Like most people, you probably take firmographic data for granted. After all, it’s just a bunch of numbers and statistics. Wrong! The quality of your firmographic data can have a big impact on your business.
Think about it this way: if you’re trying to target a specific audience with your marketing efforts, then the last thing you want is to waste time and money reaching out to people who aren’t interested in what you offer. That’s where having high-quality firmographic data comes in handy.
By ensuring that your information about a potential customer base is accurate and up-to-date, you can be confident that your marketing campaigns are as effective as possible. Here’s everything you need to know about firmographics:
Firmographic Data Defined
Firmographic data is information that pertains to organizations. This data can help you better understand and categorize potential clients or partners. Firmographic data points include company size, industry, location, and more.
Knowing this information can help determine if your product or service is relevant to the target company.
Firmographic data is information about a company, such as its industry type, size, reach, annual revenue and expenditure, ownership style, market trends, and growth information. This data can help understand a company’s business model and how it operates in its market.
Firmographic and demographic data are important in B2B sales for different reasons. Firmographic data helps you understand the organization, while demographic data helps you understand the individuals within that organization. Using both types of data, you can get a complete picture of your potential customers.
Marketers use demographics such as gender, income, and race to create buyer personas.
Marketers and sales reps can use business data to profile and target businesses.
Firmographics can help you to understand a company’s values by looking at the demographics of the people who work there. This information can give you insights into how a company operates and its priorities.
(For example, you could change your marketing strategy if your target markets are mostly millennial employees.).
Application of Firmographic Data in Market Segmentation?
Understanding firmographic characteristics can help companies create marketing campaigns targeting specific customer types.
Here are specific examples of ways to use data points like company size, industry, and location to segment your markets.
Location Data
Data about the location of a business, such as where it’s located, where it conducts its business, and how many offices it has, is known as location information.
Before preparing your strategy, companies will often collect data on businesses, such as their industry, location, and size.
A business on the west coast may prefer to offer products and services that have facilities in that same region. This could be for several reasons, such as convenience or familiarity with the area.
Location data can help B2B organizations identify new opportunities in a given area. This, in turn, allows them to create targeted ads more likely to resonate with potential customers.
Learn more about data collection methods here.
Industry data
Firmographic data is useful to business-to-business (B2B) companies to target their marketing initiatives. Companies can better focus their advertising efforts by analyzing industry information, increasing productivity while reducing costs.
This process can help a company focus its marketing plans on a more relevant audience, which can lead to increased productivity of ad campaigns and reduced costs.
Consider a company that manufactures and sells car brakes. They seek to expand their number of retailers.
When researching your target businesses, it’s important to consider the types of services that they provide. For instance, a company that only performs an oil change or replaces a tire would not be in the same market as an auto shop that provides a wide range of maintenance services. You would exclude businesses in that latter group when collecting your data.
With marketing automation, marketers can create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.
Financial Performance Data
Performance data is information about a company’s profitability, growth, and loss.
Using this information, companies can categorize businesses into different groups based on their finances, then create customized advertisements.
If a business finds that several other companies in a target sector are experiencing decreasing revenues, it can advertise its products and services as a solution to this problem. By doing so, the company may be able to increase sales and improve its financial performance.
Businesses can use their financial data to determine if their business would benefit from their product or service.
If a company is focused on increasing revenue, it might exclude businesses in a targeted sector experiencing profit growth and consistent economic growth. This is because these businesses are performing well and may not need the company’s products.
After analyzing your data, you might want to tweak your advertisement strategies to make them more effective.
Organizational Structure Data
Understanding the hierarchical structure of your target companies can be crucial to your sales efforts, as it can help your sales teams better understand the decision-making process.
Building long-term client relationships are important for any business.
Once an advertising company has identified who they need to build relationships with, it can create more effective marketing campaigns customized for its target market’s needs.
After analyzing the data, marketers can tailor their marketing strategies to more effectively target specific demographics.
Importance of Firmographic Data
Having firmographic data on your prospects is important. It lets you understand who you’re talking to, what industry they’re in, and what use case they might have for your product or service.
It outlines what companies or businesses might benefit from using your product, what issues they face, what products they use now, and how much they spend on those items.
By understanding the needs of each specific industry type, you can tailor your marketing messages to reach a larger audience. This will lead to less time wasted on bad leads that don’t fit your criteria and more time creating effective marketing campaigns that reach more qualified customers.
Understanding firmographics can help you better target your marketing activities. This knowledge can also help you understand the needs of each prospect you reach out to.
Not only will it help you identify high-potential businesses, but it can also help you:
Having access to the right firmographics can help you: (1) craft a marketing strategy that targets specific companies; (2) improve your service interactions; (3) cultivate long-term business relationships; and (4) understand who your target clients are.
Conclusion
Using firmographic data to create relevant content for your targeted clients is important. The best way to do this is by integrating your contact database with a robust marketing platform to gather this information. By integrating your market, technology, and company information, you can gain a competitive advantage that provides a complete understanding of your market and where you stand next to your competitors.
