Free Market Research


You can pay many thousands of dollars to have market research information collected for you. With Towncharts.com you can access Free Market Research provided in an integrated and easy to use format.


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 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, evaluating some new product, service or feature, or expanding into new goegraphic areas. 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 in here in this website. This free resource is available to you to use.


You can use Towncharts.com data as the beginning to many market research projects either as the main source of secondary data, as the starting point tp primary market research, 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.

Market Research Projects

  1. Find Your Customers
  2. When you are launching a business, adding a product or service, or expanding you should have a detailed understanding of the type or types of customers that are most likely to buy your product or use your services. As a new business, you would need to estimate who you think your ideal customer would be. Some of this type of research can be obtained by studying the demographic and other information avaialble on Towncharts.com. If you already have been in business and are expanding in some way then you would base the review on your understanding of your customers.

  3. Understanding Your Market Area
  4. What is the optimal location for your business? Based on the types of customers that are your most likely to shop or purchase your product or service you should develop a better understanding of the areas where your business operates or where it will operate. Towncharts.com can be used to identify geographic areas such as cities, towns, counties, zip codes and even smaller areas that are defined by the Census Bureau as Census Designated Places (CDP).

  5. Calculate Market Demand
  6. Its important to underestand the traffic that a new business can expect in any given geographic area. But how do you do this? By starting with an understanding of who your customer is you can use that information (from a customer profile) to find locations that have the most of that type of person. 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.

  7. Identifying Optimal Locations
  8. Locating a business can be one of the most important decisions an entrepreneur can make. This one decision can be the factor that determines success or failure. Its important to understand the market area where you will be opening your new business BEFORE you locate in that place. You can use Towncharts.com to access a very detailed set of information about any area of the United States. This information includes economic factors as well demographics and other information about potential customers.

  9. Sample Balancing

  10. When conducting primary research, it’s important that the data collected is representative of the actual population you are studying. What this means is that if you collect data you need it to be representative of the people you are trying to understand in terms of the proportion of different types of people in the area of study. As an example, if you were going to conduct a political poll for the area where you live (maybe for some 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. Then your poll will not reflect what might happen at the polls. (Of course is much more complicated than this because you 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. You can get this type of data very easily from Townchart.com. In fact, you can get into much more detail than only using gender and leverage the wealth of data available (such as race, employment status, education attainment level, and much, much more.)

Market Research With Towncharts.com In Summary

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.


Good luck!



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