Step Three: Know Your Market What it is: Gathering data on the people and housing in your area.
Why it’s important: Demographic research is probably the central piece of a market analysis. If you are going to target a certain demographic with a marketing campaign, you need to know where that demographic is, and plan your mailings and advertisements accordingly.
How it’s done: You can pay for this information; a quick Google search will reveal plenty of Web sites where you can purchase industry-specific reports. However, Tremonti says, there’s no reason why you can’t undertake the project yourself. “I counsel business owners who don’t have the money to pay for a market research study to be done for them,” he says. “So they do the same thing themselves.”
Indeed, all the necessary information is at your fingertips, but you’ll need to do some digging around for it. The latest census is a great place to start; it’s where the “for pay” outfits get much of their information, anyway. If you log on to www.census.gov and poke around a bit, you’ll be able to find a wealth of information. Click on “People,” then on “Housing,” to access local data from the “American Housing Survey,” and find information such as the age of the housing stock and the specific conditions within those structures. Be prepared to spend some time with this report, and make sure the ink cartridge in your printer is fresh; the most recent report for the Washington, D.C., area, for example, runs 315 pages. There are plenty of other links on the site that will lead you to similarly useful information.
If that seems overwhelming, you might start with your Chamber of Commerce or industry association chapter, Moline says. The data you find there could be more localized. It’s also likely to be more narrow. If it’s too specific, you can go to the census to fill in the gaps.