A business fosters meaningful relationships with its customers by making them a priority. But what after that? Customer engagement is a delicate matter. While companies like to boost their brand value, there lies the risk of turning customers off with wrongly designed campaigns. But let’s see how crowdsourcing works.
Apart from effectiveness, crowdsourcing is something companies rely on for the long run. It makes great economic sense. A simple example is contests by brands on social media. They help deepen customer involvement and increase loyalty.
How crowdsourcing engages customers
Crowdsourcing involves asking a company’s user base to contribute suggestions, ideas, content, solutions and more to address a demand or an issue. It has been a powerful way to increase involvement and is now an impactful marketing tool. It begins with identifying customer capabilities and interests. That is the way to understand what will incentivize your user base.
Apart from contests, social discussions about people’s needs attract participation. Your brand can absorb ideas and discuss products in such activities. As a brand that does something noticeable with inputs from people definitely builds the trust factor. For example, a t-shirt company, Threadless, depends entirely on crowdsourcing. Its website welcomes graphic designers to submit designs, which are scored by a large community and selected for print and sale. The designers get rewarded handsomely if their community scores are high.
On the other hand, open source websites and tools are also crowdsourced web entities. Each of them is jointly put together by developers and programmers across the globe.
What to ask yourself before starting a crowdsourcing campaign:
- What type of content should be used to reach out?
- What medium will be the best for reaching out?
- What is my crowdsourcing target (in figures)?
- Are my employees a suitable group for crowdsourcing?
Research your user base
Use a database system to know about people’s attitudes, skill sets, interests, and demographics. You can also use social posts to identify them. They will tell you where your campaign should focus and what kind of content will be suitable. Tedious surveys are not necessary, and you can say bye to telephoning and reams of paper work. You will be able to know whether to have an open innovation forum, an idea contest, a quiz or something else depending on this research.
Make them feel like owners of your brand
Got some products to launch? Ask people for product names. It will make them feel important. Engaging your customers in such decisions make them think, spend time, and step closer to your brand. Motivate the participants with rewards whenever possible. This method also increases their chance of buying from you. A good feedback on your products will only multiply the whole effect.
Keep listening
Your products should match customer needs. The more you adhere to their needs, the more trusted a brand you will be. Use social media or online feedback links to ask them which products they will buy and why, what are the little changes they wish you would make, etc. Crowdsourcing enhances customer-company interactions and develops your retention capability.
Social media pages are the best place to study feedback from regular customers and get them into conversations. As for your prospects, social campaigns can get them to participate across the world. That’s the way to build an audience. Crowdsourcing doesn’t only intensify customer engagement, it showcases a company’s innovative capabilities as well.