So you need to find your target demographic? You have this idea and you want to put it on paper. The problem is figuring out how people will buy it, and how to get it to market while making sure that your audience will be interested in the service or product. Well look no further than here. We’re going to uncover a couple of tools that will help you to determine the right customer for your product and how you can highlight your campaigns toward their regions, and psychographic segmentation.
The first thing you need to do is to figure out the scale of your business to start and the areas you want to service. This will all be determined by your startup capital and the budget your business can manage for a marketing plan. In this instance today we are going to assume that this will be a fairly local business with a target of a single county in one state. I started my research with the American FactFinder. This website is based on the US Department of Census and the census counts every 10 years with estimated counts every 5 years based on empirical evidence. For this instance, we will use Barnstable County. You can learn a lot about a region with this tool. For example, I am looking to sell a product that will be more expensive and cater to those that are buying homes or are remodeling. I went to the American FactFinder and searched for Barnstable County. This is what I found out:
Median Age: 52.4 (53 calls it)
Median Family Income: $95,880.00
Occupied Housing Units with $150,000 or more income: 12,56 Homes.
(Data Access, 2019)
This is just a small sample data set of what you can learn about demographics on this page. You can break regions down by sex, population, income, age, and more. This resource will help you find your target demographic correctly.
The next resource that is available to a market researcher is Claritas. Claritas takes some of the hard lifting out of sorting through empirical data. It highlights population segments by zip code in the free version. For example, when I researched my home zip code, I found that there is a large percentage of people 65 and over that live in my town which skews the average a bit. This can be concerning. However I also found out that there is a large population of married with no kids which means extra money. (Prizm Premier, 2020)
All of this information means that you will be able to view who you want to target, and how you want to get your message across. This means that your advertising will work better and you will have a stronger benefit for lead generation.
Data Access and Dissemination Systems (DADS). (2010, October 5). American FactFinder - Guided Search. Retrieved January 26, 2020, from https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/guided_search.xhtml
PRIZM® PREMIER. (n.d.). Retrieved January 26, 2020, from https://claritas360.claritas.com/mybestsegments/?_ga=2.176355437.913330504.1580002431-265401433.1580002431#zipLookup