Have you ever come to a point in your content marketing where you felt like you couldn’t write even one more blog post? You’re not alone. A whopping 33 percent of marketing professionals report that content is too labor intensive to create on a regular basis—but what if there was a way to eliminate the difficulties of coming up with a topic and actually writing the content?
Crowdsourcing—or the act of obtaining information or input from a group of people—is an effective way to alleviate the potential for content marketing burnout and create quality, engaging content. By involving your audience in the process of content creation, you’re effectively drumming up interest in your post and improving its potential to drive the results you want. Check out our four step process for creating an expert crowdsourcing marketing strategy below.
The 4-Step Crowdsourcing Marketing Strategy
Step #1: Determine Your Goal
So you want to crowdsource your next blog post—awesome! But first, you’ll have to figure out what your ultimate goal is. It is crucial that you determine this before moving forward with your crowdsourcing marketing strategy, as the end goal of your crowdsourcing efforts informs both who you reach out to and how you do it.
For example, if the goal of your crowdsourced blog post is to improve your brand’s authority within your industry, you may want to reach out to other industry bloggers rather than your customers. On the other hand, if you’re looking to humanize your business and improve engagement with your blog posts, you’ll likely want to touch base with customers for your content.
Step #2: Assess and Understand Your Crowd
Once you’ve determined the goal of your crowdsourced blog post, you can get started honing in on who comprises your crowd. Are they loyal customers with positive brand stories to share? Or perhaps they’re industry experts who can offer advice on how to use your products more effectively?
After solidifying who makes up your crowd, go the extra step and create buyer personas for them. These should include detailed information on their behaviors and motivations that you can continue to refer to (check out our previous blog post on buyer personas for greater detail.) Understanding your crowd on a more personal level—including their interests, where they source new information, and where they most like to spend their time online—will be a great help during the next step of the crowdsourcing marketing strategy process: reaching out to your crowd.
Step #3: Develop an Outreach Strategy
This is possibly the most difficult step of the four. To crowdsource effectively, you need to actually connect with your crowd, and you’ll need to figure out a way to do so that intrigues or compels them enough to respond. This is where your detailed buyer persona from step #2 can come in handy—try to connect with your crowd in the corner of the internet where they most like to reside and you’ve already improved your chances of hearing back.
For example, if your crowd lives on social media, develop a fun and engaging post—like a Twitter Poll—that provides them topic options to choose from based on what they’re most interested in reading about. They’ll appreciate being involved and will value that your business takes their feedback into account. However, if your crowd consists of your most loyal and long-time customers, a personalized email requesting content or topic ideas for your next blog post might get you better results.
Step #4: Compile and Promote
Finally, it’s time for you to compile the content you’ve crowdsourced and make it cohesive so you can promote it to the masses. It’s important when putting together your blog post to remain honest to the content you received from your crowd, as altering the words of the crowdsourcees will make them unlikely to want to contribute again.
When it comes to promoting your blog post, the sky is the limit (literally, take to the skies with sky writing!) Make sure to promote it across your social channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter—especially if that’s where you spent most of your time crowdsourcing—and to share the post with the people you sourced content from, as they’ll likely want to share it amongst their networks, as well.
