Guide to firmographic data is known to be among the most important resources for strategical business decisions. Companies collect, analyze, and utilize many different types of data both as a matter of daily operations and in order to gain knowledge that would highlight the best path to take moving forward. One such type of data is firmographic data. It is the kind of information that allows categorizing firms by specific characteristics.
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Placing the businesses
When we want to know the characteristics of a particular society, understand what kinds of people make it up and how society could be segmented and categorized, we use demographic data. Firmographic data, or guide to firmographic data, is considered to be to firms what demographic data is to people. In this context, firms can be anything from businesses of all sizes to non-profit organizations and government bodies.
Leaving the other types of firms aside, let us look at the guide to firmographic data as it relates to businesses. Firmographics include but are not limited to the following information.
- The number of employees.
- Geographic location or locations. The number of these locations. Location of the headquarters.
- Age of the firm that is, how long has it been in business.
- Financial data, like annual revenue, credit rating.
- Who are the firm’s customers? Are they other businesses, private persons, the government?
- Growth trends, meaning whether the company is growing, stable or declining.
These are the examples of the most informative categories of firmographic data. But any data that helps to place the company on the map of the industry is likely to be considered firmographics. The data that is not firmographic is for example, the name of the CEO or the name of the company website, as it does not tell anything about how the company measures against other firms.
The revealing power of firmographics
So, firmographic data helps to categorize companies by different criteria and chart and segment the market in various ways. But what is the point of it?
That answer is that there are many important ways to use such data, and categorizations made possible by it. Here are a few examples of what firmographic data might reveal.
- The location of the company will also tell you the time zone in which it lives. This may allow inferring approximate office hours, which would mean knowing when to expect responses from the company and when it is possible to have real-time contact if needed.
- Whether the company is growing or declining is important not only to potential investors but to salespeople. The needs of the company and its capacity to buy is understood better by analyzing this data.
- Knowing who are the company’s customers will tell something about its marketing strategies. There would be nuances or even major differences in how the company markets depending on whether its clients are other businesses or private persons. If your product or service is aimed at helping them in marketing or customer support, it would be essential to understand who the customers are.
These are just some cases displaying how firmographics reveal important things about companies. But the importance of such information for companies and investors goes way beyond that.
Better-informed targeting and customer support
The benefits of firmographic data for lead generation and lead nurturing are hard to overstate. Firstly, such data helps to identify the potential customers and target them instead of losing time on companies that are unlikely to be or even could not possibly be your clients.
Additionally, knowing such specific information about the company assists in preparing a better approach and the entire strategy of communication. Firmographic data will also help to score the leads more accurately, allowing to spend more time on the companies that are more likely to make a deal or to make more valuable deals. Finally, knowing more about your customer means better understanding of what exactly they need, leading to better customer support and higher chance of making the beneficial relationship last.
Data for improved understanding of the markets
Firmographic data is as important to investors as it is to marketers and salespeople. This type of data is an essential part of investment intelligence.
Such data allows to segment and understand markets better and provides valuable insight into where exactly a particular company stands in the market and what are its future prospects. Investors then are better able to determine where the opportunities lie.
Knowing what we are dealing with
When we belong to a society, we want to know who else belongs to it, what kind of people live among us. For this, we seek out demographic information. Similarly, when we are doing business, we are interested in what companies comprise the business world around us. For this, we have firmographic data. It is the data that we need to understand what exactly we are dealing with when we seek to make business deals.