Winning over B2B prospects is something even the most sophisticated marketing teams with the deepest tech stacks still struggle with.
These days, every company is dealing with unique decision-makers, purchasing processes, and budgets. The more marketing and sales teams understand about their target accounts, the more successful they'll be in capturing their attention – and eventually converting them to a customer.
An essential starting point for insights into a prospective client account is basic firmographic data.
What Are Firmographics?
Firmographics are a set of company characteristics grouped together to form market segments. In the same way that demographics are used to segment people into target audiences, firmographics provide deeper insights that B2B marketing teams can leverage to target accounts that will benefit the most from their products or services.
These characteristics include:
- Industry: Activity of the company, usually identified by NAICS or SIC codes.
- Status or Structure: The relation of one company to another, or legal status.
- Company size: The number of employees or annual revenue.
- Location: The region or regions the company works in.
- Performance: This refers to how the company is doing over time and can include: average annual revenue, profit growth or losses, and average sales cycle length.
This type of company information is often publicly available and can be purchased from data companies. Data companies gather this information by scraping through websites, tax statements, social media platforms, and other sources.
Why is Firmographic Data Important?
Firmographic data is used by marketing and sales teams to segment prospective customers into different groups. It allows companies to gain valuable insight about potential B2B clients. With a better picture of who they’re engaging with, these teams can:
- Lower marketing costs by reducing unnecessary outreach to accounts that don’t fit their ideal customer profile (ICP)
- Boost return on investment (ROI)
- Identify new opportunities
- Improve marketing segmentation and messaging
How to Use Firmographic Data
Firmographic data is crucial for the initial stages of customer segmentation. The first step is to establish the right ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). An Ideal Customer Profile is comprised of basic firmographic data that defines future ideal customers.
Nailing your target account list means ensuring your firmographic data is accurate and up-to-date. Luckily, today's leading marketing and sales teams understand this, and as a result, have established workflows that support this goal.
Once teams have created their target account list and confirmed that their prospect data is accurate, they can segment that list. With these filters and segments in place, teams are empowered to create more targeted campaigns with personalized messaging. What’s more, they can separate out accounts determined to not be a good fit.
Limitations of Firmographic Data
Firmographic data is important for segmentation, but it can't be used on its own.
The static nature can only get marketers and sales representatives so far. Ultimately, they’ll need additional context to enrich their personalization efforts.
Firmographic data doesn’t give you the full picture of a company’s needs, wants, buying behavior – and in today’s business environment –
cloud wallet data. Without this information, go-to-market teams might find themselves promoting ads with irrelevant messaging or making cold calls blindly.
Using Firmographic Data In Your ABM Strategy
Firmographic data is often the first of many steps toward building the right target lists for your account based marketing programs. But it's only one of many data types that will make your account based marketing succeed.
When used alongside behavioral, technographic and contextual data, firmographic data can foster deep account-based intelligence. Your sales and marketing teams will be better equipped to identify a prospect’s needs and likelihood to buy – and can then begin to implement the right strategies for winning ideal accounts.
Intricately provides firmographic data for millions of cloud companies, as well as cloud spending, product adoption, and usage intelligence.
Try Intricately for free to search for the firmographic data on any of your target accounts.
