If your offer is for everyone, it’s useless!

Knowing the target group (the group of customers you want to target your offer and advertising to) is an extremely important element that should be included in the marketing strategy of every online store in Dropshipping. If you have not yet made any analysis in this direction, you should make up for it as soon as possible.

1. Why is choosing a target group so important?

Identifying the target group will allow you to prepare the right offer of products that will have a much better chance of selling than products placed in the store without a specific vision of who their target customers may be. It is worth thinking about it, the more that in the Dropshipping process the online storecan focus on the elements usually neglected, because the wholesaler takes over matters related to the packaging and shipping of goods.

In addition, knowing who we want to offer our products to, we can construct the website of our online store based on Dropshipping model in a way leading to many potential customers visiting it and buying its assortment. Choosing the right target group will also allow the store owner to choose specific, effective marketing activities that would help increase the planned sales volume. Incorrectly specifying the target group or not specifying it may result in spending a lot of money on advertising, with a very low return on investment.

2. Criteria for choosing the target group

Very different criteria are used to select the target group. The selection of a specific criterion is the most important step towards defining the target group:

The most important criteria are:

a) socio-demographic: allowing to determine age, education, occupation, sex, income, possession, marital status.

b) geographical: enabling the determination of the place of residence, a place of work or a place where one is shopping.

c) psychological / cultural: allowing to define interests, lifestyle, hobbies, leisure time activities, as well as behavior in the context of shopping, views, skills, needs.

d) financial: allowing to determine the state of ownership, income, financial burden or lack thereof.

3. Tools to help in choosing a target group

The tools that can help us identify the target group according to the criteria above are Google Analytics and Google Adwords.

a) Google Analytics

Information on the age and sex of clients can be obtained using the Google Demographics tab in Google Analytics. They will allow us to tailor specific marketing solutions to the client, formulate advertising content, etc. And by using the tab:Geographical data, we can know the customer’s location and the language he/she uses when using the internet. Determining the location can help in determining the shopping habits of our recipient, information about the language will be useful when considering the introduction of an additional language version in the e-store.

The next data that may be useful in determining the profile of the target recipient is the information contained in the tab: Behavior. Here we’ll find out if anyone has visited our website for the first time or if he/she is a regular customer. This will allow us to properly select marketing resources to keep returning customers and at the same time acquire as many new ones as possible (we will use e.g. remarketing for returning customers and a broad brand campaign for new customers).

Google Analytics dostarczy nam także danych na temat częstotliwości wizyt danego klienta (np. jak często odwiedzają sklep, ile generują sesji czy też jakie są odstępy czasu pomiędzy wizytami), jak również jego zaangażowania, czyli czasu trwania sesji i liczby podstron odwiedzanych w trakcie jednej sesji. In this way, we will obtain information about the number of customers actually interested in the website and the probability that they will make / make a purchase, or only that such a person came to our store by accident or for other reasons.

Browser, type of operating system, screen resolution – this is another customer data that we can obtain thanks to this tool, and which will help us choose the right technical solutions for our online store operating in Dropshipping model so that navigation through it would not be difficult for customers.

Google Analytics also provides information about the types of devices, models and brands used by customers when buying in our store. Having the knowledge whether it is mobile, desktop or tablet, we can choose specific tools to be used e.g. on mobile devices, guided by the number of visits to the website from a given type of device. We can also tailor the type of advertising to users using different types, models and brands.

b) Google Adwords

Another tool that will help us meet our clients is Google Adwords. Similarly to Google Analytics, it can be used to obtain data on the age, sex, location of the client. Apart from this, it also provides additional, very important information. Namely, it allows us to see the addresses of pages visited by users who have already used our e-store (and to which we directed our marketing activities – so-called remarketing). We can check the pages on which ads were displayed, which we decided to use for returning customers. It is also possible to look at specific subpage.

4. What enables us to choose the target group?

The knowledge that we can gain from this information is very important – it allows us to determine the interests, lifestyle, hobbies, views and other characteristics of our clients. It enables identifying / specifying our target group, appropriate selection of products for our e-store and matching specific marketing solutions.

There are many tools on the market that help create a target group. We will describe them more closely in other articles on our blog.

Defining the target group has a significant impact on all aspects of running an online store: matching the appearance of the store, product description, prices, photos, communication with the customer, the language we use to contact the recipients, all marketing measures used. The effort to properly match these aspects to a specific target group is the most profitable and makes us aware that we have been optimally prepared to run a store that can be successful.