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User Stats for 2024. Understanding Shifts in the Marketplace.
by Jessica Buchholz, Events Coordinator | January 27, 2025
| Third party analytics are an important part of understanding the local market. Understanding how consumers react to a region can help businesses adjust hours, staffing, marketing plans, product/service priorities, and much more. Metrics are a critical component in business decision making. Emporia Main Street gathers metrics that detail area usage, and we have the ability to break down usage points on a business by business basis upon request. Below are some data points for the community core (information is specific to downtown visitors) in 2024 that may help your business adjust to maximize traffic and profitability in 2025.  We had some modest gains in traffic over last year, but there is room for improvement. With over 2.4 million visits to the downtown last year, Emporia’s core continues to punch well above our weight class. Two areas that we hope to improve in 2025 include “visit time” and “visit frequency”. Visit time is an indicator that consumers are traveling between several stops in a given area. The higher the visit time, the more stops the average consumer (typically) makes. Visit frequency is fairly self explanatory: the more often we can get customers to visit any area, the better the traffic opportunities for businesses. When we look at where visitors are coming from, there is definite corridor that runs from Wichita to Kansas City that stands out. When we develop support alliances, looking at our surrounding counties and working to be a connection point between the two largest economies in the state (KC and Wichita) that routinely pass through our area seems to make sense. Creating a hub with unique businesses (we will never out “chain” much larger communities) is obviously a better strategy than attempting to emulate much larger markets. We have seen some shifts in travel preferences with opening of regional transportation projects in 2024. Those shifts will continue to impact consumer traffic patterns in 2025. Concentrating on messaging with regional segmentation strategies should be our primary strategy. Our secondary strategy should be to select target markets that have a compelling reason to visit our area based on activities (graduations, car shows, disc golf, the Great American Market, class reunions, cycling, ethnic events) and follow up to increase the likelihood of return visits. |
 By highlighting the routes of our visitors, we can see conduit areas that supply visitors to our core. Concentrating on individuals along the corridor, and forming closer ties with population centers within the targeted area, can provide us with the opportunity to build regional capacity. |
| Emporia is obviously known for large scale events. Singular days that pop out are State Basketball, Cinco de Mayo, the Dynamic Discs Open, the Flatland Cruisers Car Show, Graduation weekend(s), the Unbound Gravel Finish Line Party, the Great American Market, and more. Forming a cogent marketing strategy to entice individuals that participate in local activities is smart business planning. |
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When we look at weeks as opposed to days, you can tell the pronounced impact of athletic events (state basketball) and academic anchors (graduation) on the community core. Multi-day activities with defined consumer bases allow your business to directly reach out to targeted consumers. One of the changes in metrics from last year is a surge in Friday traffic. Friday and Saturday are close in terms of visit quantity, but the end of the work/school week (for some), when coupled with activities like the Emporia First Friday’s Art Walk, pushed heavy Friday usage. This may be an opportunity for certain business types to create consistent repeat customers with a “Fridays are for (insert your business)” type campaign. We have a few businesses that have pushed Sunday hours, and we are starting to see relative growth in Sunday traffic. Aligning business hours with consumer traffic is common sense. If your primary consumer traffic hits the area when you aren’t open, it might be difficult to execute sales of products and services. A change in hours takes a while to catch on with consumers, but coordinating efforts with neighboring business to create multiple opportunities for extended hours spending can generate additional sales. We obviously aren’t on a coast so “Emporia compared to the national average” isn’t realistic, but we can look at how our community compares to the Kansas average by metric category. In areas where we have an advantage regionally, we can draw underserved consumers to are area more frequently. |
Our “college town” status lends itself to lower incomes because you have adults in school with limited earning capacity until they enter the full time workforce. However, we do see the need for job and opportunity diversification that can enable higher salary categories where we lag behind the state. Again, as a younger “college town”, you would expect to see more single person living environments. We are on par with most other household size options when compared to the rest of the state. More single person households points to social business opportunities that introduce people to other singles within the population. Emphasizing the social nature of your business in marketing, to specific markets, can help people build social circles in the area. Our ethnic breakdown obviously shows a large “Hispanic or Latino” population compared to the state average. Remember that Emporia has Latino families that have been here for several generations, and there is significant diversity within that demographic segment. Other population segments by demographic group are lower than the state average, which shows we may have some work to do in welcoming and retaining a diverse population. |
Measuring educational attainment can help us understand our local economic drivers. If local jobs require more education, the populace typically has higher educational attainment. Economic diversification should be a focal point for our area. Our market is relatively young, particularly in comparison to the immediate region. Businesses can use this information to drive more “hub” youth activities to the area from the broader region.Visit data will vary from business to business and from community location to community location. The datapoints above are meant to show aggregate data for the core of Emporia. We encourage you to set a time to discuss market data for your specific business as you set your goals for traffic and sales in 2025. |