A targeted market is the precise group of people you may want to reach with your marketing message. They are the people who are most likely to buy your products or services, and they are united by some common characteristics, like demographics and behaviors.

Basic e-commerce SEO skills and decent content strategy can catch you as many as 100,000 random hits right away, but they would value less significant when compared with 500 hits from users who are actually looking for your services or product. This saves your time and effort into reaching out to a broader audience and only looking out for potential customers. Whenever you want to market a product, the biggest mistake you could make is thinking that your product is for everyone. Defining your target audience for an e-commerce store can assist your business strategies in many ways. It saves up your marketing energy that was previously being utilized to reach a bigger, but less interested audience.

How would you prioritize these audiences and segments?

How often would this audience visit your website?

How much competition do you have in attracting this audience?

What other sites might take your audience away from your site?

What type of audience is the most critical for achieving your website’s goal?

Some data points you might want to consider are:

• age
• gender
• marital status
• children
• income
• occupation
• geographic location
• hobbies
• goals
• challenges
• how your product or service can help

Now that you know who are already interacting with your business and buying your products or services, it’s time to see who’s engaging with the competition.

Taking a look at what your competitors are up to can help you answer some key questions: Are your competitors going after the same market segments as you are? Have they reached the segments you didn’t think of reflecting? How are they positioning themselves?

This comes down to the key distinction all marketers must understand between features and benefits. You can list the features of your product all day long, but no one will be convinced to buy from you unless you can explain the benefits.

Features are what your product is or does. The benefits are the results. How does your product make someone’s life easier, or better, or just more interesting?

Use these criteria to create at least three profiles of your target customers. For example, if you hold a baby clothing store, then your demographic profile might search for married women between 25 and 40 years of age who are pregnant. But if you own a luxury store, your target customer’s income level will be higher. And if you own a brick-and-mortar store, the geographic location might be within ten miles of your store.