Firmographic Data: Why and How You Should Use Firmographics In Your Outreach

For any organization to be successful, they need to understand the specific needs of its customers. And this is why most B2B marketing and sales teams are advised to focus on finding potential customers who need specific attention. There is something about being specific, and that's what firmographic data can help your organization to achieve.

Think of firmographic data as the B2B version of demographic data. Here, you look at company statistics such as industry, employee size, and annual revenue instead of personal information.

With firmographics, sales and marketing teams may now target specific markets and industries based on demographic, psychographic, or behavioral information and maximize their returns.

If you spend time pursuing prospects that are not convinced they need your products or services, you may be treading the path of wasteful resources, and you sure do not want that for your business or organization. So, how do you avoid treading such a path? It is pretty simple - using firmographic data.

While one of the biggest challenges in B2B sales is finding the right prospects, with firmographic data, you can analyze or check the company statistics instead of the personal information of your contact.

So, in this article, I take you through what firmographic data is all about, why you need it, and how you should use it in your outreach.

Let's dive right in,

Enjoy!

What is firmographic data?

Firmographic data are the information organizations use to segment prospects and their target market. These firmographic data can be in the form of company size, geographical location, number of employees and customers, types of organization, industry technology, and other companies involved in the marketing process and sales strategies.

This data ensures connection with leads, potential prospects, and your ideal customer profile. They can be collected from public sources such as annual reports, business directories, listings, buying a list, data intelligence tools, LinkedIn, press releases, and websites.

First, however, you need to select the most credible data source. For example, while business directories get updated infrequently, a Website and purchasing a list have the same risks of data inaccuracies.

Nevertheless, using a data intelligence tool is the quickest approach to acquiring current data. Examples of firmographic data include company sizes in industries, geographic locations, revenues, company tags, business classification, funding of companies, and technology tags. I will discuss these in detail in a later section of this article.

In B2B marketing, firmographic data is used to determine and differentiate your target audience from those not needing to be on your priority list.

Often, companies pay huge sums of money to uplead their sales funnel only to find that these leads are unqualified in the long run, negatively impacting your outreach campaign.

However, you can use firmographic data to prioritize and offer special attention to your top prospects as a sales rep. You can also build and personalize websites and other sales and marketing materials, establish your ideal consumer profile, and personalize emails. Further, you can leverage it to examine targeting and ad cost to gain insight into creating the best sales deal.

Why you should use firmographic data

When you segment your audience, it is considerably easier to provide relevant content that converts prospects into leads and leads into customers.

Employing firmographic data in your B2B marketing or sales team has several other advantages. And if for nothing at all but for the fact that you can use the firmographic data for business segmentation is more than enough reason to use this data point. So, if you are asking what filmography or firmographic segmentation means, now is the time to stay closer and read slowly as I explain in detail.

What is firmographic segmentation?

Firmographic data is the method of categorizing business-to-business customers using organization features or shared business. This method helps provide deeper firm insights by effectively advertising, direct marketing, and sales, resulting in better-targeted marketing campaigns.

Your team will be able to provide your prospects with key information about your service and tailor their sales pitches and marketing communications if they know their revenue, company size, locations, and other important details. Leveraging firmographic information will improve your ability to communicate with prospects and add value.

Benefits of firmographic segmentation

Firmographic data is mainly used to help businesses group potential B2B customers into useful segments.

Sales teams and marketers can save time and resources by accessing pre-segmented client data on each potential customer's size, geography, or revenue classification. Moving forward, I explain the benefits of adopting firmographic segmentation.

• **Access to demographic data and business ideas\

  **

Firmographics give factual information about the target company when combined with important messages. For example, Companies' locations, items sold, annual income, size, market share, and information about competitor brands are all made public. As a result, firmographic data may help you better understand specific industries and the marketplace.

• Customer retention

Business segmentation will help your company retain its customers. So, naturally, you will be able to advertise a firm more effectively the more you are aware of it. In addition, firmographic data helps in the delivery of top-notch customer service, which is essential for attracting and retaining customers where the company is located. It facilitates smooth communication.

And if you know what kind of businesses will use your product or service, you can predict their buying patterns. Then you can provide substitute alternatives that might take care of the needs of specific customers.

• **Saves time\

  **

In the long run, using firmographic segmentation will help you avoid wasting time on unproductive leads. Instead, you will focus more time and effort on more prospective clients, one business at a time, leading to more conversions.

• **Safety\

  **

Using firmographic data helps lower the risk of missing out on possibilities in your marketing and sales strategy. For instance, you can use this method to find potential leads and estimate the market size.

• **Minimize trends\

  **

By collecting and analyzing firmographic data, your company can spot data patterns that will help you develop a marketing plan that will ultimately boost your marketing and sales efforts.

• **Optimal resource distribution\

  **

By incorporating firmographics into your marketing plan, you can achieve your sales and marketing goals without spending much money. Companies need to spend their money on something other than trying to sell to a market that is likely to acquire their products.

Your sales and marketing efforts are targeted to only those customers who are most likely to be interested and have the financial capacity to make purchase graphic segmentation.

• **Increased ROI\

  **

Employing firmographics in your company will help you create a strong marketing strategy that supports your sales initiatives. As a result, your sales and revenue will inevitably increase.

How to use firmographic data

In an earlier section of this article, I gave several examples of key B2B firmographic data points. So, this section explains how you can use these firmographic data for B2B lead generation. But first, I give a list of these data points;

• Geographic location

• Company size

• Industry

• Annual revenue

• funding

• Company Type

• Business classification

• Company tags

• Technology tags

• **Geographic location\

  **

In geographic location data, you want to ensure your major priority is your target market. So, you narrow and filter your search to include only the address of your target audience. You do this to avoid unnecessary spending and to cut costs.

For instance, rather than waste money on ads, phone calls, emails, and outreach campaigns to the wrong audience, you can use such funds to cater to your specific audience if you have a sales rep in charge of the region where your lead may be resident.

You can also use geographic location data to help find time zones. For instance, your sales development representative (SDR) can send an automated email to prospects during business hours if you know their time zone. Additionally, the email copy can automatically change to recommend meeting hours based on your prospect's time zone, saving your SDR from having to suggest times that work for both parties manually.

• **Company size\

  
  **

The company size data gives information on the number of employees that works in a company. For example, as a salesperson, you can target businesses with the specific company size you need if you know how many employees each company has. Having this data will also help you personalize your website in such a way that only your specific number of target audiences will be automatically accessible to your specific Call To Action (CTA) button. In contrast, the non-target audience may be presented with the generic sign-up button.

• **Industry\

  
  **

Firmographic data on the industry allows you to personalize your website to include specific information for your target audience. For instance, if your prospect is in the banking and finance industry, when they visit your website, every piece of information they see will be related to their industry. At the same time, visitors from other industries will see information relating to their different niches.

• **Annual revenue\

  **

Like the data on a company's size, you can use the annual revenue data similarly. The revenue data serves as an indicator of potential transaction size and prospective match with product offerings that are related to company size. Using revenue data, you may categorize potential clients into small, medium, and big buckets and filter for overall company size. Following that, you may customize your messaging, route leads appropriately, score leads, and more.

• **Funding\

  
  **

Similar to the annual revenue data, you can use information about a company's funding for business segmentation, personalization, sales outreach, and predictive modeling.

• **Company tags\

  **

In traditional marketing, SIC, NAICS, and GICS industry features are used to identify a company's industry. But nowadays, a different variation of this, called "company tags," works a little better in modern digital marketing. Company tags are more specific and display the company's expertise or industry. Hence, you may need to employ business classifications.

• **Business classification\

  
  **

This data categorizes businesses on a high level, such as B2B, B2C, ISP, SAAS, E-commerce, enterprise, mobile and marketplace.

• **Company tags\

  **

These are a broad classification of firmographic data obtained by referencing other online data sources. And this data point is more specific and displays the company's industry.

• **Technology tags\

  
  **

This tag indicates data about what technologies a company uses for its sales platform so that a marketer can view the information. Although not all technologies can be detected, many are accessible for viewing. For instance, your sales representatives can check a prospective customer's tech tags while speaking with them during the buying process to determine whether they are currently using one of your competitors' goods. Then, they can use this information to customize their communications to customers' issues with that competitor while emphasizing all the advantages your product has over its competitors.

**Final notes
**

Since B2B organizations target other businesses as clients, not individuals making decisions on what to purchase for their use. Hence, personal information such as the prospect's age is not important. However, information such as the company's size, income, and industry is very important. Consequently, the need for firmographic data.

Further, segmenting and selecting qualified prospects becomes simple as you integrate firmographic data into your sales cycle. Besides, salespeople are better equipped to manage leads when firmographic data is available. For instance, you can evaluate a firm's purchasing power and preferences using data on the company's current position, size, and other firmographics. As a result, salespeople can create better engagement plans and proposals.

As a B2B marketer or salesperson, you must harness firmographic data to identify and differentiate your target audience from the pool of generic prospects. It would save you time and help you assess relevant information on your target organization, generate sales, and thus increase revenue.