Bottom line, you can’t make money in a business if you don’t find a hot market. Time and again, the most successful marketers, online and offline, have done that by using surveys.

What’s the first step? Have an idea—or several—about who your customers might be. That’s your target market. If you already have a business, you should already know who these people are.

But you might be thinking of branching out into a new market. Maybe you’ve seen the data that say Hispanics are starting businesses faster than any other ethnic group, and you’re ready to cash in on that buying power. Or maybe you’ve decided it’s time to test the waters with the Baby Boomers. The first step is to get information about who they are and what they’re buying.

What if you don’t have a business yet? Think through who your ideal customer is. How old is he or she? Is this person male or female, or could it be either? How much money does he make? Is she a member of some particular ethnic group?

Once you know who your target market is, you need to get information—data—on that market.

• What’s their buying power?
• What kinds of products do they want?
• Who ARE they and how do they want to be “talked to?”
• How hard have they been hit by the economic downturn?

The simple fact is, getting this information up front can spell the difference between being one of the 31% of new businesses that go the distance or the 69% that that bite the dust.

And there are 2 ways to get these must-have data.

First, you can do a survey yourself. To do this, you’ll need a good definition of your target market and a list of people in that group, so you can contact them somehow. If you can’t get your hands on a list, then you can get creative. There are LOTS of ways to break into your target market to get information. Best of all, there are ways to do it quickly, without spending a fortune.

The second way to “get the goods” on your target market is to use data someone else collected. Woo hoo—somebody may have done the work for you! Chances are good you can find some great information, if you know where to look. The Census Bureau (www.census.gov) is a great place to start. They have all sorts of information. What many people don’t know is that the census folks don’t just do a census every 10 years, they do surveys all the time. If that doesn’t cut it, there are all sorts of other places to look, from the BEA to the SBA to your local library.

Either way, you can save yourself a ton of time and effort—and maybe even a lot of heartache—if you use surveys to do your market research, right up front.

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