The first stage of marketing for your dive center is to identify the available scuba diving market in your local community.

There are 8 core stages of marketing for your dive shop. The first stage is the Market. The Market is all about identifying the availability of scuba divers or students in your area.

Here are some of the items we will cover in this section that will determine your market.

1. Area demographics. Age, median income, family size, education, etc.

2. Who is your ideal client? This may already be determined by past branding efforts. Another way to ask this is what is your store known for? Are you the family dive center? Are you the executive class dive center?

3. 20 minute drive analysis. DEMA.org used to offer this as a service to their members. The concept here is that the majority of your customers live within 20 minutes of your dive center. Here we want to look at neighborhood level data, home values, consumer behaviors, etc. This can also help determine business expansion opportunities.

Area Demographics

Area demographics help you understand the local economy and the general population. Most of this information will be at the city or town level. Whenever possible, I like to look at Zip code level data.

Where do you go to find demographic information?

Here are some resources I found (Please do not consider this list an endorsement by any means. My goal was to find good data sources that are FREE to access.)

Resources: city-data.com | census.gov heatmap 

Who is your ideal client?

The chances are that you already have customers. This is not intended to create a new ideal client. This exercise is intended to hone in on commonalities between your existing clients, in particularly, your best clients.

There is a lot of benefit in understanding your existing customers. I used to run report that would tell me who my best clients were for the past 6, 12, 18 months. I would then look for commalonilies including:

zip code, age, marital status, kids, other interests.

This information helps you focus your marketing efforts. I know that it is easy to just market to all of your city but the most effective marketing should be targeted based on the habits and vernacular of your ideal client.

Your point of same should be able to pull reports that will help you. If you need help finding this data, please feel free to reach out to me.

The resource below helps you better understand the consumer profile within certain zip codes.

Resources: Claritas 360 Consumer Group Data

20 minute drive analysis

Your store’s location is an important factor in determining your ideal customer and the available market. The idea of the 20 minute drive analysis is that a majority of your customers will come within a 20 minutes radius of your dive shop.

Here are some questions to consider with this analysis:

• Where are other dive shops in relation to your store?

• Is there a zip code outside of your 20 minute drive radius where your ideal customer may live? Could you expand?

• Is your store situated bette for going to work traffic or coming home traffic? How would that affect your store hours?

Resources: Smappen.com | Traveltime.com

The goal is to take an hour this week and better understand your local market, your ideal customer, and your store’s location.

All too often, we intuit the answers to these questions without checking our gut feelings. The other side of this coin is that your store may have been in the same location for many years and the answers may have changed over time.

I encourage you to take some time and evaluate where in this “hourglass” you are winning and where you may need some extra focus.

Over the next 8 weeks, I will be diving deeper into each of the above sections. I will provide examples and activities that could take place in each of the different sections.

One simple way to be thinking of about this concept in your business is to answer the following the question:

Where do I currently need more customers? Open Water? Advanced? Specialties? Travel? Equipment?

This question alone will tell you a lot about what is going well and what area you need more focus. Please reply to this email and share with me the answer.