Understanding your retail audience

Maximising the impact of your marketing activity can only happen if you truly understand your audience. Not just who they are demographically, but what they are looking for when shopping for a product like yours, what impact they want it to have on their lives and what barriers or pain points might get in the way of a purchase from you.

Using website analytics data and a number of other sources, including your own customer information, you can build a picture of who your customers really are at present and develop marketing personas. If you want to also target other types of customer that you're not yet reaching, you can also develop personas to help you successfully market to them too.

Retail customer personas don’t need to go into every tiny detail, but should include a data-led overview of the below information:

• Gender
• Age band
• Socio-economic group
• Context of life stage e.g. married, children, living situation
• Probable job title & work responsibilities
• Their priorities in life
• Why are they looking for a product like yours & what impact do they want it to have?
• How do they consume content online?
• What social media networks are they active on? What do they do there? On what devices?
• Who influences them?
• What types of content could reach them at each stage of their buying journey?

Putting the personas, and their journeys from start to end, at the heart of your marketing strategy means that all activity you do should be aligned to the right audiences and be designed to move them along in their buyer journey, one step at a time.

TOP TIP: Personas can also help to shape any paid media targeting you might do, whether paid social or traditional PPC. Test persona-targeted prospecting ads vs lookalike audiences to see which performs best.

For more information about building your audience personas or any of our digital marketing services, feel free to get in touch today on, 0800 011 9715 or visit Fashion Digital Marketing.