How to Determine Your Target Market Online

Before you start selling retail products online, you have to know who you’re trying to sell to. Otherwise, you’ll end up wasting advertising dollars as you market yourself blindly to people who have very little interest in what you’re selling.

So, how do you determine your target market online?

Forget the old rules. Traditionally, demographics have been broken up into things like age and location. For hopefully obvious reasons, location doesn’t really matter so much to an online business. The internet gives people from all around the world the potential to find your products and become paying customers, so it’s pointless in this day and age. And while a huge number of 20-somethings are likely to get excited by the newest smartphone iteration on the market, so are 30-, 40-, and even 50-year-olds. The Great Recession has caused some turbulence, too, causing many in older groups who should be more financially secure to instead have more in common with penniless college students.

Look at lifestyle. Far more important to help you determine your target market online are lifestyle factors. Do you want people who are married or unmarried? With or without children? Are men or women more likely to be interested in your product? Do you think your average customer is more likely to visit CNN on a daily basis or The Onion? If you’re going to sell sports equipment, you obviously want to appeal to the kinds of people who play sports. These are likely to be many of the same people who pay for live sporting events, frequent sports sites, have gym memberships, and so on. Maybe you want to target parents because their kids are likely to be in some kind of sport. Or, if you focus on a specific type of sporting equipment, like cycling gear, you should see who frequents cycling forums.

Money matters. For the smart businessperson, there is money to be made at both ends of the social spectrum, but you have to be careful how you position your product. For example, advertising high-end watches to people making $30,000 a year probably isn’t going to get you very far. However, if you aim your ads at those already making luxury purchases, you’re likely to do much better.

If you’re just starting out, it can be difficult to determine your target market online with 100 percent accuracy. That’s okay. You just need to have a general sense of who you think you want to reach and aim for that audience. If you discover that a completely different audience is the one you’re actually connecting with, research them more thoroughly and refocus on what’s working. The only way anyone really finds their audience is through trial and error, but it’s still better to know what you want going into it.