Part I: What to do When Your Product is Boring?

First off, while it may be boring to you...it may be the greatest thing since sliced bread to your niche audience. For the past year I have been creating a Social Media and PR campaign around market research reports based on developing technologies. I have a very basic understanding of what these reports are about. So that means I must be horrible at trying to create a community? Wrong again.

The audience for any product will be there as long as you are the best at what you do and firmly believe that there is a customer who wants to purchase from you. Thus the problem becomes: how do you find these people?

Learn where they hang out. Online of course. (But if you know anyone in the market for this kind of market research and know a bar that they frequent near Boston...by all means let me know!) The issue I faced was that the people I was targeting tended to be 35+ in C-level positions. Not exactly the bread and butter of the social media world.

I decided to take a top down look at our press releases and where they were being published. Who was reading these articles, when these press releases were being published? Could this give me a clue as to where I might find our niche? I decided to CALL (not email) those editors who were publishing our releases and I learned one important thing.

These newspapers online presence was small...small enough to use PPC advertising. However, their print presence was much larger and that is where most of their audience received their messages and information. How could I break through to these editors and entice them to publish every press release that I sent them. The answer might surprise you: Traffic.

Traffic driving is at the heart of social media marketing, essentially more eyeballs = more revenue. I had developed a presence on social media sites likeDigg ,Reddit, and Stumble Upon and was poised to take advantage of my audience's niche (hard science). So I submitted an article from one consulting newspaper as an article to Digg, SU, and Reddit. What were my results? A frantic phone call to our Editing Manager asking how we had managed to crash their server. What happened? Social Media did.

To be continued in Part II.

tagged as boring product, c-level positions, Marketing, niche, niche audience, ppc advertising, traffic driving