Who is your customer? What is their income level? Age? Gender? Family status? Race? National origin? Industry & Occupation? How many and where do they live? Trends over time? These are just some of the elements that form the basis of evaluating the marketplace you intend to master. When starting, buying or expanding any business, knowing the demographics of your market is essential to success.
I mean, come on... How are you going to target them if you don't know who they are and why they buy?
In researching a project for one of our members, I came across a website that I believe is an invaluable resource. It is FreeDemographics.com. I get excited anytime I find a resource that can make an arduous analytical or investigative process easier.
FreeDemographics.com provides free unlimited access to US Census Data. Use of this site will enable you to perform quick accurate market analysis in an easy-to-use web environment. You will be asked to sign up but there are no charges for their services. They appear to make their money from banner ads and providing links to other demographic resources that do charge for more advanced services. In most cases, the free services are all you need.
You will be able to access summary, comparison and ranking demographic reports for all available US geographies (by state, county, city or town, right down to specific zip codes), view reports that break down the various demographic elements you are looking for and convert them to Excel spreadsheets or Word documents. This feature alone is worth its weight in gold because once you have the data captured in these two formats, you can then repackage it for your own analysis and needs.
The site contains one all-inclusive dataset with the most useful subset of variables from 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010 censuses. You can create custom reports for almost any US geographical location in seconds right down to the zip code.
Check it out for yourself and then bookmark it for future use.
This is just one of dozens of great marketing and financial leverage methods and strategies for going into business for yourself that I teach in my online Bizar Financing course. Check out my free online video Getting Rich Your Way and see how other entrepreneurs are using my strategies to start, buy or expand their own successful businesses using little or no cash of their own.
A business plan sevres different purposes with 2 being the main reason why a company would get one done. First, it sets the path for the direction in which the company is going to go. It gets the owner to think about where they want to end up in 2, 3, 5, even 10 years down the road and gets them to think about what they need to do in order to get to that point. There is a lot of research and thinking that goes into a business plan including financial statements and forecasts, continuity plans and an exit strategy. Second, a business plan can be used to find investors for your business. Your plan would have to clearly lay out what you are doing, how you are going to make money from it (so the investor can get their money back) how you plan on marketing in order to make money, who is your current competition and how the investment will be allocated.