Forum Promotion 101: The Basics – Audience and Design

October 2nd, 2007

If you have not already, please read the first post in this series, Forum Promotion 101: The Basics – Topic.

Note: even though this is an article inside my Forum Promotion 101 series, the advice given is critical in developing every type of site.

Now that we have discussed how to appropriately choose the topic of your forum, and you have hopefully chose a topic from the list you compiled, it’s time to learn about your target audience.

What is a target audience? It’s the demographics that your website is going to appeal to – who you are catering for. Demographics is defined as “the statistical data of a population, esp. those showing average age, income, education, etc”, and we are going to be looking at, in particular, age, gender, and income.

Step 1: Identifying Your Target Audience

This step is pretty easy. You should already have a pretty good idea on who your target audience is going to be just by common sense. For example, using my example in the last article, if your topic is “Gears of War” under “XBox 360 Video Games”, then your target audience would be mainly young males. Keep in mind that you are looking at the majority of what your audience is going to be – there will always be the odd one here and there.

If you are having trouble identifying exactly who your target audience is, I suggest that you pick a new topic. If your audience is unclear, then the rest of the process is going to be a lot more difficult. A lot depends on being able to establish a good connection with your user base.

Step 2: Defining Your Target Audience

Now that you know who your audience is, we need to ask ourselves a couple of questions:

1. What do they like?
2. What is their background?
3. What are their tendencies?
4. What are their characteristics?

Basically we want to know everything about them how we can build the forum exactly to their needs. Your forum will differ greatly depending on the answers to these questions.

What do they like? Maybe your audience is young and technologically oriented, the YouTube generation. They like access to tons of information, fast. They use all the new applications and are very savvy when it comes to using a forum and a computer in general. On the other hand, maybe your audience is older and would be put on information overload by all of the stuff that appeals to the young crowd. They could still be using Internet Explorer 6 and get confused about having to register to post on your forum (may not be your best bet for a target audience ;))

This information will greatly impact how you build your site. It may make you lean towards a flashy design with tons of options or a simple and easy-to-use approach. Don’t underestimate the importance of designing for your target audience.

What is their background? This is affect what they like and how they act. Like I said above, if your audience is young their background is probably very technologically oriented – they are comfortable with using a computer and can handle themselves well in a digital environment. Perhaps your audience is conservative (i’m not talking about republican or democrat, i’m talking about personality) – this may come into play when you try to monetize your forum further down the road. Conservative people are less likely to feel safe about spending money online.

What are their tendencies? What are their characteristics? In general, does your target audience like to spend a lot of time online? Are they big spenders or do they not have money to spare? Are they vocal and aggressive or like to stay behind the scenes? Even consider aspects like their eye site – will they need large and easy to read fonts or can you stick with classic verdana? Some of these questions will be hard to answer but others you will be able to find out through research.

Step 3: Designing Your Forum Around Their Needs

I touched on this briefly above, but I will go into a little more detail now. Once you have answered the questions about what your target audience is like you can use that information to effectively design and build a site for them. Think of your target audience when you are choosing design aspects of your site, like:

1. Color scheme – bright and flashy? Earth tones? Something more conservative?
2. Template – simple and easy to use, or packed with options and cool widgets?
3. Forum Software – some forum software packages have a lower learning curve while others are harder to use but offer lots more options.

Now that you know how to properly design and build your site around your target audience, you should put this information to use. While you’re anxiously waiting to read my next article in this series, start research on your audience, keeping in mind all the aspects that I told you to look for above. The next article will discuss ways to monetize your forum. It doesn’t have a whole lot to do about promotion, but it’s something that we’re all interested in!

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