The fact that you have a hammer doesn’t make the entire world a nail. You have to find specific opportunities to put your hammer to its best use. Similarly, identifying your ideal ecommerce customer is crucial to any success you might achieve. Your products, messaging and even the design of your site should all be tailored to appeal to the preferences of your key demographic.
So, how do you figure out who that is?
Read on.
Table of Contents
Know Yourself First
You must understand what you’re selling before you can know to whom you’re selling it. Your offerings must allay customers’ fears, soothe their pain points and deliver an ideal outcome for them. A person concerned about freezing to death in the Arctic tundra is going to welcome your sales pitch on an insulated parka.
What are the primary benefits of your offerings? What problems do they solve? What is the price point at which you must sell to generate a reasonable profit? Answering these questions will help you determine who needs what you have, why they need it and who can afford it.
You’re better positioned to present your wares so they achieve resonance with the people who stand to benefit from them the most when you understand what you have to offer.
Your Ideal Customer
In general, your ideal customer is someone with a problem you can solve. They must also have an appreciation for your product and be engaged by it.
Given everybody walks into a buying situation asking, “What’s in this for me?”; how are you going to make their life better? With that said, they also must be able to pay you for it and afford to use it. After all, a Gulfstream jet will solve everyone’s air travel problems, but they just got a whole new problem if they can’t manage the associated costs.
Finally, they must also be attracted to your brand values. Regardless of what you sell, you have to present it in a manner with which your customers can identify. They have to feel good about buying it form you. This means the way you present yourself, including the look and feel of your ecommerce site, must be reflective of their values. After all, what is an ecommerce website other than a place to display your wares while giving shoppers an insight into the nature of your personality?
Who Are These People?
With those factors in mind, you can begin to ponder who would benefit from doing business with you.
How old are they? Does their gender matter? Do they live in the city, the suburbs or the country? Are they professional, blue collar or entrepreneurial? How much money do they make? How much education do they have? What sorts of life issues are they confronting? Are they married? Do they have children?
These questions will help you formulate a picture of the person and figure out how to speak to them in a language to which they can readily relate.
Where to Find Them?
Now that you know who these people are, finding them becomes a much simpler task. Social media sites are heavily segmented based upon those very issues, so targeting them in that manner becomes more efficient. You can place your marketing messages where they are most likely to be well received and acted upon.
Identifying your ideal ecommerce customer is crucial to any marketing effort. Answering these questions will help you find the people who need you, have the means to pay you, and are most likely to become your repeat customers. When you look at this as a research project and make the effort to get concrete findings, your marketing tasks become much simpler.
