Driving more targeted, high-quality traffic to your website is a challenge many sellers face in today’s competitive market. Paid advertising can bring immediate traffic, but can be costly in the long run. Building a strong presence online takes time and requires solid SEO and content marketing strategies to boost organic traffic.

It all starts with a solid understanding of your target audience. Higher website traffic doesn’t always equal sales. You need to drive qualified traffic interested in your products in order to boost your conversion rate.

What Is a Target Audience?

How well you know your audience translates to how well you market your products. While you might have an idea of your customer demographics, it’s important to really dive deep and understand your customers. This often involves developing buyer personas. Buyer personas help you understand the specific needs of your target audience, and may open up opportunities for marketing ideas.

To create a buyer persona, consider some of these questions:

• Age and Sex
• Education and Income
• Occupation
• Interests
• Personality Traits
• Challenges
• Common Objections

Buyer personas rise in significance the more niche your market is. Once you have a specific idea of your target audience, you can further develop the persona by thinking of keywords they type on search engines, as well as the types of content they prefer consuming. This exercise will help you come up with the right messaging and content offers.

How to Reach and Convert Your Target Audience

Often times, shoppers are not ready to make a purchase when they first land on your website. According to research by Instagram, most shoppers spend a day or longer researching and mulling over a product before making a purchase. Given all the competition and distractions in the digital age, shoppers will probably forget about your product and go on with life without returning to your website.

Because of this, content marketing has become an essential part of any successful inbound marketing strategy. Content marketing involves creating quality content that your target audience actively looks for. To reach your target audience, you can provide free, valuable content to not only drive traffic, but also educate and engage customers.

Different buyer personas can help you come up with a list of ideas, topics, questions and content types your target customers will be searching for. Content may include short form content, long form content, infographics, blog articles, videos or e-books. What kind of problems does your product try to solve? Think about that and see if you can create content without being self-promoting.

Content marketing helps your website rank high on Google, based on the phrases your target audience searches for. For example, if you sell water filtration products, you could create content related to water conservation, pollution facts, and water-related health issues. Blog posts and newsletters are valuable tools for delivering content regularly.

This searchable content should be tied to your website and ecommerce store. More importantly, you should make it easy for your visitors to navigate to your store. Add links within the content to specific product pages when relevant, or tie it to another type of content that could lead them further down the sales funnel.

In time, as you consistently educate and build relationships with your visitors, you develop trust that ultimately leads to sales. Building relationships with your buyers is powerful. Product reviews and social media could easily multiply your sales, through upselling and word-of-mouth product recommendations.

At the end of the day, you’d want to build a passionate community around your brand, with buyers turning into advocates. To succeed in ecommerce, it’s not just about driving traffic to your store or creating more brand awareness. It’s about attracting the right people and turning them into qualified buyers.

Want to step up your ecommerce game? Download our free whitepaper to learn more about driving qualified traffic across multiple sales channels.