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Anyone have advice on how to define, locate and engage your early adopter audience when launching a new consumer product?

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3 Answers

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It would depend on the product, but you are asking for three different answers it seems.

  1. How do you define your early adopter audience. This is hard to answer without having an idea as to how innovative your product is, but, depending on how you define it you can get an idea what type of users will be interested.

  2. How do you locate them? Once you have an idea as to the target market, then you can use blogs, LinkedIn and other social networking sites to locate some possible early adopters.

  3. How to engage? Once you have a presence in some of these networking sites then you can float the idea about your product and see how people react.

The hardest question, with the most variability, is (1), btw.

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Assuming your creating a product into an existing marketplace, I'd say start searching twitter for people commenting on that market and engage them in a conversation and later pitch them on your product. Also search Google for websites and forums that cover the market and join the conversation.

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How do you search on twitter for people that is interested in that kind of product? I think the search result might go to broad. – jpartogi Dec 4 '09 at 4:52
@jpartogi - I don't use Twitter, but can you see who would be following someone that may be major person in your target market? If you can find several people that would be, then the intersection of their followers may be a good subsection. – James Black Dec 8 '09 at 14:41
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If the product is not totally new in the market, you might be able to study competitor's marketing strategy by following their online activities. However, you cannot 100% clone what your competitors' strategy since you're at a different stage. But the audience would be similar.

If the product is totally new to the market, then it would take a bit longer for people to realize the benefits of using the product. It means you have to do some of evangelizing work and educating users first.

HTH.

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