Methods for defining your market

- Three steps to defining your market. We're going to go ahead and walk you through the process of identifying what market you're actually in. We'll give you a lot of resources in which to do that. So step one is just simply identify your industry. First thing is we look at the government. The government has some great resources and the first one is the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They have something called Industry at a Glance, you want to check that out. It's a very, very nice report that kind of guides you through different industries that will give you some really good information. The US Census is another great tool to get both sizing information, number of people in a particular industry, and just industry definition overall. Then, of course, I love Googling. Googling is the best, that's going to be your best source of information. And when you're Googling, let me give you some keywords to look at. First of all, always use the word industry, segment, size or sizing, the word market, and pair that with whatever you're looking for. So, if you're looking for the automobile market, size of automobile market would be a good example, as an example. Now there's two additional resources that I absolutely love. They do cost money but you can also get kind of the free versions of the information as well. One's called MarketResearch.com and they cover about 250,000, they have actually 250,000 reports out there, on all different industries. So it's a great, great resource for you as well. And then Hoovers. I've been subscribing to Hoovers for probably, I don't know, 12, 13 years now, and I use it all the time. They cover about a thousand industries that you can go ahead and take a look at. Now, again, this information can cost money, so what I do is I Google the reports that Hoovers and Market Research put out, and I look for the summaries, the recaps, the free version of the information. And typically when they're putting out these reports, there is free versions of information that's available to you. So use that trick as well. Oh, one other great tip that I have when you're Googling. Always click on the image button, especially when you're Googling this type of stuff, when you're looking for either market size or you're trying to define the market, because you're going to find lots of charts and graphs that are really going to help you. There's a lot of really great information embedded in those charts and graphs. Use that tip, don't forget that tip.