Using Firmographics to Improve the Quality of Your Leads
There’s no doubt that when it comes to the success of any business, generating the best possible leads is paramount. However, according to BrightTALK, 80 percent of marketers say their lead generation efforts are only slightly or somewhat effective.
Ensuring that your leads are of the highest possible quality is clearly important – and is a big priority for most businesses, as is shown in the chart from Ascend2 below. Getting hold of names and contact details isn’t always enough; you need to have an in-depth understanding of your potential customers in order to seek out the best contacts, and to target them in the right way – and this is where firmographics come in.
Source: Ascend2 2016 State of Lead Generation Survey
What are Firmographics?
In simple terms, firmographics are basically demographics for businesses. They are a collection of attributes that each business has that can be used to determine a target market. For example, they can tell you where in the world your best customers are based, and which industry they are in. When you have this data at hand you can use it to find the most suitable leads for your business, and also improve your marketing strategy to better engage them.
Types of Firmographic
Industry
This is one of the most obvious and logical forms of segmentation due to the fact that the large majority of businesses will be limited to certain industries. Having said that, it is always worth monitoring your sales metrics in order to look out for any hidden markets that your company has acquired organically – you can then make sure to actively target those industries in your next marketing campaign.
Location
Where your customers are based is another important form of segmentation. This can be narrowed down to the city or state, or be as wide as a country or continent. Knowing this detail will enable you to determine where to focus the majority of your marketing efforts, or could potentially signify that you need to up your game in certain geographical areas.
Obviously where your own company is based will play a role in the places you want to target – remember to be realistic when it comes to the logistics of actually serving customers; can you get your products out to them? Are there any legal or cost constraints in dealing with businesses further afield?
Size
There are several factors to look at when it comes to determining the size of your customers’ businesses. Firstly, there’s the number of employees the company has; are the majority of your customers start-ups with only a few members of staff, or huge enterprises with thousands? You could also look at the number of locations that the business has, as well as the number of clients. Knowing what size businesses are most attracted to your offerings will mean you are better placed to seek out those of a similar nature.
Annual Revenue
Looking at the financials of your current customers can prove useful when it comes to determining the types of businesses that you are attracting. For example, just because your product or service is competitively priced does not necessarily mean that your core customer base will be those on the lower end of the revenue scale; you could be seeing a lot of business from large enterprises who are trying to cut costs.
Using annual revenue in order to segment your customers is also useful when it comes to qualifying leads. You don’t want to waste your precious time and resources by targeting businesses that can’t afford what you’re offering, so knowing the wealth of your average customer can help you weed out those contacts, allowing you to focus instead on those who are more likely to make a purchase.
Other possible variants when it comes to financial firmographics can include:
- Business credit score – Do you want to target only those with perfect/good credit ratings?
- Their profits and losses – Does the company look stable? Is their business growing?
- Order amount – How much do your average, as well as your ideal, customers spend on your products/services?
Executive Title
Knowing which titles usually purchase your products or services is important as it not only tells you who is most likely to need what you’re offering, but it also means that when it comes to generating leads you’ll have a good idea of the types of people who are equipped with the authority to make purchasing decisions for their companies. Bearing this in mind will help you find the right contacts and ultimately avoid wasted time coming up against gatekeepers.
Sales Cycle
It may seem a little more complicated than some of the other factors, but understanding your customers’ average sales cycle can be a huge benefit. Once you’re armed with this information you’ll be less likely to waste time on trying to sell to customers who have no intention of ever making a purchase, or avoiding missing out on potential sales by giving up on a cautious lead too soon.
Other variables you might want to consider in order to get a clearer picture of your customers:
- Use of technology – How hi-tech is their business?
- Busiest time of year – Is their business seasonal? When is their highest demand for your products/services?
- Who are their customers? – Are they selling to businesses, consumers or government bodies?
- Age – How many years have they been trading?
- Structure – Are they a corporation, partnership, public company etc.
Why Use Firmographics?
So what are the benefits of utilizing firmographics in your business’ marketing strategy? There are several reasons why it’s a great idea, including:
- Low cost – Because implementing firmographics into your strategy is relatively low cost, you can enjoy a better ROI.
- Develop products around customers – Knowing exactly what your clients need means you can tweak your existing products or services to suit them better, or come up with entirely new offerings altogether.
- Engage customers better – Once you have a stronger understanding of exactly who your customers are, you can alter your marketing messages accordingly, in a way that is much more likely to gain their attention and their confidence.
- Save time – Although it can take a little time in the beginning in order to analyse your metrics, in the long run using firmographics will allow you to focus your time and efforts on better leads, meaning a lot less time gets wasted chasing those that are unlikely to ever become fruitful.
- Buy contact lists – When you have a clear understanding of who your customers are, you can purchase lists of potential leads. Provided you choose a company intelligence provider that offers a range of filters to search their database, you will be able to gain a collection of your ideal target customers.
Using Firmographics
The infographic below by EMedia shows the barriers to lead generation currently faced by businesses. Clearly understanding potential customers and getting hold of relevant contact lists are challenges for many businesses – thankfully both of these can become much easier by implementing the use of firmographics.
Source: EMedia’s B2B Lead Generation Trends Report
Targeting Customers
Firmographics are ideal when it comes to both finding and reaching out to new leads. Once you’ve gathered enough information about the types of customers you want to target you can create lists of contacts using company intelligence providers. This saves you valuable time as it negates the need to research individual companies, and also means that you can
When your list is ready you can then set up your marketing campaigns, whether it be email, calling, or direct mail. Given that you’ll already have background knowledge about each company, you’ll have a better idea of how to engage them, and you can tailor your messages accordingly. narrow your search down to the most relevant leads in a quick and simple process.
Retaining Customers
Many b2b companies fail to take the time to delve deeper into the make up of their customers, despite the advantages that doing so holds. Having a clear understanding of the types of businesses that are buying from you not only means that you’ll know who to target in the future, it also allows you to predict their buying patterns. For example, you can suggest other products that may be suitable for certain customers, depending on what similar companies have purchased.
Ready to Find Your Ideal Customers?
At Global Database our innovative platform provides company information across 32 industry verticals in 195 countries worldwide. With our constantly-updated database you can quickly and easily find contact details, company summaries and financial information, enabling you to efficiently build complete lists from scratch.
What’s more, our users can filter the database using factors such as company location, employee size, sales volumes, industry and executive title. This ensures that you are always able to find the most relevant businesses depending on your firmographic research, as well as enabling you to avoid gatekeepers and get straight through to key decision markers.
Our commitment to data accuracy means that all email addresses are validated on a 30 day basis, and we also have a team of 100 in-house staff to manually check all of our entries for errors and updates. As a result, we have an extremely impressive accuracy level of 93 percent – one of the highest in the industry.
Want to find out why we are trusted by thousands of market-leading companies including Microsoft, Avaya, Cisco, KPMG, Maserati and DHL? Click here to get started…
This article was submitted by globaldatabase.com
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