Finding the ideal target audience for your E-commerce online business

 
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If you have already started your online business either via a website or a mobile application, as most E-commerce businesses do today, that is a great start. However, if you are unaware or even unsure who your key target audience is, making sales consistently and effectively may soon become your next big headache.

This was mentioned briefly in one of our recent blogs, titled “Social Media, Web Design, Digital Marketing, SEO and their roles in creating an online brand” where we spoke about the role social media, web design, digital marketing, and SEO play in creating and sustaining an E-commerce business. Today we hope to dig even deeper into first identifying who the ideal target audience for an online business is and how to effectively find them so that they are shopping virtually at your online store more than anywhere else.     

What exactly is a target audience?

We hear this term target audience often and as it is a very common marketing and digital branding jargon that you’ll come across in marketing briefs, pitch decks, presentations of all sorts, and more. The reason why this term is so popularly used is that it forms the benchmark of any and all digital-based strategy that the brand would want to undertake in both the near and the distant future. When you think about it, it's easy to understand why.

Typically, all E-commerce brands will either manufacture or distribute products and services [or both] depending on who is going to consume these products and services. Online stores will only sell if there is a demand for a particular product or service. The only real and effective way to be able to decipher this demand for particular products is to first understand the people who are interested in consuming them - your target audience.

In digital marketing terms, a target audience is a group of consumers that can be characterized by their behavior towards a product as well as their specific demographics. An example of this could be male corporate executives between the ages of 25 to 35. Having the ability to identify the target audiences correctly, forms the foundation of your online business successfully and influencing decision-making for your marketing and branding strategies. Knowing your target audience allows you to decide strategically where to spend money on digital and social media ads, identify the best way to appeal to prospective and repeat customers, and in some extreme cases even which product to build, or service to invest in next.

One of the most important uses of being able to identify a potential target audience is to also use them to define the buyer’s persona of your digital business, and what kind of impact your online store is making on their purchasing decision-making. The buyer’s persona is nothing but a representation of who the ideal customer is for your online business, drawn from data collected from a pool that actually makes up the ideal target audience.

Commonly consumed target audience demographics

Your target market or audience is a group or subset of the population who want to consume your products or services, making them your end-users. Identifying your target audience has a direct impact on any future brand strategy and business decisions that your company will make, which is why the foundation of knowing your customer likes and dislikes is essential. 

A deep, data-driven, insightful, knowledge base about your target audience will also help you to determine ever-evolving trends in the online world better and also course-correct your products and services portfolios to answer to those trends. A potential target market is usually identified and defined using the geographical location, demographics, and behavioral aspects of the subset of people within a particular area. Some of these demographics and behaviors include:

Location

The physical location of your target audience is crucial in understanding the kind of products and services they will gravitate towards on your online store. For example, few people will shop for thermal clothing if they stay in places where the temperature is usually hot. Similarly, if your online store is selling sailing boats to someone who lives in the desert, it won’t appeal to them much. Just like in real estate the same applies for digital marketing, it’s is all about location, location, location.

Age

Age plays a huge role in being able to determine the ideal target audience especially if you are also manufacturing your product before putting it up for sale on your digital storefront. A young adult or a teenager will not be interested in regularly browsing through or purchasing dress suits while a corporate honcho will subsequently show little interest in looking for baseball team jerseys.

Gender

Just like age, gender in an essential factor, since everyone has a specific choice which is why being able to talk to the right subset is extremely important from the perspective of making a sale. If you are largely talking to an audience that constitutes males selling lingerie may be a little redundant. And if your online business is all about selling fishing supplies and gear, your target audience would need to be everyone else but a group of stay-at-home women. While we are grateful and happy to acknowledge a world where the gender divide is slowly and surely dissipating, it would be silly to believe that both men and women would like the same products and services. 

Employment

Understanding the employment patterns of your potential target audience is also important in being able to sell them products and services from your online store. If your target audience is largely from in and around a plant or a factory and is used to living in rural settings, selling them urban and fancy China sets may not exactly get your cash registers ringing aloud too often. Similarly selling rustic and rural cabin goods and equipment to a more enterprising urban audience working in headquarters and business parks in the city will not have them coming back for more regularly.

Income

We saved the most important demographic for last. Understanding your target audience is also about understanding their purchasing power and their propensity to buy your good and services from your online store and this can be best understood when you understand their income demographic. If you are operating in an area that houses a population from the low-income group, it would be futile to sell jet skis on your online store targeted towards them. Similarly, if you intend to sell to a high-income group, targeting them with products and services that do not suit or fit their social and economic status will just not have them coming back to your online store again.

These demographics and the information that they assist in providing is helpful in understanding the customer and how they make purchase decisions. Targeting a specific audience will also help your digital and SEO campaigns reach the correct people who will relate most to your company's message, ethos, products, and services.

Target Audience VS Target Market

When talking about a target audience, it's a useful distinction not to confuse the term with a target market. While similar, their difference is key for marketers. The target market is the specific set of people that your business is planning to sell your products or services to. Knowing your audience and being able to find it is a defining step in building a successful brand and a profitable E-commerce business. This is, however, not as simple as it sounds. Most brands in the online world tend to make the crucial error of being too vague or generic while identifying their target audience. While this may lead to a few wins in the short term, it is the long-term scenario that generally starts to look bleaker and bleaker.

Identify Your Target Audience

To be able to find the right audience, it is integral that you first understand easy and doable ways to identify who the right target audience is.

Know better your existing Customers

By looking at and understanding the characteristics of your best current and existing customers is always a good place to start identifying newer and more potential target audiences. Some good metrics include those with the largest deal sizes, the longest retention, and the easiest customers to work with. Running a recency, frequency, and monetary analysis on your current clientele database will help brands and online stores both pinpoint future prospective customers to target. This method is also useful in helping the online store to categorize target audiences into specific levels of buying potential.

Benefits outperform Features

An ideal way to work out who your target audience is to identify potential customers with a need or interest in your services, products, and even your online E-commerce business via its different platforms such as the website or mobile phone applications. By pinpointing all of the different features and qualities of your products or services, it becomes easier to understand the benefits that are being provided to your prospective customers. When you begin to understand the benefits and value additions that you bring to the table, your online store can begin to understand who would value these features.

Market Research is the Key

Conducting a thorough virtual or physical market research to analyze all aspects of the market is always a great idea. Knowing the factors that contribute to your online store’s market and purchase path, is always a critical initial exercise that is sure to potentially help you find prospective and newer target audiences.

Multi-Segment Marketing

Not putting all your eggs in one proverbial digital basket is a good way to help you find newer target audiences for your online store. Multi-segment marketing, leveraging digital marketing, social media, PR, and content writing, aims to gain customers from different market segments to buy the same product for the same uses. It could be different decision-makers along the sales funnel, who would receive different messaging, but contribute overall to the purchase or sale.

When in doubt ask Google

Google Analytics is a very helpful and probably the most effective tool of its kind to help you identify potentially newer target audiences. If you have correctly set up goals and/or E-commerce tracking in Google Analytics, you can get some insightful data.

Peek at your competition

If your competition is doing something that is right and working for them, it would be beneficial for your online store to replicate some of their strategies which may be adaptable to your online business model as well. Marketers can learn a lot by looking at competitors to see who they are commonly selling to, and how they go about it.

$37 billion is wasted in ad spend every year from ads that fail to engage the target audience. Targeting is an essential practice when trying to launch and sustain an E-commerce business. Not all your products and services on your E-commerce online business will be suitable for everyone. The flip side to poor targeting is that a customer may actually patronize a product or service which is not ideally suitable for him or her and then go on to dislike it. This means having to contend with poor reviews and in all probability, a potential repeat customer lost forever. 

AmareSol Global is a digital business consultancy creating innovative change through a team of talented designers, developers, and strategists creating digital experiences for brands and companies around the world. We are continuously fueling growth across constantly changing and advancing digital landscapes, by seeking and formulating newer and better ways to service clientele on a global scale across industries. Look up more about us at www.amaresolglobal.com

 
 
 
AmareSol GlobalSEO, Social Media, Digital Marketing, Web Design