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With the exception of Amazon, which sells everything from 3-liter bottles of cat shampoo to state-of-the-art 3D printers, eCommerce sites are typically niche-oriented.
And there's a good reason for that.
These niche-oriented businesses thrive because they've found a unique gap in the market. They have positioned themselves as the go-to source for those particular products.
To really succeed, you need to find and attract the right audience - people who are just as passionate about your niche as you are. Without this targeted approach, it’s tough to make your mark.
So, how do you find your perfect audience?
We’ve got you covered. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you identify your ideal customers.
What is a target audience?
A target audience is the group of people you want to reach with your products. These are the people who are most likely to be interested in what you’re offering, so you focus your marketing efforts on them.
Understanding your target audience means getting to know their characteristics, preferences, and behaviors. This knowledge helps you create marketing strategies that really resonate with them and meet their needs.
Why define your target audience?
Let’s get straight to the point: you can’t market your products effectively if you don’t know who you’re trying to reach. There's no such thing as one-size-fits-all marketing.
Every ad, blog post, or social media update will resonate with some people more than others.
And you want those “some” to be the ones who might actually buy what you're selling. For example, if you're offering locally produced wines, it makes no sense to target teenagers who can't even legally purchase alcohol.
According to a recent survey, the vast majority of marketers consider audience research crucial for pretty much every type of marketing:
Marketing isn’t cheap. You simply can’t afford to waste money on campaigns that don’t deliver results.
So, you need to be smart about it.
You can make the most of your marketing budget by narrowing down your market and focusing on the people most likely to convert into customers. This approach helps your business grow and thrive.
What are the key components of a target audience?
There are two key components you need to consider when you’re thinking about your target audience: demographics and psychographics. Here’s a quick breakdown of what these mean:
Demographics
Demographics are the statistical characteristics of your target audience. These are basic but crucial details that provide a snapshot of who your customers are.
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Income
- Education
Psychographics
So, demographics tell you who your audience is. Psychographics explain why they make certain decisions.
- Interests
- Values
- Lifestyle
- Behavior
Together, these components give you a more complete understanding of who your customers are and what they need.
Imagine you run an online store that sells high-end athletic wear. Your demographic data shows that most of your customers are women aged 25-40, living in cities, with higher-than-average incomes and college degrees.
That's good to know, but it's just the beginning.
Now, let's add psychographics into the mix. You find out these women are very health-conscious, care about quality and sustainability, lead active lifestyles, and love fitness classes or outdoor activities.
With this deeper understanding, you can really fine-tune your marketing.
For example, you can highlight the eco-friendly materials used in your products or create content around fitness tips or the best gear for different types of workouts.
This combination of demographic and psychographic data helps you connect with your audience in a way that feels personal and relevant.
How to find your target audience (step-by-step)
Figuring out your target audience takes some solid research. You’ll need to dig into different data sources to really understand who your potential customers are and what they’re looking for.
Let's break it down step-by-step so you can get a clear picture of your ideal audience.
Step 1: Understand your product
To find your target audience, you need to fully understand your product. What are you selling? What does it do? And most importantly, who will want it?
This might sound simple, but many eCommerce businesses miss the mark.
Start by detailing your product or service. What exactly are you offering? List out all the features and highlight what makes it unique, such as quality materials, innovative design, or superior customer service.
Once you’ve listed the features, turn them into benefits. For example, if you sell ergonomic office chairs, a feature might be adjustable lumbar support.
The benefit?
It reduces back pain and boosts productivity. Customers care about benefits, so make sure you can clearly explain them.
Next, think about the specific problems your product or service solves. Why does someone need what you’re offering?
Using the ergonomic chair example again, the problem it solves is discomfort from sitting too long. Clearly defining these problems helps you understand the pain points of your potential customers, making it easier to target them with your marketing efforts.
Now, consider who is most likely to benefit from your product. Who has the problems your product solves? For ergonomic chairs, your audience might include office workers, remote employees, or gamers who spend long hours sitting.
Be specific about who these people are. What are their demographics? What are their interests and lifestyles?
It might be tempting to target a broad audience, but it’s more effective to narrow it down to specific niches. Instead of targeting all office workers, consider focusing on remote employees who work from home and might be more interested in creating a comfortable home office environment.
This helps you create more targeted and effective marketing messages. This sets a strong foundation for finding and engaging your target audience.
Step 2: Utilize existing customer data
If you are an established business, use the information already available to you rather than starting from scratch. Instead of speculating on who may or may not be interested in what you have to offer, check the facts.
Take a look at who has purchased your products in the past. This can give you great insight into the types of people who may be looking for a similar experience.
While you are unlikely to have access to such specific information as age or household income, you should be able to determine gender and location from your standard sales information, and those are two of the most important factors.
Step 3: Get insights from Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a goldmine of info about your visitors and how they behave on your site.
First, check out the age range of your visitors. Are you drawing in a younger crowd or an older audience? Knowing this helps you tweak your content and marketing to better match their interests and needs.
Next, look at the gender breakdown. Understanding whether your visitors are mostly men or women (or a good mix of both) can give you ideas for creating more targeted marketing campaigns.
Then, see where your visitors are coming from. Are they mostly local, or are you getting hits from across the globe? This geographic data helps you tailor your content to specific areas. If a lot of your traffic is coming from a particular city or country, you can focus more on those locations.
Another crucial aspect to consider is the interests of your visitors.
Google Analytics can show you what your audience is interested in based on their behavior. Knowing their interests allows you to create content and marketing campaigns that resonate more deeply with them.
Step 4: Use customer surveys
Surveys are a fantastic way to get to know your audience’s preferences and needs. They let you hear directly from your customers about what they think and what they want.
Using a tool like Gojiberry, you can easily embed surveys on your website. This app is perfect for setting up post-purchase surveys, which are ideal because they catch your customers right after they've made a purchase.
This means you won’t disrupt their buying process, and they’re more likely to give you honest feedback.
Another great approach is sending surveys to your email list. These are people who are already interested in your brand, so they’re more likely to take a few minutes to share their thoughts with you.
Here are a few tips to make sure your surveys are effective:
Keep it simple: Use clear and straightforward language to avoid any confusion.
Make it accessible: Ensure your surveys work well on all devices, so customers can fill them out on their phones, tablets, or computers.
Wide distribution: Share your surveys through multiple channels. Embed them on high-traffic pages, send them via email, and post links on your social media platforms to reach as many customers as possible.
Step 5: Analyze social media
Social media platforms are excellent resources for getting to know your target audience. They give you real-time insights into what they're talking about, what they’re interested in, and how they feel about your products or services.
Most social media platforms have built-in analytics tools that provide valuable data about your audience’s behavior.
Start by checking out the demographic breakdown of your followers. Look at their age, gender, and location. This info helps you get a clear picture of who your audience is.
Next, dive into the engagement metrics. See how many likes, shares, and comments your posts are getting. This can show you what type of content your audience loves and engages with the most.
Finally, keep an eye on your follower growth over time. Notice any spikes or drops and try to understand what might be causing them. Maybe a particular post went viral, or you lost followers after a specific update.
By using these insights, you can tailor your content and marketing strategies to better connect with your audience and keep them engaged.
Step 6: Find your audience in online forums
Online forums like Reddit and Quora are packed with unfiltered opinions and discussions. Getting involved in these forums can really help you understand what your audience needs and prefers.
Spend some time reading through the discussions to see what questions, concerns, and interests come up repeatedly. These recurring themes can give you a lot of insight.
And don’t hesitate to jump in and ask the community for their thoughts on your product or industry trends. This can give you direct feedback and help you engage more with your audience.
Step 6: Utilize retargeting and remarketing
Retargeting is a great way to boost conversion rates, but it also serves another really valuable purpose for eCommerce businesses: it gives you insights into your customer base.
For example, installing the Meta Pixel on your website can help you build a database of people who have visited your website but haven’t made a purchase yet.
We’re not interested in conversions here, but in seeing the pool of people who have obviously had some degree of interest in your business, no matter how big or small this level of interest was.
From this, it’s possible to create what Facebook calls a “Lookalike Audience,” which produces a new pot of potential customers for you to advertise to based on their demographics and similarities to your current audience database.
Step 7: Competitor analysis
Even if your business is niche and you dominate your sector, there are always other eCommerce businesses with similarities or overlaps. So, who are they targeting?
To find out, start by making a list of your main competitors. These are businesses offering similar products or services and targeting a similar audience. Here’s how to identify them:
Online search: Perform Google searches using keywords related to your products. Note the top-ranking sites.
Marketplaces: Look at popular online marketplaces like Amazon or eBay to see who’s selling products similar to yours.
Once you have your list, visit their websites to see who they are targeting. If they regularly publish content online, pay attention to the tone of their text and the topics of their blog posts. Check the comments on their blog posts to see how well their content engages the audience. This can give you some great ideas on how to reach a similar audience.
Another helpful tool is Similarweb. It provides detailed insights into your competitors’ websites. You can see their traffic sources, audience demographics, and online strategies.
Look at the demographic breakdown of their visitors, including age, gender, and location. This helps you understand who their target audience is:
Pay special attention to the audience interests section. This shows what types of content and products resonate most with your competitors' audiences.
Are they into sustainability, high-tech gadgets, or budget-friendly options? This information can help you tailor your offerings to meet similar interests or identify gaps where you can stand out.
Step 8: Stay flexible and expand your audience
Although it is important to shun generalizations in favor of identifying a more niche audience to attract, there is such a thing as taking it too far.
A high-end red lipstick, for example… It's very easy to classify the target audience as 20- to 40-year-old women who are professional, high-earning, powerful, and not afraid to be bold and stand out.
But we cannot focus on them exclusively. If we do, we run the risk of alienating what could be a significant percentage of those interested in the product. We need to go off on tangents every now and then.
Who else could be looking for expensive red lipstick? A loving husband or boyfriend, or a teen searching for the ideal Mother’s Day gift. At certain times of the year, especially holidays, we need to be flexible and realize that our target audience may change.
Step 9: Expand globally
We live in a digital age with countless opportunities for global exposure. Expanding your eCommerce business internationally can boost growth and revenue, but it requires careful planning and understanding of your new audience.
Your target audience abroad might not be the same as in the United States. For example, while makeup is primarily worn by women in the US, it's common for men to use cosmetics in South Korea. You need to understand these cultural nuances and preferences.
Start by investigating how your product is used in different regions. Are there local variations or specific ways your product is consumed?
This helps you tailor your offerings to better suit local needs. Consider offering product variations that cater to local tastes, such as different shades of makeup, flavors of food products, or sizes of clothing.
Step 10: Create buyer personas
Now that you’ve gathered all this information about your target audience, it’s time to create buyer personas. Buyer personas are detailed profiles that represent your ideal customers. They help you visualize your customers as real individuals and tailor your marketing efforts to their specific needs and preferences.
Let’s say you run an online store selling eco-friendly skincare products. Based on your research, you’ve identified your primary customers as women aged 30-50, living in urban areas, with higher-than-average incomes, and a strong interest in sustainability.
They are conscious about what they put on their skin and prefer natural, organic products. They often engage in wellness activities like yoga and meditation.
Here’s how you can create a buyer persona:
Name: Eco Emma
Age: 35
Location: San Francisco
Occupation: Graphic Designer
Income: $70,000 per year
Education: College Degree
Interests: Yoga, organic food, sustainability, wellness
Values: Health, quality, eco-friendly products, ethical consumption
Goals: To maintain healthy skin using natural products, to support eco-friendly brands
Challenges: Finding effective products that are also eco-friendly, work-life balance
Creating a detailed persona like this lets you fine-tune everything from marketing messages to product descriptions. It's all about meeting Emma’s needs and preferences.
You can highlight the natural and organic ingredients in your products because sustainability is a big deal for her. You can also share wellness tips and talk about the benefits of eco-friendly skincare, which she's really into.
This personalized approach helps you connect with your audience on a deeper level and boosts your sales.
Drive sales with targeted audience strategies
Finding your target audience is a crucial step in building a successful eCommerce business. By understanding who your customers are, what they need, and how they behave, you can create more effective marketing strategies that resonate with them and drive sales.
Use the steps we’ve outlined in this guide to identify your ideal customers and create buyer personas that help you visualize and connect with your audience.
Ready to take your eCommerce business to the next level?
Avoid common mistakes and start making money faster by learning from the experts. Check out SaleHoo Educate for comprehensive courses on building a successful eCommerce business.
And if you have any questions about audience research or eCommerce in general, our 24/7 support team is here to help.
