Zero In On Your Dream Customer: Why its Important & How You Can Do it

How well do you know your audience?

Is it men or women who shop on your online store? How old are they? Where do they live?

Knowing who buys products from your store is vital for every ecommerce business owner. As renowned marketer Russell Brunson once said, you can’t sell to everyone. You need to define your ideal buyer so that you can develop campaigns that resonate with the people most likely to go through your checkout.

So how do you do that?

In this article, we’ll go into detail on how to develop a target audience profile by exploring demographics and psychographics. You’ll also learn how to connect with them by utilising various forms of communication methods.

Here’s everything you need to know.

The Importance of a Defined Target Audience

Getting high-quality leads isn’t easy for a lot of ecommerce businesses. While you might be tempted to cast a wide net, it doesn’t guarantee you’ll find people who align with your ideal customer profile. Instead, you’ll end up with low conversion rates and wasted resources.

Once you’ve established a target audience profile, your marketing strategies become laser-focused and cost-efficient. You’re able to personalise visuals, language and promotion to their preferences while ensuring your brand comes across authentically.

How to Create a Target Audience Profile

One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a business owner is assuming your product appeals to everyone on the planet. To be successful in ecommerce, you must meticulously define your ideal customers by employing these strategies.

Start With the Problem

To truly grasp your audience's pain points, you must avoid making assumptions and instead gather sentiments directly from your ideal buyers. Some of the ways you can achieve this effectively include:

• Participating in social listening online, such as in niche-specific Facebook groups. You can even join in the conversation by asking detailed questions and closely observing discussions to gain valuable insights.
• Examine your competitors' websites to collect further clues. Pay attention to the problems they aim to address and the solutions they offer.
• Read product reviews on platforms like Amazon. Focus on one-star ratings to find specific issues raised by customers.

Dive Deep into Demographics

Demographic data offers insights into your customer's characteristics. There is a variety of information available which can benefit how you design your marketing strategies. Some of the essential criteria you should capture include the following:

• Gender
• Age
• Location

However, there are some additional details worth capturing to finetune your audience profile and marketing activities. Examples are:

• Household income level
• Highest level of education
• Marital status
• Homeownership status
• Employment status
• Number of children
• Hobbies and interests

With this insight, you can allocate your marketing resources more efficiently by focusing on engaging the most receptive customers and reducing costs on disinterested segments.

Explore Psychographics

Demographics rely on numerical data, such as statistics about customer characteristics. But there are also psychographics, which delve deeper and include objective and subjective insights into attitudes, aspirations and other psychological factors. Some of the variables you might want to explore are:

• Interests: These can be specific topics, subjects, or activities your customers find engaging and appealing. Understanding a person's interests helps tailor marketing messages and offers to align with their preferences.
• Hobbies: Consider the leisure activities or pastimes your buyers pursue for enjoyment and relaxation. Knowing your target audiences’ hobbies can help you create products that cater to their recreational interests.
• Lifestyle: This category encompasses aspects such as daily routines, values, habits and living conditions. The data helps you understand how your customers spend their time, make choices, and prioritise different aspects of their lives. It is valuable for targeting products that align with a particular lifestyle.
• Opinions: This market data category provides insights into people's stances on topics like politics, social issues, technology and more. Understanding their views helps you craft marketing messages and campaigns that resonate with specific viewpoints or values.

Combining demographic and psychographic data can help create a comprehensive target audience profile and highlight what resonates most strongly with them. It can also assist in creating messages that guarantee you reach the right audience.

Monitor Online Behavior

To help fill out your audience profile, you will want to further understand your target customers’ online behaviour. Some of the details you’ll need are:

• The websites and platforms they frequent
• The social media apps they use
• The groups and forums they belong to
• Their preferred payment method when shopping online
• The ads they click on and the ones they ignore
• The device they use to buy products online

Thankfully, you don’t need to analyse each customer individually to gather the data. There are multiple tools available. Some of the best include:

• Hotjar: Provides a suite of tools to gain valuable insights into user behaviour on your ecommerce store. It offers heatmaps and user recordings, helping you identify issues in the user journey, enhance your marketing efforts and boost customer retention.
• Mixpanel: A user analytics platform that tracks every event on your website and links it to individual users. It offers real-time data collection along with intelligent reports to inform your product decisions based on specific scenarios.
• FullStory: Combines qualitative and quantitative data to provide a holistic view of your customer's digital journey. It also aids in real-time bug identification and resolution, helping you retain customers and drive digital transformation.
• Crazy Egg: Helps optimise your website by providing insights into user interactions, scroll depth, and click patterns. It segments data by key elements and focuses on improving conversion rates, ultimately enhancing the customer experience.
• Mention: A social media listening app that tracks brand mentions across the web. It offers real-time alerts for rapid responses to customer inquiries or complaints.
• Meltwater: Provides AI-driven insights with a focus on social media monitoring. It filters relevant mentions, assigns sentiment, and offers customisable dashboards for comprehensive online performance tracking.
• Cyfe: Offers an all-in-one business dashboard, including social media, web analytics, marketing, sales and more. It allows data integration from various services and covers a wide range of business aspects.
• Sprinklr: Excels in social listening, monitoring three billion people across 350 million sources. It provides insights into online conversations, sentiment analysis, and competitive benchmarking to support your strategic decision-making.

Analyse Your Competitors

Your competition is likely to have a target audience profile similar to yours. So, it makes sense to review who they’re targeting, how they’re reaching out to customers, and the messaging they use to explain how their products solve buyer problems.

But you should also explore the opportunities in the market. There might be gaps that your competitors are not addressing. You can find ways to introduce your product offering to address these market needs through your research on social media, Facebook groups and comment sections online.

Engage and Communicate

While gathering data and conducting social listening will help build an audience profile for targeted marketing, you should also validate your findings firsthand. Collecting insights directly from your customers can provide assurance that you’re on the right track and not wasting time, money or resources on campaigns that don’t resonate.

Gathering Customer Feedback

There are multiple strategies for gathering customer feedback. Some of the best ways are:

• Surveys: Surveys are a versatile tool to gather the necessary information you need. You can utilise customer satisfaction surveys (CSAT) after specific activities to pinpoint areas for improvement, like the delivery process following a product shipment. Net promoter score (NPS) surveys provide an overall view of customers' sentiments toward your online store. Alternatively, customer effort score (CES) surveys measure the ease of using your products or navigating your website.
• Emails: Emails are a convenient way to seek feedback, especially after significant interactions, such as a purchase or after a parcel is delivered. Automate these emails for efficiency and keep the content concise and embedded within the email for user convenience.
• Interviews: While fewer customers may participate in interviews, the insights gathered can be more profound. Face-to-face or phone interviews allow for in-depth questioning and personalised responses
• Focus Groups: When conducting focus groups, preparation is critical to staying on topic and obtaining relevant answers. While some deviation from the questions can result in valuable insights, avoid straying too far from the main subject.
• Social Media: Many customers express their opinions about brands on social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok and Instagram. Monitoring your brand's social media channels and discussions about your business on other platforms enables you to address issues promptly and anticipate customer needs proactively.
• Reviews: Encouraging customers to leave reviews allows them to share pros and cons freely. While this can result in some vague feedback, it can also bring unexpected insights and valuable suggestions for improvement.

Continuously Refine Your Target Audience Profile

Identifying your target audience is not a one-time task but a continuous process. Keeping your finger on the pulse of ever-evolving market trends and customer behaviours is vital to success. As the market changes, so do peoples’ needs, preferences and pain points. It requires ongoing research and analysis to ensure your marketing efforts remain effective.

By continuously refining your target audience profile, you enhance your marketing strategies and demonstrate your commitment to meeting your customers' evolving expectations. Your ability to adapt will be vital to your long-term success as an ecommerce business owner.

Get to Know Your Audience

Following these steps to define and refine your target audience profile is crucial for the success of your marketing efforts and business goals. By understanding your audience's demographics, psychographics, and pain points, you can tailor your messaging to resonate with them effectively. The process of continuous refinement also ensures that you stay aligned with the evolving market landscape and your customers’ expectations.

Now, it's time for you to take action. Apply these steps to finetune your marketing strategies and connect with your ideal customers more efficiently. Remember, a well-defined target audience is the foundation of a successful marketing campaign.