Demographic data analysis can help to pick the best location for your small business. It will help you to understand how close or far away your candidate locations are from your target customers. This way you can make informed decision before you make the final decision about your business location.
The simplest form of demographic data analysis is to look into population and median income levels around your target locations.
We present 4 tools that allows you to visualize demographics data for free. We provide a short tutorial video for each tool to help you learn how to use that tool.
- Census reporter Census reporter is a non profit open source project aiming to make the census data accessible. It has amazing documentation and makes navigating the census data easy. You can pull any metric from American Community Survey (ACS) in a table and you can visualize it different geographical levels. Here’s an example of how to work with censusreporter.com.
- Location Analyzer Location analyzer is a tool developed specifically for picking the best locations for a new small business. The tool is very easy to use. All you need is addresses of 2 candidate locations. When you enter these 2 addresses to the tool it will pull population, age income data for these locations and put the information on a map for easy analysis. It allows you to see which of the locations have a better locations with respect to your targets customers. Here’s a quick video for using Location Analyzer tool.
- Zipcode lookup from Claritas This is a free tool from the marketing company Claritas. It allows you to pull demographic data for a zip code and analyze marketing classifications for people living in that zip code. It provides data and plots for income, household composition, population by age and population by age and ethnicity. Here’s a short video on how to use zipcode lookup tool
This is a tool developed by the US Census Bureau that is targeted for small businesses. It allows wide variety of data analysis for different business types. You can put in the type of the business you want to open the area and select your target customers to see their distribution on a map. It is a very flexible tool that allows to analyze different type of demographic data. However it is not an easy to use tool for people who are not experienced in data analysis
Â