When it comes to conducting Market Research for your small business, DemographicsNow is a very powerful tool worth considering.
Many public libraries offer you access to DemographicsNow free with a library card.
Whether you’re looking to open a new location or you’re looking for more information on any geographical area, DemographicsNow as all that data you’ll need.
Demographics Now comes pre-packed with datasets from all the best providers including Experian, Dunn and Bradstreet, US Census and INRIX.
Transcript of audio:
Hey welcome to SteveBizBlog this is Steve Imke and today I’d like to talk to you about an awesome market research tool called DemographicsNow.
DemographicsNow is a tool offered by many public libraries it’s also something that I think bigger companies can actually contract to get access to, but I’d like to talk to you about how we can access it here in our jurisdiction. How you access it might be different in your particular library.
We have the Pikes Peak Library District right here and so you would click on the research tab and then go down to the business sub-tab in there when you come up there these gonna be all the business resources that we have available. Since this is a database you’ll want to click on the database tab and halfway down you will see a tool called DemographicsNow which is what we’re looking at.
Typically, you would have to enter your library card and
your password at this particular point however because I’m already logged on it
didn’t ask me to do that.
One of the very first things you would go ahead and do is you would enter a city or specific address if you had a physical location or something like that or you could just enter may be a zip code so that’s what I’m gonna do right now.
I live in Monument Colorado so I’m going to enter their zip
code which is 80132 and so now that will identify monument and that will define
my search area for how we’re going to look at.
I will tell you that it’s broken principally into people and companies, demographics, and maps. There are literally hundreds of reports. There’s no way we can explore each and every one. We’ll talk about a couple of the ones that I think are rather important.
You need to select them on this particular menu or from the home page where you can select from one of these categories right here so we’re first going to look at people and company records.
The first thing you’re going to get is a list asking for a list type and let’s just say in our particular situation let’s first do some business Intel.
People & Companies Reports
One of the reports that I might typically do for a client is the business list.
DemographicsNow Business List Reports
Now you can see that it comes up looking primarily if we’re going to do some research on a specific company, but I want to go find a bunch of different types of companies so for our example I don’t really want to for company name our executive.
I don’t want to search by that anyway so maybe I want to go ahead and I want to search by keywords because we are not even sure what the NAICS code is or the SIC code, so let’s just say I was thinking about opening up a liquor store.
I would type in “liquor store” in the field there and I would ask it to go ahead and find codes. Look it came up with two different codes. I can select both of them here and then I would click on the search button right here to search all of the liquor stores that are associated with that zip code. It generally takes only a few seconds to run and as you can see here there are three different liquor stores that are there is one that does $190,000 another does $201,000 and another does $1.6 million in revenue.
This guy has three employees, four employees, and one employee. Here’s the telephone number where you can reach them and their physical addresses.
Let’s just say I wanted to drill down even a little bit more I might select this one right here and then it can select details and while it’s probably not as good as ReferenceUSA to do some of the detailed information on a business-to-business search it does provide some interesting information.
Typically the information is what you might find in an address book listed over here. It gives you some industry profile stuff like their NAICS code. They give you some business profile information so you can see that they do about 1.6 million in revenue. They’ve been there since 2005 so on and so forth so you can kind of look at that. It gives you some nearby businesses that are close not necessarily related to this particular NAICS code but other ones in there. Then you can see some of the executives right here so we know if we were to contact this person we could use the ReferenceUSA lifestyle database to go ahead and look up this individual right here and find out a little bit more information about the owner of this particular business.
So that’s typically the only one that I run maybe on a business list.
DemographicsNow Household Reports
We can also do some household lists so you can see I could look up individuals but I might look at specialty types of things that I might want to look at. Let’s say if I want to look at average household income I might choose to do that and if I wanted to go and I could put a minimum and a maximum in there those kinds of things again. I don’t really find this area here to be too much value at least for doing some of the research but it is some basic demographic information.
Demographic Reports
I think where the real power kind of comes is in this demographic section right here all right so the first thing I would like to explain is there are different types of report types you can see.
There are comparison, rank and summary type reports. So in the free download section of SteveBizBlog.com, you’ll see that I have a “DemographicsNow Report Overview“. If you were to click on that you would get this list here and it lists all of the different reports that you have in just some basic information or whether it’s a summary or a comparison report.
On the top here you can see it even included definitions. Comparison reports list all the elements of a selected so on and so forth and so you can actually see what some of the different types of reports actually are now.
DemographicsNow Comparison Reports
If we’re going back into DemographicsNow let’s first look at some of the comparisons reports that you might find rather interesting. So again assuming that we’re looking at a liquor store. I really like the Simmons reports that kind of come down the bottom. So if I’m going to open up a liquor store I want to look at the Simmons beverage alcohol comparison.
So you can see there’s lots and lots of different reports that I can go ahead and find but I’m just kind of following a thread right now. I should say right here run the report now this is a rather interesting report. Anytime anybody uses a debit card, credit card, or a loyalty card. basically the UPC code of what they purchased is matched to their billing address on their credit card or a loyalty card or something like that.
I’ve asked it to do the Simmons beverage alcohol report for all of Monument so it’s giving me some basic demographic information. There’s are 8710 households and so on and so forth. But here’s where to get to the detail right here so this these are index scores. Effectively anything that is a hundred would match that it would say that that’s like average or the median any number that’s greater than 100 means that that is more prevalent in this particular geography.
Beer and non-alcoholic low beverages have a 75 index so they’re actually below the median when it comes to drinking non-alcoholic beer.
Champagne, on the other hand, is 21 percent above the average there seems to be a lot of red and white wine drinkers here. Wine seems to be very popular here so you can kind of see how that kind of information factors in there.
If I’m going to open up a liquor store, for example, I would probably spend quite a bit of money on wines and that kind of stuff because they’re quite significantly higher than the average usage of alcohol in this particular area.
All right so that’s one of the comparison reports that I really like. Again please explore all the different reports on your own.
DemographicsNow Rank Reports
When it comes to rank reports there are a couple different ones. One you might want to think about is “ranking by income” report. Again I can run the report there and it will run a different report for me and it will tell you in the town of Monument the median income is one $113.000. The average per capita income is this, and the average age is 44. There are 8,710 households, so it’s going to give you just some basic ranking information to kind of help you understand a little bit.
DemographicsNow Summary Reports
The other section where I think we can drill down a little bit more are the summary reports. There’s a few of them that I really want to talk to.
One report that I find reasonably valuable is one called Mosaic Household Summary Chart Report. If you click on that and you run the report it gives you some interesting things.
DemographicsNow Mosaic Group And Type Manual
I probably need to explain at this particular point that as you can see there are different segments here what they call types and groups that exist out there so again under the free download section there’s this “MOSAIC (DemographicsNOW) Group and Type Manual” that you can go ahead and download and this is basically what it looks like it gives you a variety of different ways to look at the audience.
It’s great for doing customer segments when you’re doing business model canvas you can see here’s the group and then these are the individual ones that talk specifically about the mosaic family tree.
Higher-income tends to be up here lower and come down here singles and old on this side young and families on that side so you can kind of get some ballpark and you can see how the numbers kind of pass along here so this happens to be part of group a and we’re talking about.
Let’s say the Power Elite which happens to be the first one. If you want to just to kind of read one of these types of reports it just kind of tells you the average age is 51 to 65 and that 35.9% of the households in the Power Elite type are between 51 and 65 and that’s about represents at the 120 as an index so that’s ranks rather high.
They are higher than average when it comes to their property type single-family homes. 83% of them owned a family home which again is at the 112 percentile.
Household income exceeds $250,000 which you can see. I don’t need to go through all of these.
now some of these channel preferences are a little bit kind of interesting to look at. This little hand with the envelope is the direct mail. So if you send them direct mail they’re roughly 117% more likely than the median to responding to direct mail.
Here this next one right here the cell phone this is mobile and texting. They’re very focused on that because they’re index is 148 so they’re more likely to respond to mobile texting than the average.
When it comes to laptops which is this next one right here not so much. they’re below that the average at 84.
When you look at this little @ sign this is email receptiveness right here. So they’re receptive to email but just slightly above the average person
Television index is at 143. These are anything from streaming TVs to broadcast kind of things that exist out there so they do respond to television ads.
Then this is last one right here this microphone basically is how they respond to radio ads. At 152 they respond well to radio ads.
All right there’s another interesting one here which talks about Technology Adoption here these are the early adopters that are here these are the early majority and the late majority and then the laggard ones that don’t pick it up until it’s very very mature.
So you can see by this group right here although they’re the wealthiest people highly educated generally politically conservative they well invested you know support the arts and they’re very fit and active and stuff but they’re not the earliest of adopters. So if you were trying to sell a new product or something that’s bleeding-edge this might not be a great group to market to.
It also gives you some basic images on the bottom here that kind of imply a little bit about where they are. I guess they spend some time in hotels I like to go to the arts they’re big fitness things it kind of talks a little bit about these key features and kind of they’re laid out here as you can see how that lays out.
There’s also generally a second page associated with each one of these that kind of break it down into this Power Elite type. As you can see the vast majority of the power elite right here fall under this age bracket here in our connect is between 46 and 50 were that where the typical one would be more 51 to 65. So what we’re showing here is that the people are a little bit ahead of the curve and their income as it relates here.
So this is the typical these are where we are and so you can see most of them are married most of them are homeowners and so on and so forth.
Their education levels are 37% have a bachelor’s or graduate degree and so on and so forth. Of course, there is a similar report for each of the groups and types.
If I go back to the report and remember we were running the mosaic households summary chart for this 80132 zip code, it’s telling me the total population and how much is male how much is female. This is your basic demographic information that we have.
Here it’s kind of breaking it out by the different types. So the power elite that we just looked at right here is this blue one right there but the big one is this Booming with Confidence right here.
Here it’s telling you the different households that live here so Booming with Confidence represent 4309 households or just a tad under 50% and then Flourishing Families and so on and so forth.
So the same way that I got to this general report where I looked at this mosaic manual right here as we were looking at the Power Elite which by the way lists all of them which is a good tool to go do that.
If you’re actually in the report and you were going to look here you could click there are 850 power elites I could just click on that and it’ll open up a new tab and it’ll give me basically the same information that we just looked at a few minutes ago.
Sometimes I do notice that the microphone changed to this little antenna so that’s still basically the same thing as far as accessing radio but the rest of this is all identical information that you would go ahead and see for this particular group.
Now you will see that here it’s the number for the Power Elite the first one we gave you was the generic one that looked across the world. But here when we drill down here it’s going to give me the specifics for this particular area. So when I look at Power Elites right here it is saying that they’re general age range is between the ages of 46 and 50 and that’s 16.2% of the population in the Monument area represents that which is 189 index more concentrated essentially than in most places. Hope that it makes sense to you. So you can kind of look through the rest of them. The icons are there but now the numbers are very specific for our particular area.
They even give you a little bit of an archetype number here. The name that you can use if you wanted to create an archetype for Michael and Mary you can kind of see how that that represents so here you can see they represent typically about 5.24% percent of the population of household and seven percent of the populations fall underneath this Power Elite category but much more so in this particular location right here.
So this is another interesting report kind of gives you the breakdown of the different groups the ones are the most popular in any particular area so if you’re drilling down and you wanted to open up let’s say a liquor store you could actually find out a lot more about the rooftops and the people that live there.
All right another report that I find quite handy and this particular one. It is the Basic Demographic Summary Chart Report summary chart right here. So if I run that report you can see here how the household income groups as they go by their seasonal population.
How many of them are one-person households versus two and so forth.
Here’s the age distribution so you can see like 65 plus are kind of declining a little bit and ones that are growing quite a bit is this is purple one for 55 to 64. You can see that that’s quite a bit of rise right there at least.
As a percentage of the population breaks it down by ethnicity, education level, marital status, and a variety of other kinds of things. So again that’s another rather interesting report that you might find somewhat interesting
DemographicsNow Business Summary Report
Another report that I find interesting is the Business Summary Report here again is another interesting report that will list the different types of businesses in a particular area. Now this column here talks about employees and this talks about establishments.
So they estimate right here based upon the Q4 2018 when I’m running this that of the total employees there are about 8,780 employees that work in this particular area or that people are still of working age and this represents 1,228 establishments.
So let’s just say we were looking back down here this scroll down to a couple different things you can see services, my goodness, of this so the numbers of services workers. These are all the ones that are below it will kind of imply that so if you add up all these numbers that comes up to that number.
So 54% of the people who live in the Monument area are employed in some type of a service-related business. Educational services being the largest, business services the second largest and representing roughly about 10%.
As you can see the establishments as you go through here educational there is 31 educational services type of businesses that people work for. Business services represent about 200 establishments and have about 4.6 employees represent 16.3%.
So it’s a really kind of an interesting thing to see the people who live in a specific location or if you’ve added a specific address perhaps you’ve added a drivetime or a miles ring around that particular location to go ahead and collect this particular data.
So it gives you a pretty information of what industries people are employed in to give you a pretty good idea of the kinds of businesses that are there.
The last report that I really wanted to talk about here which I find is another Simmons report and it’s called… Again if we were looking for a beverage alcohol summary there it’s right there.
This one is called the l Simmons Lifestyle Demogs Statement Summary Report. I find this report very interesting. It deals with a lot of different types of questions that how people would respond to them. Again this is the same demographic information because the area hasn’t changed any.
But let’s just say we scroll all the way to the bottom. So if I’m again looking at opening a restaurant or I’m opening up a business like that liquor store whatever the case is, I might look at how they might respond to different types of questions like, “Would you pay more for environmentally-friendly products?” They are at the 113 index which means that they are more likely to pay more for products that are environmentally friendly. Similarly, there are other questions here, you can see if you know “I buy recycled paper products” is greater than the average. or here, “Don’t buy unknown brands to save money”. Since they would answer in the affirmativeit it shows they you they’re not looking for alternative brands and are more name-brand purchasers that kind of stuff which you might expect because we’ve talked about the fact that there tend to be a little bit more affluent.
It talks about how they view television, how they view movies, how they view retail establishments, how they view their cars. There’s just a lot of different questions in here that actually give you quite a bit of insight into the kinds of people that live in a specific area.
Maps Reports
All right so I’d like to kind of shift gears a little bit here and let’s move toward some of the functions on the map side here again we’ve selected the Monument area which is what we have and while there’s plenty of interesting things the one I find the most interesting are these thematic controls that you can put on here.
DemographicsNow Thematic Controls
So the first thing is you want to make sure that it’s enabled and then we can choose a variable that’s going to break this out.
So let’s just say I wanted to go down here let’s see I’m gonna choose a variable here and let’s say i choose Mosaic Dominant Distributions this is a good one that will kind of let you know about the groups and stuff that exists here. So I’ll click on that, of course, I have no other choice here so I’m just going to click that one right there. We will select the Resident Mosaic right there and perhaps what we really want to do is we want to look at it from Mosaic Groups so you can see there are lots of different versions of this. I just want to focus on Households and perhaps I’m going to focus in on somebody who is maybe… we know the Blooming with Confidence actually has a really big thing, but let’s just look at the Power Elite one that we looked at earlier.
So it’ll break it down for you and then I can even zoom out a little bit and you can see that this here is where they’re above average. So the Power Elites tend to live a little bit more over here and in another area up here so you can see how that kind of plays out.
So now if I was going to do my marketing I might want to focus on this particular part of town rather than that part of town because these represent something that even might even be below average or you know something that is not quite as populous.
So again if I knew going back to my mosaic handbook that I wanted to go after in this particular case Power Elites because they matched the demographic for which I wanted to go and they believe there are some 77 different groups that exist here these types that you can scroll through and so if you want to find power this would be the way to be able to locate where they’re kind of concentrated.
I hope this is kind of giving you a pretty good overview of some of the power that you can possibly get from DemographicsNow.
It is a very valuable tool for doing your market research and again this is Steve with SteveBizBlog have a wonderful day.
