How to use firmographic data to supercharge your growth strategy

Why firmographic data is essential for your growth strategy

How can any business hope to grow if it doesn’t know its customers?

Success in personalization and effective data-led sales and marketing hinges on one thing: a deep understanding of your customers.

Being sure of your firmographic data sets you up for growth – you’ll be laser focused on your customer at every point of the journey.

A data-led approach can easily crumble if not built on solid ground

It’s all well and good having a million data points, but if the foundations of that data aren’t solid, your sales and marketing strategy could tumble down rather than reach high.

Many businesses jump in right at the end of the process – replicating competitor content with good vanity metrics such as impressions and likes. But that approach is not going to give you a competitive advantage, and it’s not going to be an efficient way to spend your marketing budget either.

Other businesses gather so much data that they struggle to make any sense of it or know what’s reliable and what’s not.

Ian Green, Head of Sales at RoyaltyRange, says: “All sales and marketing teams want a 360-degree view of their ideal customers, but if you’re looking at so much data you can’t see the forest for the trees, or if you simply don’t know if you can trust your data, then you need to go back to the beginning and build your 360-degree view from the ground up. You start with the foundations: what you 100% know about the potential customers you need to target.”

“That’s what makes the RoyaltyRange database such a powerful tool. You can use intuitive tools to filter down to the company intelligence you need to generate the highest quality leads and market to them effectively.”

Find out more about the RoyaltyRange company financials database for sales and marketing professionals here – or keep reading to learn more about firmographic data and how it can drive your growth strategy.

What is firmographic data?

“Only 14% of organizations have achieved a 360-degree view of the customer”, according to a survey by Gartner Inc.

A true 360-degree view of your customer starts with accurate firmographic data. Firmographic data refers to putting in place integral insights and truths about your target customers – truths you can then build on top of.

If you’re trying to find leads with a high probability of becoming customers, it’s crucial to be able to identify reliable data points such as company name, industry, structure, financial data such as turnover, number of FTEs, ownership, organizational structure and job roles.

Once you’ve got a sound foundation, you can start to add other data, such as behavioral data, on top to achieve a true 360-degree view you know you can trust.

Why is foundational strategy so important for growth?

Digitalization alone isn’t enough

Without the right data foundation, no amount of tech and digital strategy will enable you to achieve your potential. “The success of a digital transformation relies on the success of the data transformation,” writes Janet Balis in Harvard Business Review. “Marketers should be keenly focused on the right sources of quality data fueling the engine.”

Personalization isn’t possible without the right data in place

The three cornerstones of effective content are: relevance, quality and quantity. The first of these – relevance – is fundamental to any personalization strategy (or even just effective marketing, for that matter). The old cliche is a cliche for a reason: you need to reach the right people with the right content on the right channels at the right times. And to do that you need a solid data foundation.

It’s more expensive when you don’t have the right data

Sure, getting access to the right data is an investment, but everything you do afterwards is more targeted and more likely to achieve your goals. Without it, you can risk spending on a scattergun approach that won’t get you anywhere.

Laser focus for your whole organization

With the right base in place, you’re putting yourself in the ideal position to scale and automate as you add tech into the mix – driving growth and focusing your whole company’s efforts on the one thing that really matters: your customer.

How can you put in place your data foundation?

Step 1: Use data to identify potential customers

Analyze your existing customers, your competitors’ customers and those in new markets you want to move into, and create profiles or personas for your ideal target customers.

Step 2: Use data to identify high-quality leads

Now you need to find real-life customers that fit these profiles. To do this, you need access to trusted data and be able to navigate it to curate lists of high-quality leads.

Step 3: Use data to improve your marketing campaigns

As well as identifying your target customers, you can use the data to derive actionable insights on how to market to them through your activity on paid, owned and earned channels.

Step 4: Use data to improve the customer experience and encourage loyalty

Genuine familiarity breeds loyalty. When you’re really talking to your customer about the things that matter to them, at the right times and on the right channels, you’ll find they become truly engaged and keep coming back.

Get started with your own reliable firmographic data

Tax authorities, international consulting companies and multinational enterprises across over 70 countries use RoyaltyRange databases and tools. Experts and professionals have trusted and relied on our database for years for transfer pricing, royalty pricing and setting loan interest rates – and now it’s available for sales and marketing teams too.

With our database and suite of tools, you can access the premium data you need to identify sales opportunities and put together marketing and personalization strategies built on solid foundations. Get rich data, including size, industry, region, FTEs, revenue, inventories and profits, for over 85 million companies and apply 60+ filters to create custom lists.

Best of all, it’s intuitive and flexible, and simple to get started. You can request a one-off database lead search for your needs, or you can choose from a range of subscription packages and benefit from full access to our premium tools and databases.

Learn more about how our company database can improve your sales, marketing and growth strategies, or arrange a free demo at a time to suit you.

Explore more resources and read more insights here.

Sources:

Gartner Marketing Survey Finds Only 14% of Organizations Have Achieved a 360-Degree View of their Customer

5 Ways Marketing Leaders Can Drive More Value in 2022