Understanding your crowd and predicting their behavior is essential to a successful digital marketing strategy. Without taking the time to define your brand’s crowd, you may as well be throwing digital darts on a map trying to see what sticks. Knowing your crowd helps brands to best pinpoint opportunities to reach and successfully activate your crowd. Luckily, Wholecrowd digital marketing experts have provided five ways brands can better understand their crowd and begin to predict crowd behavior.
1.Define Your Crowd
The first step to understanding your crowd is to define your crowd. Brands should create crowd personas for the ideal, highly-engaged, and influential user. If your organization is unsure about who its target crowd is, do market research to narrow selection criteria. Search similar topic issues, competitors, and keywords for influencers within the space. You will quickly identify the ideal crowd user. After defining your crowd, brands will begin to create messaging, creative, and calls-to-action that support the engagement of this defined user.
2. Message Testing
Just because your brand has defined its crowd, doesn’t mean your content, creative, or calls-to-action will immediately go viral. All aspects of marketing content will need to be A/B tested for best engagement results. Some message copy may resonate more than others. Similarly, some users may like specific visual content like videos or memes rather than static images. Testing the different components of the brand’s marketing will help clarify what works best.
3. Create A Connection with Users
No engagement is more valuable than a personal connection with the user. As your digital marketing strategy develops, brands will notice influencers across their social media accounts, who frequently engage with content. These are users with which brands should spark a personal relationship. These users care enough to consistently engage, tend to care about the brand’s issues, and want the brand to succeed. Brands should be able to tell the difference between an influencer and a “troll.” Once a brand has defined an influencer, they should send them a personal message, thank them for their engagement, and show them some engagement support during the process. These steps should start a conversation where the brand can dive into this user’s behavior.
4. User Feedback
After the crowd is defined, testing has begun, personal connections have initiated, and crowd engagement analyzing has started; brands can begin collecting user feedback. This step can occur in different forms. Social media polls and email surveys are the most used, but brands can also drive a “feedback campaign” to request user comments on what information or messaging they love most. Collecting user feedback is essential to adjusting your marketing strategy to get the optimal engagement out of your crowd.
5. Ongoing Refinement of Crowd (crowds change, so should you)
Change occurs whether we like it or not. A brand’s crowd is no different. A brand must be one step ahead of its crowd to keep pace with the ever-changing digital world in which we live. Try not to be stagnant. Just because one marketing tactic worked well for a few months doesn’t mean it’s infallible. Brands shouldn’t be afraid to try new techniques or campaigns to gain a broader audience. With the consistent refinement of your crowd, brands can continue to grow and change with their crowd.
Knowing your crowd is not always easy. Many brands tend to get complacent with their crowd thinking that the same strategy they used three years ago will continue to work for them today. Take these five steps and apply them to your digital marketing strategy each quarter to begin seeing your crowd and engagement increase. Need help with your digital marketing strategy? Contact Wholecrowd! We’ll analyze, develop, and implement a customized strategy that is right for your brand.
Vann McDuffie
Digital Strategy Director
Wholecrowd