The key to making your online business a success is knowing and identifying with your target audience. When clients come to me for advice on how to drive more customers to their website, the first thing I have them do is list the characteristics of their ideal customer.
What Are the Characteristics of Your Ideal Customer?
You can figure out what type of customer you are trying to target by answering some of the following questions:
• What age group are you targeting?
• Are you targeting a specific gender or ethnic group?
• What is your target audience’s average household income?
• How computer literate is your target audience?
• Will your customers be more likely to access your website from home or from work?
• How fast is your customers’ Internet connection likely to be?
• Does your target audience have any special hobbies?
• In what part of the world are your customers most likely to live?
• Are your customers single or married?
• Do your customers have children?
• What is the education level of your target audience?
To effectively target your ideal audience, you must first understand who your audience is.
Knowing some basic characteristics about your customer will help you determine the most effective marketing plan and design the most appealing website. Appropriate design and content will dramatically increase your success in delivering a clear, innovative message to a highly targeted audience.
The number-one advantage of marketing online is that the Internet allows you to get extremely targeted, more so than any other form of advertising. So the more you know about your customers, the better your chances of a successful campaign. If you don’t know who your target audience is, start asking! Give away a product or coupon to encourage your customers to share their demographics.
How to Target Different Types of Audiences
Effective online marketing is no different than marketing cars, music, clothing, or anything else. Certain basic themes, lingo, technology, and even colors appeal to one generation, gender, or race more than another. So get to know your audience; cater to their individual needs. Remember, not all web users are created alike.
By utilizing features that attract specific audiences to a website, you will be able to capture their trust, attention, and loyalty. Here are three examples of very different audiences: women, seniors, and teens.
Women want to save time and money
According to WomenTrend, a Washington consulting firm, 80 percent of all household purchases are made or influenced by women. In 2000, 52 percent of online shoppers were women. The likelihood of Internet use among women tends to increase with age. CommerceNet/Nielsen Media Research says that women older than the age of 50 are more likely than men to purchase online and twice as likely to purchase online as are women in general.
Determine who your target audience is, then provide website content and features that will keep them interested.
Women of all ages primarily use the Internet to save time and money. They see the value in 24-hour availability and being able to compare prices quickly and easily without any sales pressure — which could be one reason car and financial sites are now thriving!
Women also enjoy a sense of community, which helps explain why www.women.com and www.iVillage.com are so successful. These sites not only give women a sense of community and comfort, but also help women with everyday-life problems. The number of women who visit education, health, and family sites is drastically higher than the number of men. To sum up, if you are trying to target women, be sure your site provides some of those features that interest them.
Seniors prefer simple sites
Although younger users may seem to be dominating the Web now, seniors are gaining ground. Web users aged 55 to 64 make up 22 percent of online households and are estimated to account for 40 percent as more of the baby boomers reach retirement, according to Forrester Research.
With household incomes averaging about $60,000, seniors are an attractive target for online businesses. Although they are more skeptical about the security issues of buying online than younger users, they are quickly becoming more confident about making online purchases. Just be sure to always provide contact information, including a physical address and phone number. Most seniors agree that they will not buy from a website that does not provide this important information up front. For them, hidden contact information is a big red flag.
Overall, what kind of sites do seniors like best? Simple ones, with light graphics and no complicated downloads or plug-ins.
Teens represent a large, racially diverse generation
You better get to know this group. “Think of them as the quiet little group about to change everything,” says Edward Winter of The U30 Group consulting firm.
Generation Y is larger than any other consumer group. After all, they are the children of the baby boomers. This generation is also the most racially diverse. According to Business Week (“Cover Story: Generation Y”): “One in three is not Caucasian. One in four lives in a single-parent household. Three in four have working mothers.”
For this younger crowd, the Web is where it’s at. Traditional advertising tactics just won’t cut it anymore. This group is far too sophisticated and computer savvy. Says Business Week, “[The Internet] is the Gen Y medium of choice, just as network tv was for boomers. Television drives homogeneity, the Internet drives diversity.” They find what to wear, what to buy, and what to listen to from two main sources: their peers and online. A well-designed website is crucial for any company hoping to reach this generation, perhaps the most computer literate yet. bmw is a perfect example of a company that zeroed in on their target audience and created an online promotion that attracted their ideal customers while strengthening their overall brand.
Case Study
“We knew that 85 percent of the people who buy our cars are web savvy,” said bmw’s Marketing vice president, Jim McDowell, during an interview with John Gaffney for Business 2.0. “Our buyers are fast-track people who usually have success early in their careers. They believe that the Internet is a wonderful thing.”
With this in mind, the company launched the BMW Films campaign, a brilliant way to ensure BMW kept its cutting-edge and high-end brand in the forefront of its equally sophisticated and hip customers. There was nothing low-budget about this campaign, as bmw enticed big-name directors (such as Ang Lee, John Frankenheimer, and Guy Ritchie) and stars (such as Forest Whitaker, Mickey Rourke, and Madonna) to create six- to eight-minute
