Defining Target Audience for Your eCommerce Business

The target audience of your eCommerce business is something that you simply must consider. You need to be aware of who would benefit the most from the products or services that you sell. In case you’ve been wondering how to find your target audience, this article is here to help you. We’ll take a look at the various aspects you need to consider in regards to the audience that you’ll be selling to.

The importance of deciding on a target audience lies in the fact that your products would only benefit certain customers. This could be a large number of customers, of course, but not every product is fit for everybody out there. Therefore, you need to get as specific as possible and find the customer that is most suitable for your products. This will definitely affect the number of sales.

Get The Right Traffic for Your eCommerce Website

Marketing plans and strategies are in general designed so that they bring traffic to your online store. This is an excellent thing and having more traffic should lead to selling more products. However, not every visitor to your website is equal in value. There could be visitors that have randomly come across your online store but they may not be looking to buy. You’d rather have potential customers.

This is where the concept of a target audience could greatly help you. Imagine if most of the traffic that you receive is coming from visitors that are potential customers. A good way to lead your marketing strategies in this direction is to have a specific audience in mind. If you target people who may need your products, this will vastly improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

How to Define Your Target Audience

There are several ways that you could go about when it comes to defining your target audience. The first thing you could do is to actually take a look at the people who’ve already bought from you. Indeed, it is your current customers that can give you a basic idea of the audience you want to target. To get a better picture, you should make research in regards to your current customers.

This refers to things such as their characteristics and needs. How are your products helping them? What are your current customers getting out of your business? This usually goes back to the dynamic of problems and solutions. Your products are in a way providing a solution to problems that your customers have. Knowing this, you can start looking for other people like them to market to.

Know Your Products Well

Remember that marketing is expensive and you wouldn’t want to waste money on reaching out to the wrong audience. Aside from paying attention to your current customers, you should also take a look at another basic aspect. And this is the products that you’re actually selling. As mentioned earlier, your products will likely be a solution to a problem. And you need to know what they solve.

Big marketplaces like Amazon & eBay work in the way that they sell any kind of products to anyone. In fact, this is why you should also sell your products on there in addition to your own online store. But, unlike big marketplaces, you need to appeal to a niche audience. That’s why you should find more specific problems to solve i.e. people to market your products to. It’ll bring more success.

Use the Competition to Your Advantage

Your eCommerce business will always have a certain competition. Fortunately for you, there are ways that you could use this fact to your benefit. If you pay attention to your competition you may use this to your advantage by coming up with better offers. Let’s say you’re selling grooming products for men. If your competition is selling some of the same staff, you can market it better.

To elaborate, you should take a look at the target audience of your competition. From there, try and notice if they’re overlooking some potential customers. In case they do, you may spend some of your marketing efforts on those people and get them to potentially buy from your online store. But of course, you could also copy some of your competition’s approaches and make a benefit out of it.

Ways to Categorize Your Target Audience

You can categorize your target audience in a couple of ways in regards to their individual characteristics and situations. This can include things like their age, gender, education, salary, location, are they married and whether they have children, etc. All of this information may play a role when it comes to your potential customers and their decisions to buy. But this isn’t everything.

Aside from the characteristics that are more surface level, you should also consider the more personal ones. This could be about the hobbies of your target audience, their values, passions in life, and more. If you have a fuller picture of your potential customers, it’d be easier on you to design a marketing strategy. Of course, feel free to consider other factors as well and improve your measures.

Make Use of Social Proof & Customer Support

You could tie in the research on your current customers to the aspect of social proof. If your customers are leaving reviews and various kinds of feedback about your products, you could use this information. On top of that, you can utilize bits of customer support and ask people to fill surveys in regards to their shopping experience. This will give you an even better idea of your target audience.

But the great thing with making combinations like these is that you benefit from all aspects all at once. The reviews and feedback will improve the social proof of your store and potentially attract similar customers. The customer support will improve the relationship you have with your customers and also give you more information on what your audience likes about your eCommerce business.

Get Into Even More Detail

Even when you categorize your target audience, you shouldn’t spend all of your focus on its entirety. In order to elaborate, let’s go back to the example of selling grooming products for men. These types of products could include anything from hair creams and clays to beard oils, shaving gels, and skincare items. With this in mind, your target audience would be men who use such products.

However, if we use this example, some of the men may not even have beards and they may be focused on their hair. On the other hand, some men may only be focused on their beards and not care so much for hair products. What this means is that you can market your products with these further divisions in mind. That way, your marketing efforts will be more focused and effective.

Target Audience & the Importance of a Great Landing Page

If you reach your target audience in the proper way, this should definitely improve the traffic your website receives. On that note, it’s important to remember that your landing page needs to be well refined. The reason being is that once you attract potential customers to your website, they should be welcomed by a great landing page. After all, awesome visuals make a great first impression.

If you put together an excellent landing page this will increase the chances of translating more of your traffic to sales. The last thing you want is to make great marketing efforts that actually work but then waste the opportunity. And this will happen if your potential customers drop out early in the sales funnel due to a poor landing page. So before we proceed, don’t forget about this important aspect.

Provide Quality Content with a Blog

Aside from your landing page, it’d be a great idea if your eCommerce business includes a blog. And your blog is another thing that you can tie into the aspect of a target audience. Once you have a better idea of who your ideal customers are, you can provide them with helpful content. This too will benefit you in several ways. For one, you’ll keep the target audience interested and make them stay.

Next, you should make great use of SEO and include adequate keywords and phrases in your content. This could attract more potential customers to your online store. And since you will be providing content in regards to your target audience, your SEO would attract similar people. Just make sure you stay in the know and be updated on the changes in the market as they occur.

Update Your Research & Marketing Strategies

You should know that doing research and coming up with your target audience isn’t a onetime thing. In fact, the market rarely stays static and there are changes that are happing all the time. You need to be aware of this and update your strategies accordingly. What this means is that at times you will need to reconsider your approaches and ways of doing things. It will greatly benefit you.

Let’s go back to the example of selling grooming products for men. Sure, at first glance, it is safe to assume that it would be men who are buying these things. But, this may not always be the case for women could be buying these products as presents. If you have this in mind, you can better plan your marketing efforts. It could also depend on the time of year. Holidays mean lots of presents.

Target Audience & Target Market

Before we proceed, let’s take a quick look at semantics. In this article, we have mostly used the term ‘target audience’ but we have also mentioned ‘target market’. These two terms usually allude to the same thing but we are going to elaborate a bit. This is to make sure that you don’t get confused. So, the target market is more about the users of your products, and the audience is who you market to.

If you are selling products for people’s pets, the animals are the actual users of your products. However, the target audience is the people who own the pets and this is who you market to. Of course, most products have the same target market and target audience. If you are selling skin care products for women, the target audience would be the women themselves, unless it’s a gift.

Test Your Products & Stay Updated

When you have a good idea of your target audience and target market, it’d be wise to do some testing. You need to consider the level of competition and whether there is sufficient demand for the products you want to sell. Remember that it’d be optimal if the people that buy from you once continue to do so in the future. Because of this, you should have adequate prices for their budget.

But overall, you should keep track of how your products are doing and how are your customers behaving. From there, make necessary updates and keep refining your process in regards to your target audience. Use all the available data to help you. This includes information on the products your customers are viewing, the value of the orders, how much time they spend on your site, etc.

Conclusion

Overall, the importance of having a target audience cannot be understated. If you have a great concept of your ideal customer, this will dictate the way your eCommerce business operates. As we discussed in this article, not every product is meant to be used by everyone. Your products are in a way solutions to certain people’s problems. Therefore, you need to make sure that you’re marketing your products to the right people and in the right way. This is likely to increase your conversion rate.

If you don’t market your products to the right target audience, you will waste a lot of money. You’ll be in the risk of missing a lot of opportunities for conversion. However, remember that it’s not just about getting traffic, but having a great landing page as well. A big part of what makes a great landing page is awesome visuals. On that note, know that DragDropr is an amazing tool that can help you to design an excellent landing page, and much more. What’s perfect is that it’s very easy to use.