There would have been several instances at the workplace where neither you nor your employees could find a solution to a certain problem, and this is normal when you are running a business. However, the question is, how do you tackle such situations? Do you employ more people or take assistance from a third-party? No matter the solution you choose, investment has to be made both in terms of money and time. This is one side of the story.
Now, what if we tell you there’s an inexpensive yet effective way to tackle such issues. Would you be interested? Well, we will take that as a yes, because who doesn’t need solutions that are effective and efficient at the same time, and crowdsourcing is one such solution.
As technology is progressing, it’s opening new avenues for businesses to easily access knowledge, resources, or expertise, and crowdsourcing is one of those avenues that further promotes this idea. Several organizations – including government agencies, corporations, and even nonprofits – have leveraged crowdsourcing services, either in the past or still using them, to address the toughest business challenges.
A Quick Definition
Simply put, crowdsourcing is seeking knowledge from a group of people. It involves looking beyond an organization’s internal capacity for ideation and turning it over to a wider group of people (thinkers). When you turn to a crowd, you are bound to get news ideas and solutions that are way above your internal ideation process.
Crowdsourcing can take place across various industries and on many different levels. All thanks to the ever-growing connectivity, it is easier than ever for individuals to collectively contribute their ideas, skills, knowledge, and time to a business project or a cause. The idea here is to help organizations overcome their challenges by seeking help from the crowd.
Benefits of Crowdsourcing for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses
Constant Flow of Ideas
When you are about to start a business, there are several things that you need to figure out. Be it deciding the brand name or the logo, you need innovative ideas. You might think of new ideas yourself or choose to outsource to an expert, but the question is why do this when you can have access to hundreds, or even thousands, of experts through crowdsourcing service providing company or platforms?
Crowdsourcing companies help you seek new ideas and reshape existing ones, even if you are on a tight budget. You can simply crowdsource to a group of experts who constantly provide new ideas and concepts for your project or business while helping you achieve your goals.
Increased Flexibility
Another benefit of crowdsourcing is the flexibility it offers you in the form of monetary gains. What we mean is, it helps small businesses or businesses with tight budgets in avoiding unnecessary costs of hiring full-time workers for temporary job roles by allowing them to pay only for what they need.
For instance, if you are tight on budget and require social media marketing services once every six months to promote your business, you could simply leverage crowdsourcing services once every six months instead of hiring full-time marketing experts and paying them all year round. This not just helps you in saving costs but gives you flexibility and new ideas whenever you need them.
Reduced Time for Marketing New Products
Crowdsourcing can considerably help you in gaining insights into the latest market trends and ultimately know customers’ demands and requirements. Thus, before you launch a product/service, you can make sure it has all the essential features. Also, you can include additional features in the existing products to satisfy your customers. This is done with the help of a prototype before the product launch to get feedback, suggestions, and opinions from the crowdsourcing company. The input, that you get, can then be validated by your in-house team or other crowdsourcers, or even both.
This way you can develop products faster and more effectively while meeting the current market standards and beating the competition. Thus, it would be right to say that crowdsourcing reduces the time to market new products that would have been otherwise wasted in getting feedback from customers before the launch.
More Thinking Minds
When you put a crowd to work for you, you end up unlocking a greater diversity of thoughts, concepts, and unexpected ideas. Many times, staffing levels, especially for smaller businesses, might not provide enough diversity and innovation needed to solve extremely difficult problems. However, crowdsourcing does the work for you by offering you a broader group of thinkers and unlimited access to knowledge, experience, expertise, and contexts.
Not only can you solve the most complex business problems easily but in a more effective and efficient way.
Minimize Management and Maximize Efficiency
From conceptualization to strategizing to implementation to the final selection, every new project needs to be managed. This calls for a constant flow of time, efforts, resources, and skills. However, with crowdsourcing, you can save all of that by submitting your idea and letting the experts manage the project for you. Thus, you end up saving your time, efforts, and resources which can be invested in other core business activities.
Crowdsourcing – Use Cases
With over 4.66 billion people (globally) using the internet every day in 2021, crowdsourcing appears to be a great option for businesses, especially small-scale ones, who want to maximize their (limited) resources without hampering the expected results.
Not only small businesses but reputed brands like Google or Automattic Inc. have also utilized crowdsourcing and developed their million-dollar services – Google Chrome and WordPress. Yes, you read that right. Let’s have a look at how companies, including Google, do it.
Google, the company which runs the world, uses its crowdsourcing platform to collect suggestions and feedback on its product and services from users worldwide. The collected suggestions are scrutinized by a team of crowdsource experts who validate them and give a green flag. Based on this, Google adds new features into the product or services needed to improve performance as well as user experience.
PepsiCo
PepsiCo, a few years back, utilized crowdsourcing to take suggestions from their consumers for their sub-brand Lays. The company asked consumers for their favorite new potato chip flavor and collected all the responses. Once they got the responses and brought the flavor out, they experienced an 8% increase in sales.
What are you Waiting For?
Crowdsource with SunTec.AI Now
Whether you want to start a new project or upgrade an existing one, crowdsourcing always helps. Owing to many associated benefits like cost savings, faster time to market, innovative ideas, and several others, businesses are increasingly choosing to crowdsource for multiple tasks including marketing, innovation, training data for ML models, and content among others.
With considerable experience and expertise in crowdsourcing services, SunTec.AI offers insight into business challenges and brings innovative solutions as well as ideas to meet your needs.
We specialize in multiple crowdsourcing projects for data collection catering to translation, surveys, training, localization, and many more. Our large and dedicated team of data contributors makes us a preferred choice of businesses worldwide. If you are seeking help for your project or anything business, feel free to talk to our crowdsourcing experts at info@suntec.ai. We have a carefully vetted pool of data contributors who are ready to offer you nothing but innovative solutions.