed correctly, crowdsourcing through social media can be a powerful tool for customer research, providing a brand with valuable insights on how to enhance the various facets of the business — that can be anywhere from customer services, to sales and marketing. Social media crowdsourcing adds value in several ways, brands can (to name a few): gain a better understanding of your customers, improve your product or service, optimize your social media customer service, assess performance, increase trust, and it is low cost (Zote, 2020) (Fincher, 2019). Using this organic social media is a form of behavioral economics; brands are able to build more meaningful and emotional connections with other brands and consumers — adding value at every stage and delivering positive outcomes. It is one thing to look at the analytics data and study demographic and/or psychographics to learn about your customers, but when you are reaching out to them directly, a brand is able to understand the consumer’s wants and needs on a deeper level. You are talking one-on-one with consumers, finding out their stories, and their interaction with your brand, what they are still missing from your brand. Through social media communities, sometimes you are creating more fans than customers. However, with that, the marketing team can create and deliver a “stronger, more [authentic and] emotionally driven experience across [their brands’] social media activity (Atherton, 2020).
Two brands that stood out to me that successfully used this content creation content were LEGO and PepsiCo. LEGO established the LEGO Ideas platform a couple of years back, where customers can submit a product design(s). Fellow LEGO customers are then able to vote on their favorite design/idea and explain why they chose it, and the price they would be willing to pay for it. All of this information and the highest voted designs were then passed along to LEGO corporate officials to bring to life. In this case, LEGO used crowdsourcing to drive creativity and innovation, for free. They were able to get thousands of free designs of unique products, and they learned what the potential demand would be. This platform created more of a buzz for LEGO as users were promoting their submissions all over social media to get likes. In 2012, PepsiCo debuted its “Do Us a Flavor” campaign after they started to see a decline in market share among millennials. It consisted of suggesting new chip flavors; the brand received millions of submissions. PepsiCo gave value to its participants by giving them a reason to participate. Who wouldn’t want to see their chip flavor be brought to life? They used social media to gather participants and submissions and get votes from the public, very clever!
It is especially important to know what platform will best align with your objectives and what your audience is using. The younger generation is clearly posting on Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok, and brands need to be on the inside of this. When they are on these same platforms, it encourages their followers/consumers to interact with them in a way that they feel comfortable doing so. A successful social media campaign on the right platform will lead to increased responses and engagement. As always, before you start anything that has to do with a social media strategy, never forget to identify your S.M.A.R.T. goals, what you hope to achieve as a brand and your target audience.
Sources:
4 Companies That are Killing It with Crowdsourcing. (2020, July 24). Retrieved October 06, 2020, from https://www.planbox.com/4-companies-that-are-killing-it-with-crowdsourcing/
Atherton, J. (2020). Social media strategy: A practical guide to social media marketing and customer engagement. London: Kogan Page Limited.
Fincher, M. (2019). How to Use Crowdsourcing to Improve Your Content Marketing. (2019, January 03). Retrieved October 06, 2020, from https://crowdsourcingweek.com/blog/how-crowdsourcing-improves-content-marketing/
What is crowdsourcing? (2020, June 23). Retrieved October 06, 2020, from https://sproutsocial.com/glossary/crowdsourcing/
Zote, J. (2020, January 22). How to use social media crowdsourcing effectively. Retrieved October 06, 2020, from https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-crowdsourcing/
