Small businesses need to work much harder than large box stores to make their businesses as successful as possible. This is because these businesses often have limited resources and need to work on building their reputation to gain new customers and keep old customers coming back for more. Keeping up to date on small business statistics is one way to get your small business off the ground. Below are some small business statistics (as of December 2020) and tips on how often you should check for statistic updates on each topic.
How Do Business Owners Collect Demographic information?
First and foremost, business owners should understand who actually makes up their client base. One of the best ways to find this out is to do a demographic survey. There are a few ways to do this, but the most direct way to is to post the survey on your website. Putting is as a pop-up or a widget on the sidebar of the site are both good options. If you do not have a business website, then you can also post a survey on any social media pages you might have for your business. You can then either decide to create your own survey or use an online template. Whether you are using a template or not, it is important to know some commonly asked demographic questions.
- What is your gender?
- How old are you?
- Where do you live?
- What is your ethnicity?
- How much money do you make each year?
These questions, along with other questions that might relate more to your specific business, can help you to find out what your demographics. For example, if you run an online pet shop, you may want to ask something like, “How many pets do you have?” or “What is your pet’s favorite thing to do?” While these questions are a little more fun, they are still collecting demographic information that is important to your business. It should be noted that the answers to these questions don’t need to be open-ended. For example, you can put age ranges when asking ages, like below 18, 19-30, 31-45, 46-64, and 65 and older. These can roughly let you know what generation your main cliental belong to.
Why is Demographic Information Important to a Small Business?
Demographics are one of the most important small business statistics because they say who is using your business. Once you know who enjoys the business, business owners can do a couple of things. The first thing is to do more to encourage old customers to come back for more. This could also be rephrased as catering to a business’s current client base. The other thing a business owner could do is try to expand their existing client base by doing more things that could help to attract people who fill lower percentage brackets of their demographic statistics. For example, if your business mostly seems to draw in seniors, you might want to try to reach out to millennial or generation Z clients, who will inevitably become the more important customers in the future. The smartest business owners will try to do both of these things.
How Often Should Business Owners Check Your Demographic Statistics?
When is the best time to do a demographic survey? There is very little point to doing a demographic survey as soon as you open your business, as new businesses often don’t have many customers or returning customers. Instead, a business should wait until they are well-established to hold their survey. Then, business owners can either choose to keep the survey continuously running (which takes very little effort) and just check the results every once in a while. Business owners can also share the survey on social media every once in a while to get new customers to take the survey. Doing this once every few months is a good system.
Doing demographic surveys is one of the best ways to understand your customers. Once you understand your customers better, you can run your business better!
