How can enterprises use firmographic data?

Accurate firmographic data on businesses drives better results for enterprises

You might already be familiar with demographic data – data that is based on individuals. Demographic assets can be very beneficial to a business.

Examples of these assets include purchasing preferences and contact names for potential customers and current users. This data can help drive various marketing campaigns and sales approaches. 

Firmographic data is similar to demographic data. However, it focuses instead on company data. It goes into depth with data about organizations and businesses.

Our Markaaz firmographic data Directory features over 300 million global businesses, 98% of which are small businesses. With our data, your business can boost its small business onboarding and monitoring rates.

Firmographic data is collected and analyzed to understand how enterprises operate. It can help your enterprise reduce risk, increase profit margins, and provide better services to your target market. We will discuss this in this article. 

What is firmographic data? 

There are many types of firmographic data available. Data fields range from information about a company's industry to how much growth is expected and where its headquarters are located. Below is a list of many of the commonly used types of firmographic data: 

• Growth trends – Learn whether a customer business is maintaining growth, downsizing, or growing based on market position with growth trends. Each metric is helpful, but different approaches are needed for each. 
• Industry type – Whether professional, legal, financial, or logistics, it is essential to understand the industry vertical. Remember that some companies will have more than one vertical, which may make them comparable with customers in various segments. 
• Ownership framework – Knowing whether an organization is an NGO charity, a nonprofit, a private enterprise, or a public business gives you insight into what market approach is needed. 
• Organizational size – The company's size, including staff and physical location, can be helpful to be aware of. 
• Current location – Knowing where the business headquarters are and where other offices are can help meet customers' needs. 
• Revenue and sales – Annual and quarterly sales information is helpful. These can be used for sales strategies, with quarterly data giving insight into current needs. 

The importance of firmographic data  

There are several reasons for enterprises to pay attention to firmographic data. Firmographic data is used to make observations about a company. These observations can be turned into practical actions.

For example, you can review the firmographic data of companies you want to onboard. This will help to verify they are a strong business with the potential to pay for and use your services.

When your onboarding teams, monitoring teams, or executives access firmographic data, it is easy to classify customers.

The classification can be based on growth trajectory, revenue, location, size, or other factors. There's no need to go in and organize these things specifically before moving forward with a decision. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, all customers are known and sorted. The data fields and alerts are tailored to meet the business's unique needs. 

Below are several benefits available for businesses that use firmographic data. 

Customer onboarding 

One of the most common reasons to delve into firmographic data is customer segmentation. Data about a customer company can be used to:

1. Retain customers

2. Improve products and services

3. Create better customer success processes

4. Accelerate the adoption of clients and customers.

This all plays into the onboarding process and ensures every customer has what they need when accessing your brand's services. 

User segmentation is all about grouping customers based on different factors. Examples of these factors include uncompleted goals in the customer journey, product usage, session duration, and NPS scores. Segmentation allows you to understand better customers to tailor your products and services to appeal to them. 

There are many benefits to using firmographic data for user segmentation. For instance, it can boost the loyalty of current customers and help you retain them for a longer period. Businesses can choose from types of segmentation based on need, with options like behavioral, technographic, geographic, demographic, or firmographic. 

You can introduce a personalized onboarding experience for every customer using firmographic data. Segmenting users into groups lets you boost product engagement while improving the use of features and the adoption of your product. Personalization focuses on showing relevant features to customers to be more engaging. 

For example, you could have a segment of your small business customers brought in through welcome screen surveys. All customers in this segment have answered a specific question in a certain way. If there's an important product feature that will be useful to them, personalized onboarding can provide information about it.

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Business verification 

Business verification is essential for any enterprise that works with other companies. It reduces financial risk and fraud while ensuring a business complies with important rules and regulations.

Compliance and risk officers will have many uses for business verification details in firmographic data. Compliance teams can use it to ensure they know essential data about their customers and clients. Risk officers can use it to onboard and validate additional prospects. 

While it's possible to manually dig deep into every company to find important details, it can be highly time-consuming, and expensive. Many providers offer firmographic data which will meet your needs. A few of the things provided include: 

• Verification of business identity 
• Fraud detection 
• Verification of tax ID 
• Regulatory compliance information 
• Due diligence 
• Data used for risk assessment decisions 

Due diligence is essential for any business to succeed by onboarding the right companies as clients. Having an easy source of firmographic data is a great place to start. You can easily confirm who your customers are through various types of data on your target business profiles in any industry. The verified data comes from trusted places, so you can feel secure when creating a new business relationship. 

Business activity monitoring 

According to Gartner, business activity monitoring is "the processes and technologies that enhance situation awareness and enable an analysis of critical business performance indicators based on real-time data."

Business activity monitoring is used to improve the effectiveness and speed of company operations. It does this by constantly being aware of what is occurring within a business and knowing when issues crop up.  

If you're already making use of firmographic data for other reasons. It can also play into your business activity monitoring process. Not only can you log into a dashboard and get data about your business, but you can also find out about potential and current customers and how their businesses are running.  

The reason business activity monitoring is so crucial comes down to it being available in real time. Unlike other standard reporting tools, this type of monitoring is always up to date. Instead of looking at things monthly, on Markaaz's Business Activity Monitoring service, you can immediately access information updates about a company and its situation. 

Consider upselling or cross-selling for an example of how business activity monitoring can enhance your business. When you have information about a company, its challenges, and its goals, you can activate your sales team with proof-point and can offer solutions. 

Final thoughts 

Having access to firmographic data is critical for marketing and sales. It offers a way to build personalized content for customers of all types. This data can be found and compiled manually. However, it is easier to work with a company that stores it, always makes it available, and provides relevant data alerts.  

Markaaz helps you access the data you need and can give you a better understanding of how to improve the customer onboarding experience. Contact us today if you're ready to learn more about how firmographic data can help your brand. We can answer your questions, set you up and get you ready with all the data you want.