How to Target the Right Audience for Your E-commerce Business

In this age where everyone is trying to live the dream of working from home, an e-commerce business is one of the easiest ways to get that dream going. However, setting up the store is the easy part. Getting an audience to purchase your products is where the problem comes in. However, this shouldn’t be a problem if you don’t put the cart before the horse.

Like Seth Godin said in his book, This is Marketing, “It doesn’t make any sense to make a key and then run around looking for a lock to open.” You shouldn't create a product store and then look for a customer base to buy your products.

With statistics sites like Statista reporting over 2 billion online buyers, many e-commerce store owners think they will always find customers. However, with 20 million online businesses serving these buyers, many stores also target the same customers as you.

So, how do you identify the target audience for your e-commerce business? How do you create products for a hungry customer base? This article will give you two surefire ways to get the right audience.

Pick an Audience You’re Part of

No one knows an audience's pain points better than someone who has also been through the same inconveniences. For example, a plus-sized woman about to get married would most likely have trouble finding the perfect dress for her special day. Now, if she shares her experience online and finds so many people with the same problems, she has an audience looking for a solution to their problem.

If the woman decides to start an online wedding dress shop that caters to custom wedding dresses for plus-sized women, that is a perfect way to develop a target audience for her store. Since she has already found awareness with a viral post on social media, she could use this to create awareness for her store.

While this is one example out of many, you can always find audience groups on Facebook, WhatsApp, Reddit, and many other social media platforms. Most of these audience groups have needs waiting to be solved, and finding the business opportunity in their needs gets you just the right audience. Shoplazza, Shopify, BigCommerce, etc. have collaborated with social media platforms and allow store owners to find target customers easily.

However, how do you know if these people are genuinely ready to buy? That brings us to the next point.

Learn About Your Audience

Even if you’re part of this audience, you could find out various perspectives by talking to many people. Or you could also find potential customers. Are they ready to pull out their credit cards to pay for the solution you’re offering? This is why you have to learn about them properly.

To do this, you could find people within your identified target audience who you could talk to in person. Ask them about their experiences with the pain point you want to provide a solution to. A face-to-face discussion would give more insight than online surveys.

However, the number of people you’d be able to cover with the method above would be minimal. So, online survey tools like Crowdsignal would be perfect for finding out more about the audience. Analytic tools like Google Keyword Planner could also help find the keywords your audience searches for. This gives more insight into the products you could offer to your target audience.

Conclusion

While there is still more market research to be done before properly isolating your target audience, these steps should set you off on your way. You could try other steps like creating a buyer persona, checking out your competition’s strategies, etc.

(Contributed by Oluwafemi Adedeji & Hermes Fang)