Who's Gonna Buy Your Can? ...

Marketing starts with the a couple of obvious question that a producer already knows. What do I have to sell and where are my customers?

I was fortunate, because the first thing I did was look at Google Maps and create a 3-mile map. I could make a couple of quick assumptions. 5 campgrounds and lots of lakefront homes.

This is what I gathered about my neighborhood with about two hours of effort.

---- A bit of simple online campground detective work tells me that I have over 600 individual campsites with water & electricity nearby.----

--- Within Three miles of my farm, are located ---

Angel Cove - 130 campsites

Waffle Farm - 400 campsites

Love’s Lazy Lagoon - 63 campsites

Raymond’s Landing - 70 campsites

1,000 lakefront homes - $57,000 median income

3,700 adults between 45 and 74 yrs old - Median income - $44,000

- 600+ potential customers , weekly -

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Now, who lives in all of those lakefront homes? That takes a bit more work... But there are some fine people in Missouri who can help. It's the Missouri Census Data Center.

http://mcdc.missouri.edu/applications/caps2000.html

They have a searchable census database where you can put in the latitude and longitude coordinates for the area your searching and see the number of houses, age of the people, education and a bunch of other stuff about your neighborhood.

To put in your pin-point location in the Missouri Census Data Center, simply click on this line below the two empty boxes. Click on the line that reads like on the form - use Google Maps to specify latitude/longitude coordinates.