When you start your professional career, you don’t realize how many things will appear on your plate. The more experienced you become, the more you understand when to cut costs and move forward with your company. It is not easy to establish a company from square one, especially for a beginner. However, if you can define your target market appropriately, it isn’t as difficult as you think it can be.
An ideal marketing strategy is crucial for the welfare of your online business. It is more important to identify your marketing strategies before thinking about advertisements and discount packages. You will not be associating your business with everyone. Actually, it is unlikely that you will even be talking to most of your desired public. You must interact with those interested in buying your products or services. You must convince them in a way that they don’t look beyond your services.
What is the Target Market?
If you are willing to elevate your online business, you need to understand what is a target market. This is a phrase that is pretty common within the eCommerce world today. It is a defined number of people interested in buying your products or services. By identifying your audience initially, you will ensure that your products meet the demands of your public.
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As a marketing person, you will ensure that your advertising budget is spent only on those interested in buying your products or attaining your services. There are three major talking points in defining your target customers:
- Demographics: They give personal information about your potential buyers, such as their age, gender, employment status, etc.
- Geography: It tells the location of your potential buyer. It can vary from different continents to a single street or neighborhood
- Psychographics: They tell you about the specific things that motivate your customers. They consider their top and bottom choices and the issues they have in their daily lives
Tips to Define Your Target Market
1. Mission Statement
Once you can define your company’s mission statement, it is likely that your target market will emerge very quickly. The best marketing people will tell you that authentic marketing isn’t about defining your target audience. It is about anticipating what they will demand from you. If you show the audience’s desired preferences before they even have a chance to speak, there is nothing better than that. The best form of marketing is when the marketing person thinks like a customer.
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When the customers come after your products and services, they won’t look at the features initially. They will look at the background and achievements of your company. If your organization looks credible, they will show complete faith in you. For example, if you own an educational website, they would look into your achievements and the reasoning why you started this website. If they consider your website authentic, they will start pursuing scholarships from your website.
2. Highlight the Benefiting People
In the guide to target market, you must think about those people who will be benefiting the most from your online business. You can start thinking about them once you have identified the benefits and objectives of your products and services. If you own a gym, likely, you won’t be attracting anyone above 60 years of age. Therefore, you can narrow down your market’s demographics.
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For example, if you look at the website above i.e. “Grow Food Where People Live”, you will understand what kind of customers are being targeted here. You don’t even need to look at the website's landing page. If you just read the website's domain name, you will understand where the website will be going. The business owner has the objective of growing and supplying food to areas in need. If you look at the situation since the pandemic, many countries worldwide have seen an increase in the hunger index. In such countries, these websites will come in handy.
3. Identify Target Market
This is where the influence of your customers comes in handy. When you define your target market, you must create user personas for your customers. This will come after you have created the demographics of those consumers who will benefit from your products and services. In psychographics, further details will be included about your market segment. The details of your customer segments will be as follows:
- Likes and dislikes of the customer
- Hobbies and interests
- Routines
- Preferences
- Lifestyle
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You can get all these details by either creating surveys or preferring customer feedback. However, you must only prefer customer feedback if you have a strong customer base on your website. Otherwise, social media polls will be preferable in letting you know who to sell your products.
4. Look at Your Segments
When you identify your target market, customer segmentation is one of the key steps. It is important to note that just because someone tells you that they prefer your products or services doesn’t mean it is their final decision. They opt for any other website having the same niche idea. You can ask the following questions to your customer base to have a clear idea about your market segment:
- Is the group fine to make the business move in the right direction?
- Is the segment’s income substantial to support the provided products and services?
- If the customers buy one product, will they come back and buy another one?
- Are there brands of the same niche as you in the market?
- Is the identified market easily accessible?
5. Buying Decisions
Once you define your target market, you must start prioritizing your audience. You must understand that the people you are interacting with are those who are interested in buying your eCommerce products. The people who influence the buying decisions on your website are classified as the target audience. For example, the parents will have the final say on the clothes their children should be wearing as the children don’t have the purchasing power.
6. Do Competitor Analysis
The worst form of marketing is when the person thinks he is beyond eCommerce. If the marketing person becomes overconfident and thinks that he is the benchmark for all the eCommerce people, this is where the debacle begins. As a marketing person, you should always think about evolving your marketing strategies and your target market. With time, you should consider new target audiences that will give you an idea about the new look of the market.
The best way to bring freshness to your online business is to do competitor analysis. Doing competitor analysis is not just about copying all the tactics that your competitors have done. It is about understanding the strategies they have used and how they stand out from the rest of their competitors. Competitor analysis brings uniqueness to your brand and ensures that customers look at your online business differently.
Strikingly’s Input in Defining Target Market
The best way to do things in the online world is to do them easier. It is easy to do the same things using a difficult route in the digital world. One of the ways to identify your target market in the eCommerce world is by relying on Strikingly. You don’t require any technical expertise to be considered eligible on our platform. After all, if you can create a web page without writing a single line of code, you cannot ask for more than that.
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The best thing about relying on Strikingly is that you invest next to nothing. This is especially for beginners or small businesses that don’t have the financial muscles to hire a professional web designer. Thousands of business startups worldwide rely on our free web designs to create an online presence. Our collection of website templates makes it easy for beginners to create websites for free, which allows them to compete with larger brands.
Conclusion
Once you have gone through our guide to target market, you will understand the size of the task. You will understand how to write a marketing strategy by using actual examples. You are fully responsible for attracting and retaining your loyal customers. However, you should also know that the identification of customers is the first main step. Once you have identified your audience’s gender, age, income, marital status, and other attributes, you must concentrate on those communication channels that these customer segments can utilize.
The best way to look into your customers' behavior is by using Google Analytics. Google Analytics identifies where your customers hang around online. This data can streamline your social media channels, email campaigns, and even traditional advertisements. Your tone and language will be critical in the retention of your customers. So, create your business website on Strikingly today, identify your target audience, and convey your messages to them appropriately.
