Marketing Stats for Business Plans

Are you having a bit of trouble tracking down the demographic information you need for your area for your business plan? This is a real issue since a lot of information you will receive is definitely biased. We recently came across a very interesting site that might help out:

URL: www.citymelt.com

PURPOSE: Citymelt provides finely detailed demographic and statistical information on more than 50,000 towns, cities, and other regional segments of the U.S. The information is free.

SOURCE CHECK: Citymelt was launched in November 2007. The data itself is derived from the Bureau of the Census, IRS, National Weather Service, fee-based data providers, and various other firms that supply statistical information.

REVIEW: This site is still in beta. We've occasionally received the quirky or questionable result in a search, so we'd be a little careful.

The time frame for data sets is very inconsistent, some from several years ago.

We were most impressed with its coverage of very small towns, as well as the unique types of data available. Citymelt not only includes the usual stats on a locality (e.g., median age, income, race) but business-oriented data too such as biggest industries and occupations. It also has unusual data such as average time of arrival to work, modes of transportation, most common home fuel source, building permits issued, banks with most branches, and other interesting data points. We also liked the fact that we could either b rowse all the data aggregated for a selected town or city or use sliders to discover a region that fits our own criteria (e.g., area demographics, education level, weather).