We have all heard that knowing your customer is super important.
If you know them better, you know how to serve them better, as a consequence grow your sales.
But why so many e-commerce stores are still not doing that?
Well, I don’t think that there is an excuse for that. Not knowing your customer doesn’t allow you to:
- Write a compelling copy that would attract the attention of your buyers.
- Create an amazing content and build a stronger relationship with your customers.
- Choose which platforms to use in order to reach your audience.
- Determine what kind of voice to use for your email marketing campaigns.
- Introduce new products that would help them solve their problems.
It is a foundation that every business should start with.
At the end of the day, your customers are everything that your business has. If a business doesn’t know what makes their customers tick, that business will not survive for long.
In this article, we’ll share how to create your buyer's personas for e-commerce in order to make more sophisticated decision in your business.
Deep Dive Survey
Who knows your customers better than themselves? You can make assumptions about their decisions, but you’ll never be 100% sure.
So why not go and ask them directly?
It is not as hard as it seems. If you have an existing email list, send them an email offering them a discount for answering the following questions:
- What is the primary reason for choosing us over the competition?
- What problem of yours do we solve?
- Which products would you like us to have?
- What problem of yours do we help to solve?
- How would you rate a variety of products available at our store?
- Overall how would you rate your experience shopping on?
These are general questions that we ask our customers.
What if you don’t have a massive list of your existing customers?
Well, there are more players in your market sell similar products. Is there a possibility to reach out to their customers and ask them about their services?
If not, you will have to do a research and make educated guesses and when you eventually get new customers, you ’ll still have to go back and answer these questions.
Competition analysis
It doesn’t matter whether your market is widespread or it is narrow, there will always be competition. And it might be the case, that they have already done a heavy lifting for you.
Go to their website or Facebook fan page and answer the following questions:
- What headlines are competitors using on their sites, banners and blog post titles? Write down 3 most common headlines of their most popular blog posts.
- How are your competitors positioning themselves?
- What is their Unique Selling Proposition?
- What are people saying in testimonials about them?
So why should you do that?
If you are going to write any type of copy for your Facebook Ads, you have to understand how to position yourself, how to overcome customers’ objections, what their pain points are and eventually what makes them buy.
But your research shouldn’t stop here.
Let’s dive deeper.
Competition swipe file
Now it’s time to gear up and get even more information on your competitors.
In this phase, you can actually find out what has worked or is working in regards to advertising for your competition.
Such websites as Adespresso.com and swiped.co makes it particularly easy to do that.
Simply enter your competitors’ name and you will see ads uploaded by other people.
Do you know all of your competitors?
If not, jump on similarweb.com and search for similar businesses as yours!
And then simply go back to Ad Espresso library or swiped and find other ads.
Save them and whenever you need new ideas on your marketing decisions, visit the folder and get inspired.
Top 5 (niche) blogs
Try to enter in google “top 5 (industry) blogs” only instead of “industry” enter the industry that you serve.
You will be able to see what topics are being talked the most in the industry and will get some ideas for your own content.
Who do they follow, what do they read?
After having done all of your research, you will have a pretty good idea how your customers live like.
So now think about what the customers are reading, what influencers/blogs they are following.
This information might be very useful for choosing limitless targeting options that are available.
Conclusion
The customer is the only thing that your business has; therefore it is vital to understand them very well.
By understanding them your business will be able to:
- Create better content that would solve your customers’ problems.
- Choose which platform to use to reach your audience
- Write better copywriting speaking directly to your customers.
- Use email-marketing campaigns to go through the cluster.
- Decide which new products to introduce.
There are 5 major steps that we use at our agency to get that information.
If you currently have a database of your customers, ask them about your services, why they choose you.
Keep your competitors closer than your friends. Spy them, see what they are doing with their marketing campaigns, how they position themselves, what is their value proposition.
Start keeping a record of ads that your competitors are releasing. Create a swipe-file with mentioned tools.
Google biggest blogs in your industry to see what is currently important to your customers.
As you have an idea who your customers are, what they do, start thinking of who they follow or what they read.
It’s an on-going process so don’t forget to keep refreshing your knowledge about your customers, as the industry is constantly changing.
What kind of research do you do to get to know your customers?
