Segmenting your target market using firmographics is nothing new — most marketers have been doing it for decades. But starting with companies that are in the right industry, revenue bracket, and employee count is even more critical in account-based marketing (ABM), where success hinges on launching precision marketing to the accounts that are most likely to come to your party and stay a while.
Terminus now automatically provides account-level firmographic data from our B2B Account Graph, so you can filter by industry, revenue range, and employee count, even when your CRM isn’t complete (or totally trustworthy).
We only append high-confidence data, and all of the data is housed directly in your Account Hub (read: it won’t override data in your CRM, for those of you with custom field values). This data is designed to help accelerate your ABM programs by reducing dependencies on internal data completion processes.
We’ve already walked through how firmographics can be used in determining your ideal customer profile, which is kind of like a buyer persona on a company level. But Terminus’ firmographics filters also make it easy to build a list of best-fit accounts and run targeted campaigns to them.
Regardless of whether your goal is to schedule demos, accelerate open deals, or expand penetration into your existing customer base, the key to ABM is targeting the right accounts at the right time. Firmographics data is the most basic way to do this — and with Terminus, it doesn’t require an outside data provider or even robust CRM data.
Let’s take a look at an example company and how they target, engage, and measure a campaign to best-fit customers that starts with basic firmographics.
Targeting the Right Accounts Using Firmographics
Shake It Off Tubs provides doggie bathtubs to pet grooming salons across the U.S. By using a combination of CRM data and feedback from sales and customer success, they’ve found that their product does best with larger grooming chains because the high volume of clients means repeat orders and expansion opportunities.
Shake It Off is a small operation located in Minnesota, but has had larger success selling to both coasts because there are more chains. Due to high internal shipping costs of their product, Shake It Off isn’t seeing the returns they’d like from that portion of their customer base. To help build their penetration at more local chains, the marketing team wants to run an acceleration campaign targeted specifically on Midwestern chains where sales has an open opportunity.
From their total addressable market of all grooming salons in the U.S., Shake It Off has drilled down to a specific list of eight large chains in the Midwest that have open opportunities. This not only enables them to get in front of their most ideal customers, but also reach those accounts with a very specific message — not to mention support the sales team in closing deals.
Engaging Those Segmented Accounts
To raise awareness, Shake It Off will run digital display ads and sponsored LinkedIn content through Terminus. Terminus allows Shake It Off to easily segment their CRM data by region, revenue range, and open opportunities, and even supplement missing or bad data for organizations with empty or incorrect fields. This gets Shake It Off down to that targeted list of eight companies.
Keeping in mind the ABM best practice of using a test and control group for campaigns, Shake It Off will also run tactics to all large companies with an open opportunity. Those in the Midwestern list will receive customized 1-to-1 ads and content, while those outside of the Midwest will receive a more general message.
Measuring Accounts with Firmographics
With their two lists built, Shake It Off’s marketing team can not only track digital ad engagement across the two segments through impressions and click through rate, but they can attribute all marketing and sales activities to actual revenue through metrics like average deal size, time to close, and percentage of opportunities closed won in each cohort.
And since the team is focused on accelerating open opportunities, they can compare the two segments to see if the 1-to-1 ads served to Midwestern accounts carried greater impact than the more general message sent to the rest of the target market.
Eventually, layering on data around buying intent, web engagement, and existing relationships (all available with Terminus and our partners, by the way) will be the next step for Shake It Off in building a scaled ABM strategy. But firmographics is an effective place to start.
To learn more about using firmographics to improve your account-based marketing (or to brainstorm other cute dog-related business names), schedule a Terminus demo today.
