Most of us familiar with the concept of crowdfunding, where businesses try to generate funds for their projects by promoting them on funding platforms such as Kickstarter, etc.
Crowdsourcing is a similar concept but instead of generating funds, the companies use a large group of people or customers to get new and innovative ideas directly form the customers so they can develop new product and market their already existing products.
It is a very effective way of marketing since you will generate all sorts of buzz in the market because of using a large group of people for promoting the brand or the product, eventually increasing the sales and profitability of the company.
Internet plays a very vital role when it comes to crowdsourcing. Internet has bought the organizations closer to their customers. They can now directly reach out to the customer and take feedback about the products and their service and the customer could do the same for giving a feedback.
Crowdsourcing can add value to an organization's marketing strategy as follows:
When it comes to feedback or ideas, people don't shy away.They are ready to share their ideas if they are provided a platform for it. Crowdsourcing provides the platform and customers give their valuable insights and new ideas. Thus it can be used as a tool to carry out a market research.
It is very effective and allows an organization to save time as well as money as by tapping into customers who have similar interests and have new ideas to increase the brand awareness in the market.
It also allows organizations to increase the data base with new customer information which they can leverage in the future while introducing a new product and targeting the new segment of customers.
One of the best examples of crowdsourcing is a marketing campaign by Coca Cola. The campaign was specifically designed for the target audience in Australia where the growth of the brand was slow. They came up with an idea and overnight stocked the aisle and shelves of supermarkets with coke bottles having 150 most common names of people residing in Australia and what happened next was just outstanding.
Sit back relax and take a close look at what Coca Cola did in Australia to grow their market share.