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Knowing your customer base is critical to having a successful online business. If you know your industry well, you may think you know who your customers are. Can you verify this through any data you collect on your site’s traffic? Do you know that the customers you are getting are the best visitors you could be getting? Do they convert well? What if there is a segment out there that you are not yet marketing to? Having a full understanding of your site’s target market can help you design and promote your site more effectively.
Brainstorming the essential questions
Try to answer the following questions about who you assume your target market to be:
About your target consumer:
Male or female?
Average age range?
Income level?
Marital status?
Buying habits?
If you’re servicing a business market:
Size of company?
Public or privately owned?
Age of company?
What does that company sell or do?
Now fill out this information about your product, which can help shape the type of consumer you may want to target because these questions will reveal your consumers’ motivations for buying:
Is your product a necessity or luxury?
What is the product’s lifecycle? How often will customers need to re-purchase?
What is the product’s availability?
Possible future changes in this industry?
Price of average purchase?
Research the potential audience for your product or service
Whether or not you were able to answer all of the questions above, chances are, if you haven’t already done the research, most of your answers are guesses or assumptions about consumer behavior. Perform some research using sites such as www.internetretailer.com, www.emarketer.com and www.forrester.com . These sites provide detailed reports on the results of surveys in the online marketplace. Having a definition of your target market that is based on actual data will help you make better decisions about how you market your site as well as help you to formulate a business plan that may make your venture more attractive to potential investors.
Make sure your target market is shopping online
Does your target consumer actually use the internet frequently for purchases? Do some research to find out what demographics exist within the online marketplace within different online shopping methods. For example, does your target market tend to use search engines, directories, or shopping portals? Are the demographics of your target market more apt to click on banner ads, text ads, or are they more vulnerable to email marketing?
Additionally, knowing what people are typing into the search engines can help you better understand which types of products and services in your industry are most popular. If your products are getting a high amount of traffic in the search engines, you can be sure there’s a market out there. Wordtracker.com is an excellent tool for this purpose. Wordtracker will tell you how many times per day any keyword is typed into the major search engines. It will also help you to know which search engines or shopping portals are used most frequently by your target market so that you can tailor your search marketing efforts toward these resources.
Use surveys and analytics to get to know the visitors your site is already receiving
Put questions into your checkout process that will allow you to capture information about your customers. This will tell you more information about who is purchasing on your site. You can also issue surveys via email. Information is power, and this type of feedback from customers may show you opportunities for improvement with your site.
Utilize web traffic analytics to determine where your customers are coming from and what they are doing on your site so that you fully understand user behavior. This can help you make better decisions about your site’s usability and design. Knowing the pages on which they are arriving and their click paths from that point can help you make more informed decisions about where you’d like your visitors to go when they arrive on your site. You can also consider using LivePerson or other chat clients so that you can proactively communicate with your site’s visitors. This feature provides you with the advantage of getting to know your site’s visitors better while at the same time helping to answer their questions and push them toward the sale.
Using this information
Once you have the best possible understanding of your target market and you’ve become aware of all the different niches that you can market to, be sure you keep a pulse on the industry, refreshing your data with new research regularly. Utilize this information heavily whenever you are crafting or re-investing in your business’s marketing strategy. For example, you can advertise for a very general market, and you may get a lot of visibility and traffic as a result, but making sure your advertising is as targeted to your ideal consumer as possible will enable you to lock in a higher conversion rate and repeat business.
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