Have you heard yourself saying this lately? “I’m getting all these page views but not many sales.” You might have many potential customers discovering your brand, but your issue might be not finding the right customer.
You want customers looking for your product and its benefits to discover you. If you need to make the right marketing moves, the opposite might occur: many dissatisfied folks are leaving your website. When finding the right customer, the key is quality over quantity (though quantity never hurts).
We’ll help you get in the right mindset that will help you bring the customers you need to your brand.
Understand Your Brand
Every marketing endeavor worth its salt starts with a journey of self-exploration. You need to have a clear vision and understanding of your business (not what you want it to be) to get it to become the entity you want it to be. The process doesn’t have to be dire; you’re likely already running a successful business if you have the time to do an exercise like this. Here are three critical components to generate a fuller understanding of your brand.
Understand the Audience You Want
What kind of audience do you want? Customers with disposable income need to be more specific. This isn’t a trick question, and in fact, it might be the audience that you already have. This portion of business discovery can be fun because you get to think about the type of people for whom your products fulfill a need. But you also have an opportunity to dive deeply into demographics and customer research to determine what particular kinds of customers buy your products.
Customer experience takes priority. According to a recent study, 73 percent of customers now say customer experience is the first thing they consider when deciding whether to purchase from a company. That’s why you should understand your buyer’s personas and offer them what they want.
Know the Competitors
Understanding your ideal audience (and customers) will naturally lead you toward your competitors. This is an important step. Understanding who you’re competing against lets you know the potential unmet needs of your customers that your competitors might be filling, and then you can respond with products and marketing that serve those needs. Using tools like SpyFu, Google Trends, and Google Alerts to understand your competitors’ actions is an excellent place to start.
Competitor research can give you a great insight into their marketing and pricing strategies. With detailed analysis, you can rest assured that you can survive in harsh competition. Since e-commerce is a vital competitive area, you can always be one step ahead of your rivals. Remember that you can track your competitors with automated solutions like competitor price trackers.
Know Yourself
After doing the first two, you must take a long look at your products and services. What does your product do for your customers? Do you promise something your product does not deliver, preventing you from getting your ideal customer? If so, make adjustments. Micro adjustments in marketing plans can pay big dividends.
After knowing your product’s capabilities, you can spend more time developing brand awareness. Highlight the value behind your product so that your customers will buy the product and the value you promise. That way, you can create a stronger brand image around your customers.
Target the Right Customers
Not everything is for everybody! It can be hard to internalize this fact regarding your business, but it’s the truth. Some customers need to look for your product and what it provides. However, Google processes over 8.5 billion searches daily, so the odds are that more than enough people are looking for products like yours. How do you find those customers and point them to your products?
You can do some market analysis through Google Analytics and social media insights. Use them to identify demographic trends that tell you more about your customers. Identifying your target customers helps you determine which customers best fit your product. Then, you can strategically create new marketing strategies that will align with your target customers.
Explore the Possibilities of Organic Search
Organic search drives more traffic than other marketing channels. Organic search results are unpaid, meaning they’re delivered to the person searching on the search results page as a standard item, not an ad.
What does this mean for you?
It means that it’s time to start (if you still need to) producing content that brings the customers you want while also doing keyword research and optimization so you can start ranking in the organic search results. This is not to say that advertising is ineffective or that you should neglect social media. Still, a solid strategy is to start researching keywords to determine pieces of content you can use to compete for the eyes of your ideal customers.
Build the baseline of your content strategy
It would take an encyclopedia-sized post to explain the ins and outs of creating a quality content strategy but to start getting the customers looking for your products; there are some basic steps to take.
What Format?
When examining your brand, you must identify the format best for your customers. Infographics? Video? Blog posts? Social media posts? Different customers will look for other formats, but you also want to ensure you create content that matches your brand.
For instance, if you sell furniture that customers have to assemble at home, a combination of how-to videos, schematic infographics, and blog posts on interior design might be a winning combo. Infographic tools help you easily create an infographic.
Where Will You Publish?
This can also be a significant content strategy or PR campaign component for finding the right customer. Because we’re talking e-commerce, content that indexes to a Google search is likely where you will want to publish, so on your e-commerce website’s blog, your social media, or websites that will provide good linking opportunities to your own. There are also physical options, including but not limited to press releases, community engagement, brochures, newsletters, events, sponsorships, and partnerships.
Market research is valuable. Analyze and decide which platform is the best for your target customers to reach as many customers as possible. Track your customer’s footprints and identify the platforms they use regularly.
What Visitors Are You Going to Compete For?
This is the big one. You’ve done the work and know what type of customer you want to compete for, but how will you do it? A great place to begin is keyword research. Ecommerce SEO tools like Ahrefs or Moz are fantastic ways to start researching competitive search keywords that your ideal customers use. You likely won’t be able to compete for highly sought-after ones, but using your content to compete for less searched-for or competitive keywords is a powerful way to start bringing the customers you want to your brand.
After competing on keywords, you can consider competing on pricing while finding the right customer. It’s a known fact that modern customers are sensitive to price tags. According to Shopify’s Future of Commerce Report 2022, price is a key factor influencing 74% of consumers. That’s why you must consider a competitive pricing strategy that can strengthen your competitive advantage.
Don’t Be Afraid to Be Human
This is more of a philosophical tip. People don’t just select a product or company to purchase from based on their need for the product. They’re much more likely to buy something from a brand they connect with. When someone is looking for shoes, they’re looking for shoes that express something they feel about themselves. So, when creating a content strategy or plan for your e-commerce business, remember that the culture you make, and the humanity you put on display can be just as influential as the price tag you attach to the item.
e-commerce marketing
