If you don’t use the vocabulary your audience is using, it’s going to be a lot harder, or even impossible, for them to find your information.
However, lab research etc can be expensive and sometimes we just don’t have time to set this up. Well, there’s a wealth of information about your audience right in front of you - it’s free, it’s easy to find and you can get to it while you are sitting in your PJs if you like.
Online discussion forums.
Forums are full of people using language they use every day. Language they search with. Language we should use to help them find useful content.
Mental health case study
Brilliant.
I spoke to a lot of people in the medical profession. They all had different ideas about what we should tell people, including:
- when to see a doctor
- what you can do in an emergency
- why you should take the medication you are prescribed
- ways to tell your boss/teacher so you can get appropriate help
We had no money for research and no analytics. I had to get everything from desk research and have it published in 3 weeks.
Looking to help
I decided to go to forums to see what people were posting. It was quite hard not to feel totally helpless when there’s so many people talking about things that can cause them a lot of distress. But there were themes to what they were talking about. I kept looking at the common words and the things people wanted the most.
"Who are all these people?"
When we hear about something for the first time or are distressed, it’s obvious that we are going to forget to ask questions. So it’s understandable people were coming out of their doctor’s office and wondering what was going on and who to ask for help.
From what I was reading in forums, that was certainly the case. Some people weren’t willing to talk to people they knew because they were worried about the reaction they would get. Some just wanted more information. So they turned to the anonymous internet to get some answers.
Health care system vs audience need
When we hear about something for the first time or are distressed, it’s obvious that we are going to forget to ask questions. So it’s understandable people were coming out of their doctor’s office and wondering what was going on and who to ask for help.
From what I was reading in forums, that was certainly the case. Some people weren’t willing to talk to people they knew because they were worried about the reaction they would get. Some just wanted more information. So they turned to the anonymous internet to get some answers.
I started right there: a ‘who’s who’ guide to mental health. Then I went on to all the other things the forums were asking like how to help a relative or when to call emergency services.
The ‘who’s who’ guide consistently out-performed any other page in the section by quite a margin.
I went back to the forums every couple of months to see if there was anything missing. At times, I saw people referring to my pages as a source of help. They won’t know that it was them who helped me put the pages together in the first place.