How to Research Your Industry: Free Websites

The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) is the standard used by Federal statistical agencies in classifying business establishments, and several directories can be searched using NAICS codes. Also, several of the library's resources that have industry reports, trade articles, and financial ratios can be searched using NAICS codes. This website has a keyword search option that will allow you to find the right code for your business.

The Census Business Builder (CBB) is a one-stop resource for information about the customers, competition, and market for small businesses. This suite of services provide selected demographic and economic data from the Census Bureau tailored to specific types of users in a simple to access and use format. The Small Business Edition of the Census Business Builder is built primarily for small business owners who need key data for their business plan or to better understand their potential market. It presents data for a single type of business and geography at a time.

The County Business Patterns and the ZIP Code Business Patterns from the Economic Census trace the number of establishments, the quarterly payroll, the annual payroll, the total employment, and the number of establishments in broad economic sectors in different geographies.

The Economic Census is the U.S. government’s official 5-year measure of American businesses and the economy. It provides the most comprehensive data available at the national, state, and local level, representing all industries and geographies.

The SBDCnet has free, full length market research reports on a wide variety of industries that contain key business statistics, association links, information from trade articles, and consumer information. This website also contains link directories to other web resources and a help center that has more information on select business topics, such as Women Owned Small Businesses.

BizStats is a leading source for free business statistics. In addition, they provide financial ratios for multiple broad industry classifications, profitability risks, rules of thumb for valuation, and estimations on target rent costs for the listed business categories.

Bizstats is owned by Bizminer, a resource available at the Central Branch. Bizminer covers industry financial profiles and market reports for 9000 industries, so businesses can compare their company’s financial performance to local and national companies of similar size by industry.

A Google Advanced Search allows you to limit your searches by a number of different factors, such as domain name and filetype. If you conduct a search using keywords about your business and the word association and narrow the domains to .org websites, you will probably find a relevant trade association. If you take that same search and narrow the filetypes to PDFs and add the word reprt to your search, you may find packaged reports and infographics with relevant industry information.

Management consultants can be a valuable resource for market research. For example, McKinsey & Company and Business of Fashion (BoF) publish an annual fashion consumer report State of Fashion 2024 which discusses fashion economy and key trends. It may take some searching on the McKinsey & Company’s website to find the reports, the Our Insights page is a good place to start.