Do you know your catchment area demographics?
Does your area predominantly consist of young families, retirees, established households?
What is the home ownership ratio?
What sort of building approvals currently in place?
What are homes sales like?
Is the area going through any infill development?
How transient is the population?
What is the nationality percentage breakdown?
What is the age group breakdown?
What is the household income?
How many 20-30 year old single females still living at home?
I have added the last question, not to creep anyone out, but this was one of the research matrices that we used to use a few years back. We were selling home starter packs – some saucepans, towels, bed linen, etc. It was all packaged as a “Home Starter”. In this case we were able to scour the electoral roll and look for mum, dad, and an over 18 female daughter (based on same surname). Slightly illegal now, and probably illegal back then, but the object of the exercise was to interpret available resources to build a call list.
The majority of the questions above can be easily answered using publically available information. It is not that this information is presented in a sales ready format, but by using census data, data from the realestate institute, and other sources, you can easily analyse this data and build useful sales lists. Take this a little bit further, especially if you have a knack for this, and all of a sudden you have lists that have an inherent value. Give it a different theme, and this data can be applied to different industries and can sold.
Another additional source of this information, where much of the demographic information has been completed, is from businesses that sell advertising themselves – think of getting advertising rate cards from the local television stations, radio stations, newspapers, the Chamber of Commerce, and industry organisations; the latter because they have a vested interest in supporting your current venture.
Although you may have started your business career with a lunchbar you might just find yourself as a list manager. The best part of this is when data has been analysed, it can be modified and on-sold multiple times.
