Where do you want to practice? In a small town? The suburbs? Downtown in a large metro area? Rural locale?

Wherever you go, you’ll need to start learning about the area and the people who live there. From the larger market in your area you’ll begin to narrow down those people in a specific area to whom you will be directly marketing.

Here are some questions you may have concerning market definition — and the answers.

Q. Why do I need to know about this market?]

A. There are a number of reasons to find out more about the market:

• You need to find out if this is where you want to live and practice. (See “Finding Your Dream Location.”)

• You’ll want to be sure that the type of practice you’re thinking about will fit the people in the area. For example, if you want a pediatric practice, you probably do not want to go to Sun City, Ariz., where the population consists of mostly retired people.

• You need to know who you are marketing to before you know how to market to them. As you design your “Year 1 Marketing Plan,” you may be talking to advertising agencies, radio stations, or other media. You need to know about the people you want to advertise to so they can help you design advertising for this special group.

• Information about your market is the basis for the marketing plan section of your business plan.

Q. What information do I need to gather?

A. The information you need to collect is called demographics. (The term means “writing about people.”). It is information about the group of people that live in a specific area.

The demographics for Sun City,Ariz., for example, are very different from those for Seattle, Wash. Demographics are defined as the socioeconomic groups in an area characterized by age, income, sex, education, occupation, etc.

Some of the most common demographics are:

• Population as a whole,
• Number of households,
• Percentage of individuals by each race,
• Percentage of individuals by education levels,
• Ownership rate (percentage of people owning their homes),
• Median home value,
• Median household income,
• Crime statistics, by type,
• Retail sales per capita (per person),
• Mean travel time to work,
• Percentage change in population since the last census.

You want information expressed in percentages, so you can compare locations. For example, if you speak Spanish and want to market this ability to a Hispanic population, you would want to know the relative numbers of Spanish-speaking people in various cities you might be considering.

If the cities were approximately the same size but city No. 1 had a 15 percent Hispanic population and city No. 2 had a 22 percent Hispanic population, you might consider city No. 2.

Q. Where do I find this information?

A. Start with this Web site, www.fedstats.gov. This is a great site that compiles information from different federal agencies.

A non-government site is www.ERSYS.com, which compiles information for relocation on U.S. cities. It won’t have information on smaller cities or towns.

Another website with city information is City-Data.com. This site includes information on smaller cities and towns.

Search for the city’s own Web site, the Chamber of Commerce, or the local business development organization. The best way to do this is to go to a search engine (such as Google) and type in the name of the city and state (or city and province). One of the first entries in the list will probably be one of these sites.

You might find additional information on the HUD (Housing and Urban Development) website, at http://socds.huduser.org/quicklink/screen3.odb?citystring=1212875

Q. What do I do with this information?

A. Use the data you have collected to construct a word picture of the area. In a paragraph or two, tell about the people in the area, selecting meaningful information about them.

As you write your marketing plan, select information that relates to marketing. For example, you can omit crime data for this purpose, but do include household income levels and personal income and educational levels.

We suggest you bookmark this page in case you want to do research on another area later.

Also check out this article from Chiropractic Economics magazine, “Use demographics to build your patient rolls,” July 2003, Issue 9, www.chiroeco.com/article/2003/issue9/marketing1.php

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