Friday, November 21, 2014
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Neighbors | Tim Cleveland.Stuart Gibbs of the Business and Investment Center helped a lady get signed in before his presentation at the Poland library on how businesses can better know their customers.
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Neighbors | Tim Cleveland.Stuart Gibbs of the Business and Investment Center spoke with an attendee of his presentation about how businesses can better know their customers.
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Neighbors | Tim Cleveland.The Business and Investment Center's Stuart Gibbs gave a presentation at the Poland library about how businesses can better know their customers.
By TIM CLEVELAND
As part of his four-part business workshop series, Stuart Gibbs of the Main library’s Business and Investment Center gave a 90-minute presentation on how businesses can better know their customers on Oct. 27 at the Poland library.
The other workshops in the series were starting a small business, creating a business plan and locate your customers.
“Tonight’s program is know your customers,” he said. “There’s three databases that patrons can use to identify their customers and know more about them.”
The first database Gibbs spoke about was DemographicsNow. It has everything about people’s buying habits except names and addresses. Gibbs said that for instance, it shows how much alcohol is bought at convenience stores in a particular zip code, address or radius.
The second was Reference USA. It is based upon individuals who buy things with a credit card or take a survey. Their data is bought by Reference USA. The database has a scale of 0-10 and if someone scores a seven or higher, their name gets attached to a specific subject they’re interested in based on their buying habits.
“If I bought a bunch of football equipment with my credit card, that may give me a high enough score to where I’m interested in football,” Gibbs said of Reference USA.
The final database was Local Market Audience Analyst, which covers predictive behavior.
“Anyone can look up their own name, it’s kind of cool,” Gibbs said. “You can kind of see what your interests are.
“There’s a lot of date out there. Magazines you subscribe to, for instance.”
Gibbs gave an example of how a business could use the information in the databases to their advantage.
“Imagine I was a horse food business and I’m trying to get to know people that are interested in horses,” he said. “I can use the library’s databases, look them up by the people, say in Columbiana County, who are interested in horses and they’re my potential customers. I can immediately get a customer list of all the names, addresses and income levels of the people that might buy my product.”