7 Things You Need To Know About Your Target Audience

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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/)

Can I Dropship From My Country?

by Olga L

Can I Dropship From My Country?

Yes, you can do it!

We get this question quite often, actually, so we’d like to answer it once and for all: you can dropship from ANY destination on the globe. It doesn’t matter whether you live in Belgrade or in Kuala Lumpur or in Manila or anywhere else.

Does it make any difference if you are located in Singapore or the United States in case you’re doing all your business activities through a website? Basically, all you need to run a drop shipping store is a stable Internet connection.

Can you go online effortlessly?  If yes, then there’s nothing that can actually stop you from becoming a dropshipper. Let’s go over the whole process again so you could see it more clearly.

Drop shipping business explained

So, let’s suppose you’ve made up your mind on the perfect drop shipping niche.

To start your business, you need to get a proper website. You can either build it yourself if you get both the skills and knowledge, or alternatively, you can order a ready-made store that is customized to fully suit your needs. In any case, your own location makes absolutely no difference. Internet is global, so all the online works can be done from any place worldwide.

As soon as the website is ready, you need to fill it with items. These are not your own products; they don’t belong to you, you don’t manufacture them, and you don’t store them in a warehouse. Physically, you don’t even see these items – you just post pictures and descriptions of them on your website.

Again, does it matter what’s your country of residence? You don’t deal with storage facilities, and you’re not managing a factory or something. You just find a reputable online seller who has good quality products, and basically repost their pictures and descriptions on your own website. Obviously, you need to make the product pages look perfect, but still, it is all done online, so your physical placement makes no difference at all.

So, your website is fully operational, and one day you see that someone has just placed an order for some of the items you’re offering.Your further actions are really simple: you contact the owner of the store where you’ve taken this particular product description, pay them the item price, and ask them to deliver the item to the address of your own customer.

You see?

Your physical actions are not required. You simply write an electronic message to the actual seller to place your own order, and you don’t have to do anything else. All the product issues and delivery tasks are the seller’s responsibility. You only need to write a couple of messages, and this can be done from any point on the globe that has Internet connection.

Still unsure you can dropship from your own country?

Are there any shipping limitations?

You’re not asking the original seller to ship the item to YOUR country.You’re asking the original seller to ship the item to the country of your buyer. See the difference? Your location doesn’t matter at all. Yes, you need to check the delivery terms of the seller you’re working with, but you only do this for the convenience of your clients. Your place of living has nothing to do with it.

Are there any legal limitations?

As a dropshipper, you are free to partner with any sellers at your choice.We personally recommend to import items from AliExpress. Here, you don’t need to make any formal agreements with the platform, and you definitely don’t have to sign any contracts with the sellers. You don’t have any paperwork; you simply need to place your order and write the seller a message in case you want a customized package or something like this.

In our experience, the sellers here are really friendly and open to communication with dropshippers. This is quite a typical notification you can see on AliExpress:

Here’s another example:

And another one:

Well, we hope you got the idea. AliExpress sellers don’t really care where exactly do you live. As long as you order items from them and pay for your purchases, they are more than happy to communicate with you. And of course, speaking about money, we also need to answer a highly popular question you can see in the following paragraph.

 Are there any payment limitations?

When you order an item from AliExpress, you can select the payment method that is the most convenient for you. The platform offers a number of secure ways to pay for your purchase, so whatever country you live in, you are most likely to find at least one way to safely pay for your order.

And of course, it’s important to make sure that you can accept payments from your customers (otherwise, the whole business has no point, right?) This is why we typically recommend to integrate multiple payment options into your website: you need to be able to accept both credit card payments and PayPal payments.

The reason is, you’re targeting customers from very different parts of the world, and they may have various preferences and limitations in terms of online payment methods. For example, PayPal doesn’t accept payments originating from several countries. So, if you provide your potential customers with an additional way of making a payment (for example, with a credit card), you have it all sorted out.

As you can see, you’re unstoppable. Quite a nice reason to start your own drop shipping journey, right?

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/can-i-dropship-from-my-country/