When starting your adventure with the e-commerce industry, one of the first major challenges, on which success largely depends, is accurate identification of the audience. Fortunately, there are several reliable tools that will make this task easier.
The e-commerce industry has been growing rapidly for a long time, and statistics do not indicate that anything is going to change in this regard. In 2020, e-commerce sales worldwide reached $2.3 trillion, and this amount is expected to double in 2021. The implication is that there is a growing number of people who want to shop within their comfort zones, and this in turn is shaping the needs of specific consumer groups in more and more detail. This is why finding the target group for our online store is an extremely important task at the business level.
Every time we want to sell a specific product, the biggest mistake we can make is to think that it is universal and analyzing the specific qualities of the audience group is not needed. However, this is shooting blindly and produces similar results. If you really want to grow your business, you will need to define your ideal customers in as much detail as possible
Let’s assume that we run an online sportswear store. It cannot be disputed that understanding the lifestyle and behavior of people who regularly play sports is necessary to get them interested in our offer, to make it attractive to them and to make it stand out from the competition. As a rule, it is easiest when we ourselves are fans of what we sell. However, regardless of this, when struggling with the issue of targeting, it is worth remembering about a few proven, helpful tools.
The basic “weapon” of anyone who is serious about the e-commerce industry. It is used not only to analyze traffic on our website, but first of all it provides information about people who generate this traffic. Thanks to Google Analytics we can find out not only the basics such as age, gender and interests of people visiting our site, but also get data on average time spent on the site and, most importantly, focus on users who converted.
A very valuable tool thanks to which we will be able to learn much more about our target group than standard demographic data can tell us. The application collects information about users’ lifestyles based on the analysis of their liked profiles. This, in turn, helps to build a comprehensive picture of the group of recipients – the values they share, their aesthetics and, consequently, their consumer behaviour.
An excellent choice for anyone who has encountered difficulties in defining the target group. It is used to check which target group is interested in keywords characteristic for our business and it also offers the possibility of insight into the traffic characteristics of our competitors. The condition is the presence of market rivals in the Google advertising network, but most businesses promote themselves on its basis.
Once we take the help of specialized tools, it is necessary to create an individual profile for each user visiting our online store and being our potential customer. Knowing on whom we have to focus our attention, marketing decisions will be much easier, because more precise and not so chaotic. Advertisements will be able to be selectively targeted to specific subgroups of the audience, and their members will feel for sure that the marketing strategy is directed more carefully to their needs.
Many successful e-commerce entrepreneurs claim to have developed the best strategies for doing business through conversations with customers. It is a good practice to record customer feedback as soon as you are done with them. Some online stores even go a step ahead and offer a short welcome survey to new users to take their needs into consideration right from the start.
Read also: How to create good text for a company landing page?
Main image of the article: photo by Rosa María Fernández Rz / Moment / Getty Images
