Understanding your target audience makes it easy for a business to find potential customers who are likely to be interested in the products and services you offer. A customer portrait is defined as a definition of the behavior, needs and other characteristics that characterize most customers. The presence of such information makes it easier for the company's employees to create marketing materials, develop a strategy to promote an eCommerce store and increase sales.
Today's consumers encounter hundreds of marketing messages every day, and most of them "filter" those messages that are not personally related to them. For a specialist, this means having a good idea of their target audience - who these people are and what they want. This information makes it possible to stand out from the general information noise and increase the chances of getting your message across to people who are potential buyers.
Having a customer profile allows you to structure the information and the list of works required to achieve your business goals. Thanks to the demographic, behavioral and other characteristics of your target audience, you get a clear idea of who the goods or services are aimed at.
For example, you can apply this knowledge when developing a content marketing strategy, because no matter what type of content you create, you need to ask yourself: "Will this be of interest to my target audience? Will it encourage readers to take the targeted action that the business wants? If the answer is yes, then the work is moving in the right direction.
It's quite simple: if you don't understand your audience and their needs, how can you offer them what they really want? One of the most important tasks that the business faces is understanding your client. This helps to determine, for example, how your eCommerce store is different from others that offer the same products. Around these differences and builds up the concept of a brand.
The more informative the portrait of the customer, which you have made, the easier to find opportunities to expand the customer base and increase sales. In addition, additional segmentation into subgroups makes it easier to personalize e-mail links and messages through other communication channels. It is much easier and more efficient to reach out to a potential customer by means of such means as ads and banners in contextual advertising than by handing out flyers offline.
Based on the buyer's portrait, appropriate marketing campaigns are also developed. For example, if you produce leather accessories premium segment, the main buyers of which are top managers and entrepreneurs, the specialist clearly understands what settings to use targeting, instead of unscrewing displays of advertising to the entire audience.
The information to be collected depends on the direction of the business. If you are focused on individual consumers (B2C), you will need to know their demographics, shopping habits, income and advertising channels that will help attract them to the site. If you are working on a B2B model, i.e. focused on selling goods/services to businesses, you will need to find out which sector of the economy they work in, how much they usually spend and which suppliers they work with.
Since online stores are predominantly B2C-based, you will need the following criteria to get a buyer's portrait:
An important step is to collect information about the purchasing habits of the target audience. For example, you need to determine why a segment of customers always buys the cheapest product or prefer to buy the latest models of certain products.
There is no need to go too deep into the collection of information, the details should be moderate. It is unlikely that information that your customer prefers chocolate over marmalade and loves fresh carrot juice will come in handy if you are a gamer. You need to determine your customers' priorities and the factors that influence their decision making rather than finding out what clothes they prefer to wear on Monday mornings.
If your online store has been running for at least several months, be sure to analyze the traffic to its site with the help of web analytics tools. Or assign this task to specialists who are engaged in its promotion. You may be pleasantly surprised by how much information will provide an analysis of traffic and visitor behavior on the site. Google Analytics is an extremely powerful tool for data collection and segmentation, but for their correct interpretation, it is better to use SEO Suite.
The best way to understand what customers really need and what they would like to get from your business is to ask them. It's best to give your audience as many feedback tools as possible in order to get the most out of it. This can be email, social media pages, telephone interviews and surveys on the online store website.
Sometimes it is not so easy to establish communication with the customer and build a trusting relationship with him. In such cases, it is useful to consider ways to encourage those who want to express their opinion. Use, for example, a small gift, coupon or promotional code for a discount. Make sure that no matter what purpose you are trying to get feedback from your audience, this process will be enjoyable for both sides.
Understanding your clients is crucial for your business when creating an effective strategy to achieve your goals. It is very risky to build a marketing strategy based on offers alone. In this case, the risk of spending time and resources to implement a deliberately wrong marketing strategy will be too great. That is why you need to stop guessing and begin to form a portrait of the client and description of the target audience, to meet the needs of which the business is focused.
In any case, business is in the process of constant development, and it is quite normal in the modern economy. After all, in many niches, competition is at such a level that even in order to be in place, you have to constantly run.
