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8 Effective Ways to Determine Target Audience for Your Online Shopping Store in 2022

Updated on December 8, 2021

4 Min Read
ecommerce target audience

[UPDATED] Ecommerce industry has been on a rise for quite some time and stats from particularly last year indicate no signs of it slowing down.

According to Statista, ecommerce sales worldwide amounted to 2.3 trillion US dollars and e-retail revenues are projected to grow to 4.88 trillion US dollars in 2022. This indicates the large number of customers looking to shop from their comfort zones. However, having a market full of customers develop the need to determine ecommerce target audience for your business, particularly ecommerce stores. Thus, how to find target audience for online store is an important business level task.

Whenever you want to market a product, the biggest mistake you could make is thinking that your product is for everyone. It is like shooting without aiming. If you want to succeed in the development of your business, you will have to define your ideal customers with as much detail as possible. And for that, you should follow these ways to target your audience more effectively.

1. Understanding the Importance of Ecommerce Target Audience

One of the primary concern that online businesses face is the influx of irrelevant traffic on their websites. There is no denying that the latest tools and techniques have helped many businesses drive traffic to their platforms, be it for a few seconds only. However, conversion rate from such input is almost negligible in most cases.

Basic ecommerce SEO skills and decent content strategy can catch you as many as 100,000 random hits right away, but they would value less significant when compared with 500 hits from users who are actually looking for your services or product. This saves your time and efforts into reaching out to a broader audience, and only looking out for potential customers.

Defining your target audience for an ecommerce store can assist your business strategies in many ways. It saves up your marketing energy that was previously being utilized to reach a bigger, but less interested audience. As a result, you can generate the same revenue with lesser resources if you know what your target audience is looking for.

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Here are eight ways to determine target audience for your ecommerce store:

2. Know Your Audience

Audience in the ecommerce industry works differently from that of real world. Merchants don’t interact with customers as they would at a physical shop. Hence, judgment on one’s behavior and personality varies at almost every encounter.

Let’s say, you have an online store for sportswear. Now, it is important that you understand the lifestyle and behavior of people who follow sports on a regular pattern. It would be easier if you, yourself are a fan of what you’re selling. This act removes the need for carrying out basic research as you already know; what, how and when your potential customer want your product.

3. Picture Your Potential Customer

As an online store for sportswear, you should have an understanding of your ecommerce target market. This step can be carried out by making an individual profile for every user that visits your online store. Once determined who you have to focus on, your marketing decisions will become much easier. You will be able to selectively target a group of similar customer profiles.

4. Customer Segmentation

Now that you have created customer profiles, it is best advised to categorize your ecommerce store’s target audience. Make use of demographical information, such as name, address, user behavior etc. In fact,  modern practices suggest that businesses should make note of customers’ lifestyle, profession, and needs that are not being met. This helps online stores to better cater users as well as rightly mould promotional messages.

5. Surveys and Customer Feedback

Many successful entrepreneurs claim to have come up with best business-driving strategies while talking to right customers. It has become a common practice to record customer feedback right after completing business with them. Some online stores even take it a step ahead and offer brief welcoming-survey to new users, in order to take note of their needs right at the start. Knowing more about the customer should be the north star while making business decisions so using a survey maker, like JotForm, can be the first step to get to know your customer better.

Data generated from surveys and customer feedback can be graphically displayed to see where your ecommerce business stands and which segment can be improved. In addition, due to regular communication with customers, you can also ask them to write reviews of your product or service on public rating forums.

6. Know Your Promoters

Once you have identified target audience for your online store, the next step is to look after promoters of your brand. Customers cum promoters are basically advocates of your business that help popularize your brand via word of mouth. It has become general practice to leverage a satisfied chunk of user base and educate it to build a strong referral base. In this regard, most companies offer decent incentives to their promoters.

7. Stalk Your Competitors

This is perhaps one of the most important details that businesses need to take care of. It has been an ecommerce best practice among industry giants to keep track of their competitors and their strategies. In fact , this practice be seen in everyday life. Take the example of a sanitizer that claims to wash away all 100 viruses from your hands. In response, another competitor launched an improved hand sanitizer that does the same in lesser time.

Similarly, online businesses need to be aware of products and services being used by their competitors. Sometimes, it is the same product or service, just the difference of strategy used in marketing to the right audience. Therefore, keeping track of competitor’s audience is an efficient way of knowing what market should you take care of.

8. Re-evaluate Your Marketing Efforts

Now that you have a better idea of how to find ecommerce target audience, it’s about time to go over your business plan and consider a few things.

See, if your ecommerce target market would benefit from your products and would it truly appreciate its existence? Try figuring out what drives the decision-making wheel among your potential customers and how often they can afford to be in business with you? Answering all these questions should help you better prepare your business strategy with respect to your online store’s target audience.

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Tahha Ashraf

Tahha Ashraf is a Digital Content Producer at Cloudways, a Managed Cloud Hosting Platform. He loves talking about brands and writes content related to online marketing. He is fond of creativity and writes poetry in his free time.

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