Use forum Like A Good MarketerForums are wonderful places to connect with others interested in a particular subject area and
can help marketers in terms of research. We are going to reveal how to find the "hungriest" audience and the exact problems people are looking to resolve using forums as our research medium. Let's look at a scenario. When people are looking to resolve a problem, find information about a service, or get advice prior to purchasing, they typically go to a forum and post a question. These posts can be found within any industry and will reveal 10,000's of different niches within each. More importantly, personal forum posts will allow us as marketers to get an accurate idea of what exactly people are looking for online, which issues they are looking to resolve, and how they plan on resolving them. By visiting forums we also get feedback from people who have tried certain products online, and their overall results. We can then take this information and create a web page that promotes products that will help people answer their questions or solve their problems. Let's look at an example of this within one of the largest online industries; the "dieting" industry. If we were looking for some insight into a dieting industry, we could browse some of the top online forums around these issues by typing "dieting + forum" into Google. Here are the results of forums that came up with this search: Featherish.com LowCarbSite.com/forum HealthBoards.com/Boards Southbeach-Diet-Plan.com/Forum After quickly going over some of the posts within these forums we found that many people are looking for information on the following topics: *counting calories *carb blockers *over 50 dieting *food calories *weight loss plateaus *staying on track *healthy food choices *starvation *fighting hunger *growing herbs *sugar alcohols *gastric bypass *eating 5 meals/day *flu & dieting *drinking water *benefit *atkins diet affects *whole wheat donuts *benefits of coffee *fasting *south beach diet This list literally took less than 5 minutes to create an we have 20 brand new marketing "angles" that we can take within the dieting industry. This was really simple, and by visiting a few forums we have created a solid foundation to work with. This is the type of research we do when starting a campaign. Marketers that spend time researching before "implementing" will achieve much higher success EVERY SINGLE TIME!! Forum research works and you should incorporate this technique into your day-to-day research activities. |