How Crowdsourcing Can Help Your Business

When budgets are tight and innovation is hard to find, crowdsourcing ideas and expertise is a viable option for companies large and small. Learn how you can get the most out of experts by learning from them in areas beyond their expertise.

Today’s post is by Michael Volkin, founder of Crowdsourcia.

You’re an entrepreneur and you have a vision that drives you. Fantastic. The problem is, as a small company, the content you produce is often reviewed by one or two people. Hiring a consultant to fill in the gap will help a little. Yet even with this solution, the process is finite and contains the opinions and experience of only one person.

But there’s another way – a way that is more dynamic and expansive. It’s more impactful and it optimizes your results. I’m talking about crowdsourcing.

This article will not only show you the benefits of crowdsourcing, but how your company can access a universe of expertise for pennies on the dollar.

Please note: Crowdsourcing is Not Crowdfunding

We’ve all heard about Kickstarter and Indiegogo, the crowdfunding sites. However, crowdfunding is only a small subset of the big universe that is crowdsourcing.  Instead of being about money, crowdsourcing focuses on intellectual capital. It’s the collective knowledge, experiences, and insight of a group of people, working toward a common goal.

The Business Crowd

You’ve already seen crowdsourcing in action on platforms like Wikipedia. When applied to the world of business, the outcomes can be just as bountiful with high-quality results. In fact, Forbes magazine reports that there may be “no better way” then crowdsourcing to get feedback or “evolve your good idea into the next big thing.”

Crowdsourcing helps you solve a problem quickly, and can be a great tool when your resources are limited and you need help promoting your business.

So, how can crowdsourcing help your business? Check out this case study:

Stack 52 – Goal: Increase conversion on e-commerce page

Our solopreneur client owned an online fitness retail company and wanted to boost sales of his fitness product, Stack 52. Before crowdsourcing, the web site’s conversion rate of visitors to buyers was 2.2 percent.

We took a screenshot of the client’s e-commerce page and showed it to a highly-vetted group of five experts. We sourced our crowd from several professions such as sales, marketing, design, and copy writing. We then gave our experts three days to review everything from layout and graphics to the commerce site’s embedded video and text.

As the group critiqued the e-commerce page on these elements, an interesting thing happened over the course of those three days. As one might expect, the process started with individuals delivering specific feedback in their areas of expertise. But as the joint feedback continued, the discussion became more nuanced, collaborative, and complex.

Our copywriter, for example, pointed out some great observations about the design of the page. The designer, meanwhile, made some astute comments about the language being used. Each expert brought knowledge from their previous experiences working alongside different specialists, and this magnified the project’s possibilities. In other words, the experts were contributing valuable insight from areas outside of their specialty. In business, we often spend too much time pigeonholing experts into their chosen field of expertise, ignoring their untapped expertise in other disciplines.

In the end, our client’s e-commerce page went through three revisions, with the final revision resulting in a radical change. Now, the e-commerce page actually took the visitor through a journey. It told a real story about how the product was created and how it benefits the customer.

The customers noticed.

The Result: Shortly after implementing the new page, our client saw his conversion rate jump from 2.2 percent to 4.9 percent virtually overnight. That’s more than a 100 percent increase in click rate! This client still experiences that same conversion rate month after month from three days of collaboration with the experts.

The Takeaway: When you put your project through a crowdsourcing process, the solution becomes dynamic. Experts often become stuck in their niche in their industry and don’t realize they have hidden knowledge outside of their field of expertise. But there is a treasure trove of information just waiting to come out. All it takes is a different context. Crowdsourcing creates that context for you and your business. It delivers more than the sum of its parts.

– Michael Volkin is the founder of Crowdsourcia, a website where companies can get feedback on projects from multiple experts. Mr. Volkin has been a serial entrepreneur for over 20 years, has written 5 books, one best-seller and has built and sold 3 companies.

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

Photo: Audience Amused During the Refresh Leadership Live Simulcast by Express Employment Professionals