Are you a business or organization looking to grow and connect with other businesses and broaden your customer base? Mesa County Libraries may have just the tool for you to use. ReferenceUSA is a powerful database containing millions of consumer and business profiles. You can search and narrow down your results to meet the specific needs of your organization. I will run through an example with you of how this can be done using the Grand Valley Paddling Club (GVPC) as a model.
The GVPC would like to grow its membership by reaching out to a targeted group of potential community members. Logging into ReferenceUSA using my library card, I can choose “U.S. Consumers / Lifestyles” and then Advanced Search. I see that there are almost 300 million results with no limiters selected. I like to start with narrowing down the results geographically. I can draw an area on a map to search or go by city and state or ZIP code. I can then limit my number even more by selecting one contact per household or expand my selection by selecting all per household. The section that really narrows down my results is the Lifestyle category. When you choose the Lifestyle category, you have a whole host of options and sub-options to choose from to target the people that you want to reach. Deciding which lifestyle choices best fit your needs is the key to a successful search.
Now that you have narrowed down your results, it is time to download a list that you can use. Click on View Results, and you should see a list of people that fit the search criteria. There are many options to view the results, from charts to heat maps, but the simplest thing to do is select people from the list and click Download.
The trick with downloading is to select your desired level of information detail by selecting Custom. By choosing Custom, you can choose the information that is most suited to your need. You can get very detailed in terms of what information you can obtain through ReferenceUSA.
Sorting consumer and business profiles that fit your targeted lifestyles is just one way that you can use the ReferenceUSA Consumer database. In the next blog, I will describe how to use the U.S. Businesses Database with another easy-to-follow example.