3 Great Methods to find your ideal dropshipping target audience

What is your dropshipping target audience?

Dropshipping store owners often don’t think about whom they are marketing to, but they should.

Why?

Well, dropshipping is an excellent way for entrepreneurs and business owners to make money, but it’s only as good as the marketing campaigns behind it.

Therefore, being aware of your ideal target audience that responds well to your marketing campaigns is crucial for transforming your online business into a lucrative one.

This article will guide dropshipping store owners on finding their perfect target audience.

If you want more information on finding this ideal target audience for your dropshipping business, read on!

What is a dropshipping target audience?

Everyone understands that you need customers to run a profitable dropshipping store.

However, unlike some people believe, customers won’t find you through a search engine like Google just after you have launched your store.

Dropshipping is a business model that relies on marketing to bring in customers.

When marketing, you promote your products to a specific group of people. You have chosen this group because you expect that they will be the ones who have the highest chances of purchasing your product.

The specific group of people you target while marketing is your dropshipping target audience. It is a group of people with similar interests, hobbies, age, or gender that you expect to purchase your product

3 Methods you can use to find your ideal dropshipping target audience

As you have read, finding your dropshipping target audience is the first step to successful marketing.

And now that you understand the importance of finding your ideal dropshipping target audience, it’s time to learn how to do it!

This section will cover the three main methods that you can use to find a vast dropshipping target audience.

Don’t worry; it’s not as difficult as it sounds if you put some effort into it!

1. Develop a buyer persona

One of the most popular methods for finding your dropshipping target audience is the buyer persona framework.

This method is all about understanding who your typical buyer is. This includes things such as their age, interests, gender, etc.

A buyer persona is a fictional person that represents your ideal customer.

And therefore, if you base your dropshipping target audience on your buyer persona, your ads will be shown to people that all come close to your ideal customer!

Here are some more things that fit with identifying a buyer persona:

The essential information of your buyer persona

As you can see, there is quite a lot associated with a complete buyer persona.

For dropshipping stores, essential information about your buyer persona is their info, value & fears, negative info, and interests!

Let’s go over a few of those things below:

Age

For some dropshipping stores, age is crucial information about the target audience.

Most of the time, you should consider the age of your target audience because different age groups behave in different ways.

For instance, if you target a millennial audience, you might use a text that is a bit more informal and could even include some slang.

In some cases, the buyer of your product may not even be its users. If you are selling child toys, you may have to alter your ads in a way that will convince parents to pay for your product.

Gender

This one should be pretty obvious and can sometimes very simply be chosen based on the product you sell.

For example, if you were to sell products related to rugby, most of your customers would likely be male. In contrast, it would likely be better to target females when they sell makeup.

However, don’t be afraid to test the other side of the waters. For instance, females might also buy your ‘manly’ product as a gift!

Location

When dropshipping, picking the right countries to target can differ between succeeding and failing.

A country with a high GDP per capita, good logistics, a large population, and high social media penetration will often perform better than those without these characteristics.

Interests

Another vital piece of information about your buyer persona is their interests.

This part of the research is about knowing what they like and prefer.

We are setting up a dropshipping target audience based on interests in Facebook Ads.

Sometimes, the interests of your ideal buyer can be easy to determine, but it can be very hard too!

For instance, if you sell cat toys, you target people interested in cats or pets.

However, what interests do people have who buying tea mugs? It could be almost anything.

That’s why it can be challenging to determine your buyer persona’s interests for some products.

You may have to do some guesswork and try to brainstorm about what interests your potential buyers could have!

Social media usage

Social media usage is the last piece of information we will cover, and it’s again a crucial one.

If you know your ideal customers’ social media usage, or more broadly, the places where they ‘hang out,’ it’s much easier to target them effectively.

When researching social media usage, it’s crucial to determine which social networks your ideal customer uses most frequently.

Once you discover this, reaching them will be much simpler!

2. Analyze the benefits your product offers

Have you ever thoroughly thought about which benefits your products offer?

We hope so.

People buy results, not features. So it is critical to understand what benefits your products offer for the success of your dropshipping business.

Consumers do not buy products. They believe in product benefits.

Keeping your product’s benefits in mind doesn’t only help with writing excellent product descriptions and creating incredible ad creatives; it’s also beneficial for defining your ideal dropshipping target audience.

That’s right; you may be able to define a great target audience just by having a clear understanding of your product’s benefits.

From these benefits, you could identify quite a few things that will help determine your target audience.

For instance, the first benefit (magnetic action draws out impurities) might attract people who fear having too many impurities in their skin.

Another example; since the product doesn’t contain any nasty chemicals and is cruelty-free, people who aim to make the world will likely attract a better place to the product.

Hopefully, this example clarifies that you can use your product’s benefit to identify parts of your target audience.

To sum up, determine what problem you solve or what need you fulfill (the benefits) and whose issues or needs you are fulfilling (the target audience).

3. Test different audiences to find the best-performing one.

The previous two methods involved defining your ideal dropshipping target audience without actually starting your marketing efforts.

For those who have a bigger advertising budget and little time, finding a substantial dropshipping target audience will also work through simply testing a lot of different audiences until you find one that is profitable.

We like to call this the ‘quick testing method,’ usually used with Facebook Ads. However, you can use this strategy on other platforms too!

This method works as follows.

First, you create many separate marketing campaigns, each containing a specific target audience that you have picked based on educated guesses.

With educated guesses, we mean that you should try and find target audiences that should fit with your product.

After setting up your campaigns, you let them run for two or three days, after which you stop the unprofitable ad sets and scale the profitable ones.

The quick testing method allows you to test multiple interests quickly, collect data about your buyer persona quicker, and speed up your way to using Lookalike Audiences.

One way to start is with a large and broad interest like ‘cooking.’ Then, analyze the Facebook Ads Manager Dashboard results to narrow down and find your perfect audience step by step.

An alternative is to start with many small and specific interests like ‘cooking recipes.’ By doing much testing, you may find a reasonable claim that will recover your losses in other ad sets and hopefully leave you with a profit, too!

Conclusion

You now understand that a dropshipping target audience is a specific group of people you target in your marketing campaigns.

Targeting people interested in your product won’t make any sales. Therefore, it’s crucial to find your ideal dropshipping audience!

The primary way of doing this is by developing a buyer persona. However, analyzing your product’s benefits or simply testing a lot of different audiences may work as well.

Lastly, you have seen three great marketing methods that can enable you to reach your ideal dropshipping target audience and therefore make some money on a couple of profitable marketing campaigns!

Good luck with finding your ideal dropshipping target audience!