Firmographics are an important consideration since they may help companies better understand their target market. Firmographics are the descriptive features of a firm or organization.

The following is a list of firmographics that might be discovered, as well as their definition: industry sector, size, location, and income are examples.

This information is useful because it may be used to identify suitable prospects. You may segment your ideal prospects according to this data in order to target them more effectively. This allows you to focus on people who most closely match your needs.

How Is Firmographics Different From Demographics?

Demographics are a type of data that describes the characteristics of a given population, such as age, sex, income, or ethnicity. Demographic information is frequently utilized by businesses to target their marketing and advertising campaigns.

Gender, income level, ethnicity, and educational attainment are examples of demographics.

In B2C sales and marketing terms, these features are more essential than demographic statistics. Firmographics are used in B2B sales and marketing to categorize customers based on their company or organizational traits.

What Is Firmographic Segmentation?

Firmographic segmentation is a type of market segmentation that uses firmographic variables to divide the overall population into groups.

Firmographics are firm-specific data such as:

Company Size

When categorizing firms, keep their size in mind. A company’s size is determined by the number of employees it has. For example, a small business may have difficulty marketing to major businesses due to a lack of expertise.

If they don’t have any prior expertise, it’s critical to target 500-1,500 member firms that are smaller. Small companies would be easier to appeal to if you’ve never dealt with them before.

Industry

Furthermore, you may apply segmentation to your campaign. Your product or service may be relevant to only a few industries. You’ll discover new markets by determining which industries could benefit from your product or service.

It will assist you to increase your bottom line and win business by identifying prospects who require the specific type of service.

Location (e.g. country, region, state)

Firmographics cover where a potential customer business is located geographically: city, state, region, country, continent, and so on. Is the firm large or tiny? Are they major or minor? Or are they global?

Most businesses will not engage with ones outside of their direct region due to lack of local knowledge and difficulty of work.

Financial Performance (e.g. annual revenue, MRR)

To begin, you may split your prospects into categories based on their annual revenue. You can tailor your sales approach the company’s goals by segmenting your prospects according to their annual revenue or profit.

Are they attempting to improve their profitability by appealing to new clients, or are they aiming to increase their client base? If it’s the latter, you might focus on providing them solutions for simplifying workflow processes and increasing employee productivity.

For example, you could provide ticket booking software for music venues that need to automate parts of their ticket retail process.

Another factor to consider is that you may only want to sell to specific businesses. This is because they are the ones who can afford your product or service.

Status (e.g. publicly or privately owned, non-profit)

The status or structure of an organization is a description of the relationship between one organization and another, as well as the legal standing of the entity.

Examples of such include limited liability corporations, publicly owned companies, privately owned and individual firms. Different organizations may differ in the value that they may extract from your product or service.

 Why Segmentation Is Important

Segmentation is crucial to getting the most out of your efforts. Companies will often want to figure out who their ideal customer profile (ICP) is and where they may be found.

This can assist businesses in making more informed product features and marketing decisions while avoiding undesirable targeting techniques that waste money.

Firmographic data may help you fine-tune your marketing targeting. Marketers employ to find traits that exist within segments and among them. Knowing how customers respond to your product/service and which channels provide the best response is crucial.

This implies you have a plan in place, as well as the money needed to implement it, so you can focus on those channels that are performing well. It saves time and energy by allowing you to compare many strategies rather than attempting everything at once.

You can use firmographic data to enhance your customer service. By leveraging data such as location, you can help better distribute customer service offerings.

For example, if you were servicing a wholesale client, they would be looking to partner with organizations that are located within their region.

Furthermore, firmographics can be utilized to search for potential collaboration and business possibilities. Businesses may use this knowledge to make more informed decisions about where to focus their efforts.

How to Start Thinking About How to Use Firmographics?

The first step is to figure out what data you have access to and what you need to collect. Depending on your business, you may already have some of this information. You’ll want to gather data on things like company size, location, industry, and revenue.

Once you have that data, you can start looking for trends and patterns. Look at the traits of your best existing clients and determine which attributes fit your ICP. Then, once you have determined attributes that are important to you, you can start thinking about questions like:

• What industries are growing the fastest?
• Which locations are seeing the most growth?
• What are the largest companies in your industry?
• How large is the company in terms of employee size?
• What is the organizational structure of the company and how will it change in the future?

To understand the use of firmographics, we can look at an example. Imagine that you are a business that creates custom invoices and estimates.

Your product may be best suited to small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), ones that are experiencing high growth and regionally located in your area and are in an industry that needs a large number of invoices.

Then, you would use firmographics to find firms that are SMEs, have high annual revenue, are regionally located near you, and are in industries such as manufacturing or professional services.

By profiling your ICP by traits, you will be able to quickly identify prospects that are worth pursuing and prioritize them. From here, you can reach out via cold email, AI outreach, or look for an introduction.

Further, you can leverage this information for future marketing. This would include building high ranking content to attract prospects that are within your ICP.

The value of firmographic data can be seen through a study conducted by Kennesaw State University. This showed that an extensive amount of firmographic data collected from 11 million US companies could help accurately predict the chance of a company going bankrupt.

Triggr maximizes the use of firmographic data with the lead finder tool.

Taking public data, Triggr categorizes each company against firmographic traits so that when users jump onto the platform, they input the traits they are looking for in their ICP to filter down to companies that are great prospects worth pursuing.

Triggr has helped multiple clients build prospecting lists very quickly. This is an example of how a sales intelligence firm can help you quickly identify and pull this data.

Where Can You Find Firmographic Data?

There are a few methods to find firmographic data:

Online Search 

You can search information online such as financial results for a company, headquarter location, and general news about their trending growth via Google. The downfall to this approach is that it is extremely time-consuming and difficult to filter and consolidate the existing information.

Sales Intelligence Tools

There are many sales intelligence tools, such as Triggr, that allow salespeople and marketers to conduct targeted searches for a particular company to find firmographic, buying signals, and contact data.

Triggr provides real-time alerts on the back of new firmographic data appearing that is relevant to you. The benefit of this is that it is far less time-consuming and allows you to focus your efforts on selling.

Concluding Statement

 Firmographic market segmentation is critical for marketers since it allows them to better execute their marketing plans. You’ll undoubtedly find new advertising possibilities, more relevant messaging, and a higher return on investment by classifying prospects based on similar variables.

The more intimate you get with a prospect, the more personalized the value proposition you can deliver, and the greater your chances of it resonating and resulting in the intended behavior.

Author: Thomas Rielly 

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasrielly/

Bio

Founder of Triggr. Triggr is a sales intelligence platform that enables B2B organizations to close more deals by leveraging real-time public intent data to uncover intent.

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