Market research includes the collection of information using both primary and secondary sources. To conduct primary research you will need to interview the target people of interest (qualitative research) or use field surveys to collect information. Many times you can gain deep insights into customers, business opportunities, markets, and more using data that already exists. This data and information is called Secondary Market Research. The Towncharts.com website has a wealth of information collected from authoritative government sources that can be used.
Whether you are preparing to launch a new business, expanding into new goegraphic areas, or evaluating some new product, service or feature, there is a large amount of data available from federal and state government agencies that you can use to gain deeper insights and understanding. Towncharts.com has painstakingly reviewed the available information from a wide variety of government agencies and pulled that information together for you. This resource is available to you to use, free of charge.
You can use Towncharts.com data as the beginning to many market research projects as either the starting point of primary market research, the main source of secondary data, or to augment your other research. Additionally, the census type and other data that is available on Towncharts.com can be used to properly balance (sample balance) your primary research. A wealth of secondary research data is available here in easy-to-read charts and narrative text. What's more, this public information is available for nearly every location in the United States including cities, states, zip codes, counties, and even countries. There is data on topics as diverse as demographics, local economic performance, real estate, healthcare and education.
Towncharts.com has a wealth of information not just on demographics such as age, race, gender, ethnicity and more but also information on an area's healthcare coverage, economic conditions, educational attainment and more. These types of factors are essential to estimating the demand for your product or service in a geographic area. What's more, the data is presented in easy to understand graphs that include data comparisons to other locations as well as aggregate benchmarks such as the metropolitan area and state average.
As an example, if you were going to conduct a political poll for the area where you live (maybe for someone running for mayor) you might conduct a survey or stop people on the street and ask them who they intend to vote for. As a very simple example, let's assume you do this and end up with responses from 60 men and 40 women. Now with Towncharts.com and for the area you are covering you know that the actual percentage of men to women is 48% men and 52% women. Therefore you know that your poll will not reflect what might happen at the polls. (Of course it's much more complicated than this because you'd need to include models of voter turnout/likelihood to vote, etc.)
In order to "balance the sample" you will need to use the actual percent of the population to more accurately reflect what will truly happen in the vote. Fortunately, you can get this type of data very easily from Towncharts.com. In fact, you can get into much more detail than just gender and leverage the wealth of data available such as race, employment status, education attainment level, and much, much more.
As described, Towncharts.com can be an excellent source of free market research data and information that you can use. Additionally, this data can be an invaluable source of data and key facts to use in developing primary market research for interviews or surveys. Finally, the fact-based data on Towncharts.com is essential for balancing primary market research data that you might collect from a survey or interviews in order to make the data better reflect your customer and market potential.
