Knowing your target market is an important part of ecommerce web design and search engine promotion. Your target market can influence many factors and is critical to the success of your online business.
Some things to consider when defining your target market are:
- What is your target area? Are you targeting local, regional, national, or global?
- Are you targeting businesses or consumers? If targeting businesses are they small, medium or large? If targeting consumers is it important to target families, couples or even the single market?
- Are you targeting the budget or premium market? Are you looking to sell lots of lower priced items or a few higher priced items?
- Who is most likely to purchase your products or services? Are they gender specific, for certain age groups or are they targeted to a certain activity, lifestyle or hobby?
Why is it important to know your target market?
Target Keywords
Identifying your ecommerce stores target market at an early stage means that you can attract the right customers and not waste resources by targeting the wrong people. Targeting the right market allows you to achieve a higher return on investment.
Understanding your target market allows you to find the best and most relevant keywords for your website from the very beginning and gives you the perfect opportunity to ensure your website content is rich in these keywords. Knowing your market means you can search by location, price and specific interests and find the keywords that are most likely to drive traffic to your website.
Customers with a set budget may include words such as ‘cheap’ in their search terms, whereas people searching for more expensive products may include words like ‘luxury’, ‘premium’, or ‘designer’. Using the correct keywords is important for successful conversion rates as targeting the wrong keywords is unlikely to attract suitable customers.
Ecommerce web design
Knowing your target market is not just important when choosing keywords for search engine promotion but also when considering the design, layout and functionality of your website.
If your target is a younger market, you may want your website to be more eye catching with more activities and things to do. If you are targeting an older market, something cleaner and easy to navigate may be preferred. If your target is businesses then a professional look and feel are best.
From a technical point of view, this also allows you to decide the types of functionality you want to include. Websites targeting businesses may want to include features like having to register for an account to view prices.
Consumer focused ecommerce websites may want to include features like ‘send to a friend’ so that visitors can share product recommendations and increase traffic through word of mouth; or shareable wish lists that allow visitors to save items for future reference or share on occasions like birthdays or Christmas.
Knowing your target market is important to the creation of your ecommerce website, but this is also the perfect time to identify your competitors and check out their online store to get a feel for how they target the market. We’re not suggesting you copy their website by any means, but knowing your competitors and understanding how they work will allow you to identify things that could work for you as well as things you wouldn’t want to include.
Having a list of websites you like (whether relevant to your target market or not) along with information about your target market gives your web design agency a better understanding of what you want to achieve with your website and allows them to suggest options to enhance your online store further.
