Crowd Marketing: How to Promote a Company on Forums and Review Sites

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Crowd marketing helps a brand gain the trust of its audience and attract new customers. In this article from the team of the reputation agency Topface Media , we explain how best to use this promotion method: choose the right platforms, create appropriate content, and analyze the results.
Basics of Crowd Marketing
What is Crowd Marketing
Crowd marketing is a type of guerrilla internet marketing where user recommendations are used as a promotion tool. They are published as messages and comments on public platforms where the brand’s target audience is. Such mentions look natural because they are part of the exchange of experience between members of the online community and help the consumer make a choice.

Thematic discussions are an ideal space for crowd marketing practices. Example: on a parenting forum or in the comments of a community of mothers on social networks, a woman asks for social media marketing service advice on choosing children’s toothpaste. Brands selling this product can participate in the discussion on behalf of an ordinary user and recommend their toothpaste to the target audience.
Goals and objectives of crowd marketing
The point of crowd marketing is to increase the popularity of a brand and product without direct advertising, to tell about the benefits from the consumer's perspective and help them make a purchase decision. To do this, arguments and useful information about the product are added to messages.

Messages with brand recommendations from ordinary users, organically integrated into an online discussion, are trusted more not only by people, but also by search robots. Therefore, crowd marketing is used for the purpose of organic promotion of a company on the Internet. A large number of backlinks placed in discussion messages and reviews helps with SEO and allows you to bring more visitors to the site. As a result, the visibility of the brand on the Internet increases.



In addition, with the help of crowd marketing, the company establishes its authority as an expert on topics discussed by users on the platform. This helps to create and maintain a brand reputation, increase its recognition, arousing interest in products among the target audience and increasing loyalty, and stimulate sales.
Types of Crowd Marketing
All messages in crowd marketing can be divided into two types: containing an active link to the company's web resources (they help generate backlinks) and simple mentions of the brand and its products without a URL. These publications are implemented in different formats:

as messages in comments, discussions on social networks, discussions on forums,
in the form of reviews and overviews and responses to them,
like integrations with influencers,
as high-quality and useful branded content in communities on social platforms.
Choosing platforms for crowd marketing
The choice of platforms for distributing publications depends on the business area and its target audience. You can manually find online platforms with a relevant audience suitable for posting crowd content through a search query with a keyword in Google or Yandex. To get “live” resources with user activity in the search results, you need to set a time frame of up to two weeks.

If the brand’s target audience is residents of St. Petersburg who want to get their teeth treated, then the queries can be: “St. Petersburg dentist forum”, “St. Petersburg dentist reviews”. We skip the first advertised pages in the search results and select sites with discussions, reviews and overviews, questions.