There is a way that you can use discussion forums that will turn them into a very effective marketing weapon.
The nature of discussion forums is that members ask questions and exerts answer them. Why not look for experts who can be your potential clients and then ask them what qualities in the service or product that you intend to offer will suit persons similar to them best? The thing about discussion forums is that people are often eager to show off their expertise. So you can be sure that there will be plenty of advice flying at you. You can also be sure that the advice will be extremely helpful to you and your business because you should remember that most of the people replying are leading world experts on the subject at hand.
A little later, it then becomes the easiest and most natural thing to thank the experts and invite them to view what their expert advice has helped create. Chances are that some of them will be interested in your product or service.
Now the whole magic emerges from the fact that you can repeat the same thing at several discussion forums meaning that with one stroke you will be able to reach thousands of your potential clients. The other advantage is that posts at discussion forums remain there virtually permanently and are indexed by leading search engines. This means that the post will continue to attract traffic for a long time and some of that traffic will end up buying from you. That is not all, the link you put in discussion forums will count as one of the one way links pointing at your site which is important for search engine optimization (SEO) reasons.
Using discussion forums in this way you can turn them into valuable marketing tools that can earn you plenty of traffic and sales.