Know Your Territory Street Lesson #3

Okay, so you've papered the neighborhoods, created your alliances with other non-competing businesses and even have your employees families involved in promoting you. You also chose a good friend to go mixer hopping with and shamelessly promote one another at all of the events around town. So now that you're staking your claim around your place of business, the question now is HOW do you KEEP your territory?

KNOW YOUR TERRITORY. This means doing some homework and if you're like me you don't have hundreds of dollars to spend on accessing top notch numbers from a marketing firm. So what's a business to do? Research through your local government websites or libraries. Since this is research based, your information sources will differ from mine but I at least hope to point you in the right direction!

Here are a few tips to get you started:

1. Go to your city government's website. All cities should have demographic facts on their city. Most should cover total demographics breaking the information down by land, ethnic profile, and population projections.

http://www.houstontx.gov/planning/Demographics/dem_links.htm

2. Census Bureau - Most city government sites should also include the Census information that the US Government does every ten years too. These can be even more useful since they're filtered by districts within the city. So you can see by your zip code the number of people, ethnicity, unemployment, etc as well.

Houston Links:

Census Information for City Council Districts
2000 Census Index by Council District Boundaries (detailed information)
City of Houston Maps by Council Districts

3. American Community Survey - found on the US Government site, The American Community Survey (ACS) is a nationwide survey designed to provide communities a fresh look at how they are changing. It is a critical element in the Census Bureau's re-engineered decennial census program. The ACS collects and produces population and housing information every year instead of every ten years. http://www.census.gov/acs/www/SBasics/

With the ACS, you can get more update information concerning your community, district, etc. The downside of the ACS is that it's not available in all areas, so you would still need to rely on local government surveys and the US Census survey.

4. Organizations and Chambers - Most large cities will have organizations that do their own research or compile research into a more readable format, ie, so you an I can understand it! For example, Houston has a very large organization called the Greater Houston Partnership. They include the US Census data but also include other local data such as:
Business Incentives
Economic Forecast
Economic Indicators
Major Employers
Job Growth by Sector
Industry Profile
Arts and Culture

Follow the link below to get the information on the topics listed above.

http://www.houston.org/facts-figures/

The above is just a snippet of the information available on the Greater Houston Partnership's website. http://www.houston.org/

If you're part of a chamber or any other organization, ask about their statistics on their members as well. Within these organizations, you can get a headcount of businesses similar to yours or businesses who could use your service/product.

Remember to think outside the box when you're researching your businesses possible consumers. Information is everywhere, sometimes you just have to do a little digging!

Well, I hope I was able to help you with some possible ideas.

Thanks for reading my posts and letting me kick it old school!

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