Prioritizing Your eCommerce Audience
One of the biggest challenges for any eCommerce startup is knowing where to focus their time and energy. Entrepreneurs get pulled in so many directions. With only so many hours in the day it’s hard to dedicate enough time and energy to everything. Building up a website, generating partnerships and gaining traction at live events all require a lot of effort. For partnerships and investors in particular the conversations are a lot easier once you have shown some success. So if you’re a startup and don’t have a lot of traction, but everyone you talk to wants to see results first what do you do? The answer is go straight to your audience.
New products are created to solve a problem. Whether it’s making something more convenient, improving on existing technology, or something completely new, there is a purpose behind the product. Finding people who have the problem your new product will solve can make or break a launch. Although there is generally a lot of research behind who would be the most likely to purchase the products it is imperative to test that theory. That is why social media is the perfect place to start when launching a new product.
Social Media for eCommerce
Social media channels such as Facebook, for example, allow you to hone in on specific audiences. Not only can you target by age, gender and location. You can also drill down to things like personal interests and job titles. You can also layer in things people have liked as well as many other attributes.
There are so many targeting options on social media platforms it is impossible to list them all. That is why social media is the best eCommerce advertising strategy for new product launches. It allows you to go directly to the people you thought of when creating your product.
Uncovering New Audiences
At The Missing Link when we work with startups, we collaborate by diving into the clients audience research and comparing it with our own. We then launch social media campaigns to test those audiences. Sometimes we nail it 100% and the product really resonates with those audiences with sales growing quickly. However, what typically happens is a lot of the main audiences perform well, some performed poorly, and we gain valuable insights that show us new audience groups that weren’t originally considered.
As an example we discussed in our personas blog, something we see very often, certain products for males don’t do well when targeting males. We learned some of those products are more commonly given to those males as gifts from females such as significant others, mothers or sisters. It is through research, testing and proper data analysis that we uncover those bits of information and adjust to highly profitable campaigns. Not only does this help clean up our initial campaigns, but it now gives us a clear target for all campaigns across other channels. The result is a proven concept for the new product and strong sales to make talks with investors and partners a lot easier.
Summary
As an eCommerce advertising agency, we always start with social media advertising for new product launches. This allows us to test how the product resonates with the audience. It also allows us to learn about new audiences that may not have been considered while developing the product. This strategy generates revenue, awareness and extremely valuable insights that grow sales.