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If you live in the United States -- unless your name is Richard Hatch -- you're probably used to paying taxes. What you may not be used to, though, is seeing those tax dollars being put to use to conveniently help you do your job better. In fact, the U.S. Government provides a free, and surprisingly robust, system to provide you with U.S. Census demographic information -- much of it very relevant to the Consumer Goods industry.
How to Get it:
You might assume that getting your hands on a free government service like detailed demographic data would be a convoluted process. Unfortunately, you'd be right -- the Census Bureau website is as confusing as any DMV office. So, pay close attention to the steps below to get your hands on this valuable resource:
- Open you internet browser and go here: http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/SAFFFacts?_sse=on
- Click “show more”
- On the page that appears, click "Geography"
- A relatively straight-forward interface will appear where you can select MULTIPLE GEOGRAPHIES at various levels of detail. For example, in the image below, the user has selected Total US, New York, and New Jersey.
- Click “Show Result"
- Your data is now visible on-line. If you’d like to download it, use the menu labeled “Print/Download”.
So you've got demographic data, what now?
You can certainly dive right into the data using tools like Microsoft Excel, but a better bet is to take advantage of a system that can warehouse, manage and easily present that data. For example, within just a few minutes, a demographic dataset from this website could be put into XP3 from Interactive Edge to produce visually stunning and insightful content.
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