In any business your target audience should drive all decisions made, so defining you target demographic is an important step. The general attributes of your target audience are obviously important, for example, age, sex, location, income level and marital status however looking deeper into their motivations, the way they shop and where they congregate makes for more understanding of your customers, hence more sales.

In broad terms we can offer a vague definition of Eliotturner’s target demographic as sophisticated women aged 25-55 as we are selling women’s handmade jewellery. However we may come to find that men are our biggest consumers, after all, research has shown that men use eCommerce sites more than women.

As you may have read on our blog post ‘Viral Marketing at its best’, we are currently building an email database through an online prize draw whereby those entering will be asked to complete an online form with the option to opt into our email distribution list. Therefore, the email database we build up will contain only those we know are interested in our products.  Consequently, this will allow us to learn more about our target demographic as we plan to send out surveys to these people requesting data such as age, gender, location, motivations, where they congregate etc. Also, after the launch of Eliotturner we can gather data from customer’s signup profiles.

Knowing our target demographic will ultimately save us time and money on aspects of advertising and marketing as we will know what these people are most likely to be responsive to. For example, in the case of where our target market congregate; if we discover social networking sites are widely used by our customers we can base our advertising campaign around this.

In it to win it? Everyone has heard it one hundred plus times, however over the next two years as reported by the Daily Telegraph online sales are set to double. Even if we take into account that Paypal reported a £8.3bn drop in spending by the end of 2011, online sales are still expected to rise to £21.3bn. The £21.3bn figure is covering all of online sales from various market places but it is still a very large number.

Online retailing is very real, this is shown by the failed retailer “Woolworths” now opening an online store. Granted Woolworths will never be the same, but they are moving online to get a piece of the £21.3bn pie.

According to the news piece on the Daily Telegraph website UK retailers are enjoying the boom in online retailing even though their bricks and mortar stores are feeling the pain.

There are a lot of gaps on the high street at the moment with NOW CLOSED boards all over, but the surge in online retailing could see a lot more retailers using the web.

So we’re aiming to have a big lump of that £21.3bn consumer spend in 2011.