B2B Company Data
What is Company Data?
B2B contacts are crucial for effective marketing strategies, yet maintaining a database with sufficient scale is increasingly challenging due to the growing volume of available information. Investing in a sales contact database offers a quick, cost-effective solution to access essential information about potential clients.
Remote marketing to other businesses, primarily via phone or email, relies heavily on B2B contact data to establish initial contact with target companies. This data also enhances segmentation efforts, allowing for tailored marketing campaigns such as email marketing or cold calling.
Company Data Explained
Key Attributes of Company Data
The key attributes of company data can be divided into firmographic and technographic-based data. Depending on what type of information about a company you require, you will rely more on one or the other of these two. With the use of these two types of data you can build an extensive company contact database of those companies most suited to fulfilling your company’s needs.
Firmographic Attributes
Firmographic data is data specific to an organisation. Just as demographic data focuses on individuals, firmographic data focuses on the organisation. B2B businesses can use firmographic data to help with market segmentation by using variables to categorise firms. Firmographic data can tell us which industry an organisation fits in to or its location, for example. Company Name and Address.
The most basic data on a company you could have! It goes without saying that you need to know the name of the company you’re engaging with. Along with that, it’s helpful to have the address of the head office of the company, as well as the addresses of their branches in any countries you’re interested in. By having access to a company’s address or addresses, you can make informed assumptions about their behaviours, whether they be influenced by the geography, climate or regulations of the area.
Industry
When using firmographic segmentation to categorise firms, firms can be attributed an industry label. This indicates the firm’s primary activities, whether that be the type of services they offer or the products that they produce. When trying to target a particular firm it is crucial that you take into account which industry they operate in. For example, a company that operates in the environmental sector is unlikely to be seeking the same resources as a company that operates in the high-street fashion industry. Not only is it important to take industry labels into account to ensure the appropriate resources are delivered to those firms, but also to help you to sift out those firms that are not involved in the particular industry you are looking to work with. For this reason, it’s a good idea to include industry in your B2B ICP before you make a data purchase. There’s no point investing in an IT company database if you’re targeting retailers!
Company Size & Revenue
Company size is typically divided into two attributes: annual revenue and number of employees.
A company’s revenue is a key consideration in firmographic segmentation. It is little use targeting a company that doesn’t have the funds to afford what you’re offering. For this reason, it’s good to build a customer ICP so you know what kind of company you’re looking to prospect with data-driven outreach. If it’s large companies and enterprises, you’ll need to buy corporate data. If your ICP is a start-up or SME, you can buy start-up company data.
Taking into consideration factors such as whether a company has experienced considerable fluctuations is their revenue over the years or where they fall in terms of being a small start-up or whether they’re listed on the FTSE 100 helps you adapt your B2B marketing strategies. A company revenue database gives you a comprehensive source of truth for revenue and how it’s fluctuating, which is why revenue data is such an important company data attribute.
Having data indicating the number of employees a company has is one of the most helpful pieces of firmographic data you can have. The number of employees indicates whether they’re a small start-up, medium sized company, or even a large multinational company. Ultimately, these numbers will greatly influence how you go about targeting these companies. The way you would approach a small, local business is completely different to how you would a large business with bases in multiple countries.
Technographic Attributes
Technology Stack
Having access to data on a company’s current technology stack allows you to build up a profile of that company and how they operate. You should also expect to be presented with when these technologies were acquired, helping to form a timeline for this profile. When it comes to technographic segmentation, there is often an element of assumption: a company may rely on a certain software, leading you to draw conclusions about the company’s operational methods. These conclusions, however, are more often that not, very accurate if you have an understanding of either the technologies used or an understanding of how companies of that size or in that industry generally operate.
Online Presence and Social Profiles
Almost every company nowadays dedicates time to maintaining its public presence through blogs and various social media profiles. Company data effortlessly collects and summarises information from these platforms for you. As well as this, it can offer an insight into how a company behaves online, including specific social media posts, job postings, and online searches.
This information can add context into how the company functions and wishes to present itself. Collecting information from social media profiles or blogs is reasonably easy to do and, as companies turn to these platforms more and more, they present an increasingly relevant source of information about a company and its behaviours.
Intent Data Attributes
Buying Signals
In-depth company data may include information on the company’s more recent acquisitions and services the company has recently stopped using. It could also even contain information on what the company has been searching for online or on comparison sites.
Sources and collection methods of Company Data
Because it incorporates many overlapping data types, it’s difficult to get all company data from one place. Indeed, most company datasets are compiled from many sources. These include whitepapers, company registries, company social media posts, company webpage source codes, and phone calls.
