The internet is populated by millions and millions of visitors each day, and each one of these visitors has a number of places to go daily. Every place, every website, every online retailer and the news outlet that they visit responds to one group of things: their needs.
Without realizing it, everybody is looking for a solution to one or more of their needs. We are not necessarily talking about needs like food or shelter, but other needs like the need for work, the need for entertainment, the need for art, the need for music, the need for innovation, and so on.
Creating an audience means gathering a growing number of people around a main subject of interest. By focusing on one thing and exceling in it, you get the first step right by keeping an audience alive.
Market vs. Audience
You’ll need to differentiate between your audience and your market. You can’t have one without the other, but you’ll have to focus on your audience to get greater market capitalization.
A market is where you get your sales from, and your audience is that fraction of said market that will serve as your social backbone, because it will be the people that will give you feedback.
For example, if you are in the market of mobile games and you create adventure games, it means that you are creating games for the entire market, but your audience, the people who specifically like adventure games, that’s the one that will give you the greatest support and number of sales.
Finding an audience
“Sarah Vegan” was just starting her vegan goods delivery service. She had created an incredible and intuitive website for her products, she had the right inventory and personality to manage it all. She just needed the clients to really take off!
Sarah had the good fortune to be invited to participate in two very popular podcasts during the first week, so she saw this as the golden opportunity. She could talk in depth about her stuff and create awareness about her eCommerce shop.
After both interviews were over, Sarah detected a huge spike in traffic to her site. Visitors came and went during the first 48 hours, so she was convinced that she had struck gold.
48 hours later, that spike in visits came to a stop, there was no conversion because nobody logged into her site and nobody made a purchase. Understandably, Sarah was sad, and she started to think that maybe this eCommerce thing wasn’t for her.
When Sarah decided to examine what had just happened, she tracked her visitor’s activities in a deeper way. She found that she advertised to the wrong audience! People went to her website, but they didn’t purchase, not even out of curiosity.
The first step in building an audience is knowing where to find it and then taking action. Some measures that you can take right now to find your audience are:
- Look for blogs where your products are discussed. Check them and ask their owners to let you participate as a guest blogger, this will be end up being good for you and for them! This will help you pull visitors from said blogs to your site!
- Look for podcasts where stuff related to what you sell or offer is discussed. Ask the hosts to let you participate in it and do a great presentation. This will give you a large stream not only of traffic, but of willing customers!
- Create a blog and be proficient in optimizing it to be found on search engines. Don’t focus it on selling your products. Focus it on reviewing them and telling visitors the benefits of acquiring them while giving them a link to your website.
If you are offering services or are marketing, the same advice applies. Focus on giving people something that can help them make a choice. Be supportive, not pushy!
- Use a service like Google Analytics to know what your site visitors are doing. By knowing where they come from, where they go, and where else they shop, you can take your game to them.
The 50% rule
eCommerce case studies demonstrate that for all your visitors to your website, 50% is willing to buy the kind of products or services that you sell, and the other 50% are just testing the waters, which means that they are still looking around for the best offer they can find.
What this number shows you is that you have to be ready to convert that 50% into buyers by getting them to stay on your page. Just like stated before, this means offering people great content.
If somebody is willing to buy, yet not quite ready, they will stick to your site until they decide, which is great because it means that you created a customer before they converted into a buyer, so that is one more member added to your audience.
As for the other 50%, it will depend on how good and attractive your offer seems to them when compared to others, and how well they remember your website.
The good thing about this last percentage of people is that they can end up seeing your site as a great source of information and will be a great resource of referrals and positive comments.
The 3% rule
According to the “demand generation pyramid”, when you break down that percentage of interested people, at the tip you are left with the ones that are ready-to-buy at any moment, and those people amount to 3% daily.
This 3% is where you want to drive your efforts most fiercely. This is the percentage of people that will click on “buy now” if they see that your offer is good enough for them.
