How To Find Your Target Audience For Ecommerce Business8 min read

1.Analyzing your current customers:

Everything starts with your existing customers, this does not only ensure you understand your customer’s interests and needs better, but also helps in sculpting your buyer persona that can be helpful in finding consumers who are more likely to purchase your products.
There are 3 stages in analyzing your customer for an ecommerce business.
The first obviously being the crucial step of identifying who your customers are. This group then must be split into 2 sub groups with similar needs, interests and traits. This way you can also identify target customers you are not reaching.
In google analytics, you can analyze the purchased users interest.

Also, In Klaviyo Email tool, you can see the predictive analytics.
This will help you to understand more about the lifetime value, avg order value, and how frequently, they are making purchases.
Customer analysis next process involves in understanding what the groups needs are, based on customers from different groups.

2.Analyze your competitors customer

To know more about the audience, definitely check the competitors customers.
They will not share their customers publicly, you can analyze purchased users interactions on the reviews, testimonials, Facebook reviews & comments.
here, you can see the 360 reviews on competitors product page.

If you check the review, it will get to know the target audience problem that they are facing.

Here is another example from Facebook recommendation:

So, Find the competitors’ customers where they engage & monitor what they are saying.

3. Research Paper

When you are entering a new market or for the first time, you need to do clear cut research on the current industry standards, the problems, audience needs, interests and more importantly on your competitors audience.
To find out above things, reading the research paper is the one of the best ways to find the target audience.
Here is a way to find the research papers:
Search your keyword on google like “Natural soaps” market research.

Then Refer the research papers & gather data from articles.
Also, check the research date or article published dates. This will help you refer to the recent research articles.
You may not get the research papers for free, bt still you can find few research papers from Statista

4. Survey

Surveys is the most comfortable and accurate representation of your customers/users allowing you to exploit your questions to its fullest.

For example if you are selling a natural soap online, there might be thousands of questions piled upon in your mind. How much are they willing to pay? Which flavour do they like the most? This is just a gist of thousands of questions raised in your mind.
The first step in identifying your target audience is to send a survey to a balanced set of general audience. The survey sample can include anything that includes from as basic as name to what they look for in a soap etc.
In that, you have to ask questions that you want to learn more about the audiences. 

There are more things you can ask to your audience, here are few:

1. Gender,
2. Age
3. What is your interest? or Do you use chemical free soaps?
4. What are the activities you like to do? ( give them options too)
Now you know what you need to ask & next you should know where we have to ask?
Because there are many platforms where people stay. Let give you the ways, you can choose the ways based on the users/customers placement.
• Website popup or widget on the site
• promote on social media page via form
• Send a mail to existing customers
• Ask via Chat bot
Based on the 2010 U.S. census data there are roughly 30 million people in your target market. The ideal number to go for when you are conducting a survey is 150 people and the margin of error stands at 95% confidence level that’s equivalent to + or – 3% that’s close to perfection.
I use Hotjar to do surveys on the site & for other platforms, I use Google forms.

5. Forums

Another great space where the audience engages and interacts a lot that gives the ecommerce businesses just enough space to know what they are talking about and then market their products that answers their questions.
You can find the forum in google. Search product/industry “forum” to get related forums.

In the forum, you can find lots of questions & answers from the users.

Here, interested people only engage with forums, so you will be able to find the audience interest.
Analyse the pattern of questions that arise and then try solving them with your products. This helps in drafting an effective marketing strategy along with helping you find your right target audience.

6. Facebook Insight Tool

Facebook Insight tool is a great way to find out the audience demographic & affinity interest based on activities on Facebook.
Using this tool, we can find the audience demographics, affinity interest/ pages that they follow. Here is an example

Facebook collects huge amounts of user data. The more you know about the users, the better you can target them. You refine audience in your Facebook Ad Manager based on the below points;
• Demographics
• Geographics
• Gender
• Time user is active
• Device
• Interests
• affinity pages
The more layers and filters you use, the smaller your audience circle gets. But that’s indeed a good thing considering eliminating unwanted audiences from your core audience group.

7. Think With Google

This is one of the best sites to get more details about the audience.
In fact, I use this to find out the target audience because it gives lots of information about the audience. Here is some sample data about the block Friday sale.

Think with google allows e-commerce owners to go beyond the demographics to find the right target audience for your business.
You can find the relevant insights from think with google by searching on google like Natural Soap “think with google”

Refer all the articles/insights & then you can then start using information to build your own target audience by adding the audience from the existing list based on their interests, demographics and your business goals.