TARGETING THE RIGHT AUDIENCE IN ECOMMERCE
Wednesday, August 5, 2015Global Administrator
How to Target The Right Audience For Your eCommerce Store
Targeting your audience and understanding them is important to any business. Not only does it help you to understand your audience better, but it gives you an opportunity to evolve with them and become what they want through your interactions with them.
Before, demographics were the big differentiator. You could appeal to your audience using simple facts of their gender, age, income etc. Although these are still extremely important, lifestyle is becoming increasingly more powerful in the targeting game. Here are a few things you may want to consider when targeting that you may not have thought of.
Know who they are:
Knowing who your audience is will help you effectively plan your marketing strategy. Consumers want value with everything they do. You need to understand more than just their need for your product.
As an online retailer, it’s crucial for you to know as much as you can about them. It’s not just about the purchase, it’s about the relationship. If you are able to create content geared towards your audience that is useful to them outside of purchasing your product, you make yourself memorable. Working backwards helps you target your audience appropriately and creatively. Aside from the demographic segmentation you’re already going to do, here are a few other questions you can ask yourself…
- What do they do for work? What hours do they work?
- Are they married? Do they have children?
- What do they do in their spare-time?
- What are they interested in?
- What are their values and beliefs?
- What in their lifestyle would prevent them from purchasing your product?
Create your customer’s
persona and market to them, evolve with them and learn more about them as you go!
Know their shopping patterns:
Understanding your target market’s shopping patterns is so important, and for obvious reasons. You don’t need hear it from us. With eCommerce playing an increasingly bigger role, however, there are many other patterns to consider.
- Are your customers finding you through a search engine? If so, where and what are they searching?
- Are they stalking you online first and learning as much as they can before they purchase?
- What pages of your website do they look at first and last? Where are they dropping off?
- Are they being referred? Who is referring them?
These are only a couple of the questions that you want to answer while targeting, but knowing this information can help you optimize all marketing and merchandising efforts. In addition, you can create a sophisticated flow to your site that fits your consumer’s shopping patterns. For example, knowing what products a single user looks at in one visit can help you determine which items are generated in a
“Products you may also like” section. This is smart way to increase basket size and keep your customers coming back.
Understand their likes and, more importantly, their dislikes:
Again, this may seem like common sense, but that shouldn’t make this any less important to your targeting process. Knowing what they like makes it easier for you to appeal to them. You can choose the benefits you want to emphasize to them, and which ones you choose to use in your marketing.
Alternatively, understanding what they dislike will help you make better choices of what to exclude and what to change about your product and processes. This will also help you develop quality content for blogging, email marketing and other forms.
In the end, one of the most important questions to ask is what’s the problem and how does your product or service solve it? Targeting is just about working backwards and finding what makes your audience tick.
These questions do vary from industry to industry. Did we leave out anything important? Let us know in the comments below!