customer-development, growthI have a Ukrainian forum that is aimed at a very small community - goat farmers in Ukraine. While 50% of the information is strictly related to farming itself, there has been also a lot of information collected that can be useful for regular users, e.g. recipes, nutrition info etc.
How do I make goat farmers invite their clients to the forum?
It sounds like you’ve already overcome the chicken-egg problem, which puts you in a pretty fantastic place to start. If you already have content that consumers will be interested in, most of your remaining challenge is just to get that content in front of consumers for the first time, so that they know it exists and that it’s useful.
Given that, it sounds like you’ve made an excellent next decision already–you’re looking to leverage your existing user-base to stretch into the next sector. A lot of businesses will view the B2B and consumer audiences as disjoint, but that’s rarely the case.
The next thing you’ll want to figure out is how useful your forum is, and more importantly in what way it’s useful, to users. It sounds like you have a good idea here of that, since users can come on and share recipes and find nutrition information.
Once you’ve got that worked out, you’ll probably want to fork your thinking into two separate groups:
This isn’t really part of your question, and I respect that, but I think it’s an important piece of the puzzle. For this one, I’d think about who your audience is and what activities they like to do.
I know next to nothing about Ukrainian culture, but are there farmers’ markets there? Perhaps you could put up posters. Your forum has the distinct advantage that, whether you’re profiting from it or not, it’s doing good–you’re getting useful information to people about things they want to know, without being too flashy. You can advertise it as such, and, again depending on the culture and location, people probably won’t mind.
The question to ask here is what’s in it for the farmers. Who buys goods from farmers? People who want to cook. Who cooks? People who have recipes. Where can people find recipes? Your forum. How can farmers find and retain customers? Pointing them to the, again, social service of your forum.
I don’t know how profitable you expect to be from this, or even what your plans are with the website once it has users, but I’m a developer, so I tend to think like a developer. If you could add a section on your site for farmers to claim their businesses and do promotions, you could get them actively promoting your site, the way that many television shows these days actively promote Twitter by showing hashtags.
If you aren’t comfortable modifying the site in that way (which is reasonable, forums are generally pretty uniform), it might be a bit more difficult, but you could try printing out some flyers, or even small stickers, and going to farmers that you know are already on your site as “freebies.” Again like some social networks, you could have a small logo for “find recipes and nutritional information on [your forum’s name]” that farmers can put around. If users on your forum get profile pages, offer customized graphics that include the username or URL for the business’s page.
Once you get a few on-board, more will come. If your forum has anything like Stack Exchange’s reputation system (and pardon, I’m not familiar with what most forums are doing these days or if they do that such a thing), farmers who participate a lot will want to show off their “expert” status, which will just encourage other farmers to. If you can gamify the exchange of knowledge and show to the participants that displaying those numbers to users will be directly beneficial to their consumer confidence, you’ll be in a good place.
When in doubt, though, the advice I always like is just to talk to the clients. Talk to a few highly active farmers, a few random people (particularly if you could go to a farmers’ market with a clipboard and take a poll), and ask them what you’re asking us. Yet again, you have a social service, so if you ask people “what would make you most likely to share your recipes on my forum?” or “how can I improve your farm business by giving your customers access to like-minded peers?” you’ll undoubtedly get at least a few ideas that we haven’t thought of.
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