Almost every company needs to do marketing whether they realize it or not. Even companies that market toward people they already know, such as high end B2B product companies that rely on the CEO’s personal relationships, are running marketing campaigns when the CEO reaches out to his contacts. However, a lot of companies do not think that they have time for marketing, and they go belly-up.
Other companies know that they need to do marketing but they simply do not have the know-how to do it. They try to hire outside agencies to do it for them but this gets to be very expensive. Small start-ups who need to spend money hiring other types of workers simply cannot hire agencies.
In this episode of Future of Publishing, VigLink CEO Oliver Roup interviews Founder & CEO Vincent Ha of Gushcloud, a crowdsourced marketing tasks solution provider.
Highlights
- Marketing is an investment, not an expense…
- But many companies don’t have the initial funds to make that investment…
- But they can still make a small investment in crowdsourced marketing and get decent ROI on that investment!
Crowdsourcing has become very popular in the past few years, coupled with the rise in high-speed connections and India’s increasingly high-tech economy and educated workforce. With many companies looking to cut costs, they can let workers compete to receive the lowest wages possible to do simple tasks, whereas ten years ago the same company would need to hire a person full-time (or an agency part-time) to do these tasks. Perhaps one of the earliest example of crowdsourcing is Wikipedia, which allows people from throughout the world to contribute content and develop their webpages. This model is different than crowdsourcing in a business sense because instead of each person doing a set task, each person makes small contributions which build upon each other in the wiki model. Furthermore, Wikipedians try to reach consensus on the discussion pages whereas different crowdsourced workers rarely communicate with each other in Gushcloud and Mechanical Turk.
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