How To Learn Everything You Need To Know About Customers In Your Zip Code In 5 Minutes

Zip codes, those humble 5 digits that help get mail to your front door can also unlock a treasure box of data about the people who live there. We’re going to show you how, and it’s going to blow your mind.

You’ve likely heard the term demographics – data points like age, sex, race, and income. You may have heard the term psychographics – attitudes, aspirations and psychological criteria humans use in making purchase decisions. When you mix these two data sets together, you get a really powerful view of a customer.

Dance studios rely on hyper-local marketing, and rightly so, because families lead incredibly busy lives and travel time and convenience are critically important factors in choosing activities for their littles. Enter the humble zip code.

Meet Tapestry: A FREE Tool To Explore Demographics & Psychographics By Zip Code

ESRI’s Tapestry Tool gives you a rich picture of the demographic and psychographic profiles of customers in your zip code. You can also add a 15-minute drive time filter or a 5-mile radius filter to further refine your data set – particularly helpful if you cross a few zip codes. **If you want to skip ahead and see what’s available for your zip code** – here’s the link.

Let’s Explore The Tool

Once you enter your zip code, you’ll get a color coded map with hover overlays that indicate what the primary profile for that area is. Here is an example of area code 76012:

When you click the label name, the box on the lower left of the screen changes to give a description of the Tapestry Segment. It’s a tiny box, and not the easiest thing to read, but it has a REALLY important link inside it that says “Click For More Details”. (See the yellow circled item below). When you click that, you’ll get a detailed PDF report that you can save!

The segment box shows the top 3 segments for your zip code, so be sure to explore all of them. In the example shown here, the segments are Young and Restless, Metro Fusion and NeWest Residents

To the right of the segment description box are some other data highlights:

Median Income – you can compare the median income for the Zip Code to the Filtered Area (Buffer), The county, the state and the US as a whole.

Financial Optimists – This gives a picture of how people are feeling about their financial future over the next year. Low optimism could tell you that pricing will be on people’s minds and you can incorporate that into your promotions & planning.

Education – consider education levels when you are crafting content and writing copy.

What You’ll Discover In The PDF

A short narrative on the segment, describing how they live, shop, work and behave.
Neighborhood details
Socioeconomic traits
Age breakdowns – be SURE to check that chart out because it shows you ages of kids in these segments which is NOT typically available in other data sets
Income views – by top occupations in the segment and by household
Household Budget Index – a breakdown of how households are allocating their spending
Market profile – consumer preferences
Housing details – renters vs owners
And much more