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by Olga L.
As an owner of a drop shipping store,
what do you know about your customers? Well, um…they’re brave and reckless –
they blindly buy random items from an unknown online seller, after all!
Okay, nice for a start. Anything
else? Nothing at all? Come on, it’s important!
Why is it important? Seriously, why do you need to know
stuff about your buyers? Why can’t you just create a store and add items and
wait for sales? Because you will have no sales in this case.
In drop shipping, your commercial
success is defined by your marketing strategy by about 75%.
And how on Earth are you going to
plan your marketing efforts if you know nothing about your potential buyer?
When you have a picture of your
average customers, you can:
·
Understand their needs and
wants
·
Think of your value for them
·
Create a strong marketing
message that is appealing for your clients
·
Find the relevant marketing
and advertising channels
So what do you need to know about
your target customers?
1. What do they have in common?
One of the most awesome things about
drop shipping business is its global reach. It means that you’re
not necessarily limited by any geographical boundaries. You may choose some
specific country or region to work with, but a customer can actually come from
any point on the globe. And the whole nature of online stores means that
ANYONE can get interested in your offers and place an order. Their occupation,
gender, age, marital status, etc. can be strikingly different. In other words,
your customer can potentially turn out to be a stay-at-home mother of two from
Moscow, or a 19-year-old student riding a wheelchair in San Francisco, or a
retired construction site worker from Beijin, or…well, you see the point.
Look carefully at the niche you’ve chosen for
your store. Who might be the people who can get interested in these offers? What
is the feature that BOTH unites them AND makes them your target
audience? Is it some special part of their lifestyle? Their hobby? Their
musical taste or a preference in video games? The gadgets they use, or a TV
show they watch?
2. What are their needs?
So, you’ve determined that you will
be mostly targeting iPhone users who like The Walking Dead series. Or maybe the
people who are thinking of starting their video blogging journey. Or maybe
Muslim women interested in fashion and following the newest trends. Or whoever
else. Now it’s time to answer a really important question: what is the
reason for them to buy the items you offer? In other words, what is
their need?
The iPhone user might be looking for
a phone case demonstrating their passion and uniting them with other fans of
the series. The video blogger-to-be might be looking for cheap yet durable
tripods to hold their gadgets in due place during the recording. The Muslim
woman might be looking for ways to bring a bit of diversity into her clothes
and to find a Western-style item that matches the religious norms she follows. Well,
you got the idea. Yes, that’s complicated. But the answer to this question
leads us to the following one:
3. Can you meet their needs? So, you’ve found out who might
be the people interested in your drop shipping niche, and whyexactly
they are looking for these particular items. Now it’s time to think IF you
can offer them the thing(s) they need and want so badly. As a drop
shipping store owner, you heavily rely on your suppliers. They are
your starting point when you start thinking of creating a webstore.
This is why it will be necessary for
you to find out if the needs of your target audience can be met with
your resources. For example, if you do drop shipping with AliExpress,
you need to make sure that the items shown on platform suit your customers’
needs. Otherwise, if your store doesn’t provide any help or solution to your
customers, what’s the point?
4. Can these people buy your items
spontaneously? This question mostly refers to your customers’ purchasing power.
Can they actually afford these items or they need to save
money first? Can it be an impulse purchase or your
potential buyers need to think about it for some time? The
answers to these questions heavily define your future marketing strategy. You
can’t advertise your products as something that can be bought in a blink of an
eye if this purchase requires some planning first. At the same time, you can’t
refer to a simple and cheap item as to a ‘grand and life-changing gain’.
5. What language do they speak? Not literally (though it’s obviously
important to have the right mix of languages in your store). What exactly do
your customers type into Google search bar when they are looking for stuff to
buy online? How do they phrase their search queries? What words and expressions
do they value the most when they read product descriptions and advertisements? What arguments, reasons,
and promises do they trust?
All of these insights are vital for:
·
Choosing the right tone of
communication
·
Creating advertisements, banners,
announcements, etc.
·
Editing descriptions and reviews on
the product page
Speak your customers’ language, and
you’ll win their hearts.
6. How can you reach them? Oh, so now it’s time for a challenge. To plan your marketing
strategy in the most efficient way, you need to know where exactly do your
potential clients ‘hang out’.
Which social networks do
they use most actively? Which blogs and news’ websites do they
read? Who are their favorite video bloggers? This is how you will
find out where to post your advertisements and achieve the biggest reach. When
you know which social networks you can use for promotion, it gets much easier
for you to manage the whole set of the marketing activities. Instead of doing
all the job manually, you can go for automated drop shipping solutions in
order to save your time and energy.
7. How can you target them? This question logically follows the previous one. As soon as you
determine the most suitable channels for promotion, you need to understand how
exactly you will segment the audience of this channel. For example,
if you know that your potential customers mostly use Facebook, you won’t aim
your advertisements on THE WHOLE Facebook community. Instead, you will try
to only target the people who might be interested in your offers. It’s
not that difficult, actually – when you choose the settings for your Instagram Ads campaign,
for example, you can specify quite a narrow viewers’ segment. The same goes for
advertising campaigns in the majority of other social networks. So, do you
think you really know your target audience?
By Olga L. Olga is a content writer at AliDropship, and she aims to explain
the most complicated drop shipping concepts in the simplest terms possible. (
Source : https://alidropship.com/know-your-target-audience/)
