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While there's no quick fix to find more customers, there are many ways to expand your reselling pool. Start with getting to know who you’re talking to
As vintage sellers and small business owners, you want to, at the very least, turn over your inventory. You also may want to expand your business by increasing your sales.
As you know, finding new customers usually goes hand in hand with increasing sales.
But how do you actually locate those customers? Or, if you’re struggling to make even a few sales, how do you find a pool of customers in the first place?
There are several steps to building or expanding your customer base, and I’m going to address them in a series of upcoming posts to keep the information digestible.
Before you start posting more products in an effort to boost sales, before you brand your vintage shop, or before you put together a marketing plan, you need to know who you are talking to. Who is your customer? Who is your target audience?
Ideally, you’ll know who you’re talking to when you are executing anything for your business, including your listing descriptions and your social media captions.
Perhaps you have a pretty good idea of who your customers are already. But if you haven’t spent time lately digging into who they actually are, it’s worth a revisit. Customers change over time.
A target audience is a specific group of people who share common characteristics, such as age, location, income or interests, that make them likely to be interested in your shop’s products.
Identifying the target audience is crucial if you want to expand your customer base, because you can tailor your marketing efforts and messaging to effectively reach and engage the people who are most likely to convert into paying customers — and not waste time trying to convert people who will likely never become a customer.
In our article about analytics and engagement, we talked about focusing less on the number of followers and more on the quality of followers.
That’s true of your target audience. You want that target audience to be made up of people who are most likely to buy from you, rather than a bunch of people who never will.
To identify your target audience, first you need to get to know your customer(s) (or potential customers, if you are new). Then you’re going to find more people who look like them.
Let’s look at the individual people that make up the target audience: your customer or potential customer.
You may hear customer personas referred to as customer profiles, ideal customers, buyer personas, customer avatars, etc. There are a lot of names for them, and they all mean the same thing: a fictional person based on true characteristics exhibited by your customers.
While every person has their own individual set of characteristics that can’t be captured by a customer persona, the persona acts as a model to work from. It is not meant to be an overgeneralization or a stereotype, but a starting point based on investigation and research.
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Here are some things to research that will help to create a customer persona:
The best and easiest way to answer these questions is to look at your existing customers.
If you don’t know the answers to some of these questions, there are several things you can do:
If you don’t have any (or many) customers yet, evaluate your inventory, look at other players in the market with similar inventory as you, and make your best estimate.
If you’re curating stuff you love, you’ll probably come up with points for the above that mirror your own demographics, likes and desires. Start with yourself as the customer persona.
Do you have questions about identifying the target audience or researching a customer persona? Let us know in the comments!
