3 Tips to Understand Your E-Commerce Audience

Defining your target audience is a vital step in launching and growing a successful e-commerce business. By putting a little time and effort into researching and understanding your ideal consumer, you can ensure your approach to creative marketing is effective, your marketing funds are being spent efficiently, and your products are meeting the needs of your consumers. Identifying your target consumer helps you define what aspects of your product you should be promoting most, who exactly you should be promoting them to, and even how you should be promoting them.

 

All of this can convert directly to increased sales and both short-term and long-term business growth. Wondering where to start? Here are a few tips to help you better understand your e-commerce audience:

 

Determine your customers’ locations.

Knowing where customers are located enables e-commerce retail businesses to focus their marketing and SEO efforts in a productive way in order to get effective results. Location can influence important factors like lifestyle, buying trends, local event marketing opportunities, social and political preferences, and tourism sales opportunities. You can determine the location of your customers by using total sales report data, shipping location data, or by hiring a third-party geolocation specialist for further insights.

 

Focus on psychographics.

Many people are familiar with demographics, which are statistic-based qualifiers such as age, income, or occupation. But psychographics can be just as - or even more - important in defining your target consumers. Psychographics are behavior and mentality-based qualifiers such as hobbies, personal values, and purchasing taste. These factors allow you to really get to know your customer, from their personality to their core beliefs. Knowing your customers allows for more targeted marketing efforts that can not only help you meet your customers where they are, but also where they want to and plan to be.

 

Understanding how your customers think and feel can also help you design products and marketing materials that get through to them on a deeper level. Some common ways to find psychographics are through market research, surveys, or third-party social media research.

 

Test your marketing content.

Use focus groups to test your marketing campaigns before going live. You’ll often find that the feedback not only helps you improve your marketing and products, but also helps you understand why your customers think and feel the way they do. That insight is invaluable to an e-commerce brand, as you can use it to shape your efforts in the future. Prevent failed marketing spending by investing a little extra to test it out beforehand.

 

Identifying your e-commerce audience is important to e-commerce success, but understanding them on a deeper level can take your business to the next level. Check out our blog for more helpful tips on how to elevate your e-commerce business.