What Are Firmographics?
TL;DR
Firmographics are the attributes that describe a company rather than a person: industry, employee headcount, annual revenue, location, ownership structure and number of sites. They are the account-level equivalent of demographics, and most B2B targeting filters are built from them.
What counts as a firmographic attribute?
Industry classification, most often a SIC or NAICS code. Employee headcount, usually expressed as a band rather than an exact number. Revenue band. Location, from country down to postcode. Ownership and structure: public or private, independent or a subsidiary, single site or multi-site. Age of the company, and funding stage where it applies.
What links them is that each is a property of the legal entity and each is queryable. A company can only sit in one headcount band at a time, so every firmographic filter you add shrinks the matching set in a way you can predict.
How are firmographics used in targeting?
They define the account list, which is the first half of any outbound programme. An ideal customer profile is written in firmographic terms precisely so that it can be entered as filters: industry, headcount band and location together usually cut a database down to a workable segment before any person-level filter is applied.
They also change the message rather than only the list. Headcount decides who holds buying authority, ownership structure decides whether the site you contact can buy at all, and location decides which regulations and which language apply, so the same offer needs different framing across bands.
Where do firmographic attributes come from?
Public registries and regulatory filings supply the structural fields, company websites and press supply location and positioning, and headcount is inferred from public professional profiles as often as it is reported. Revenue is the least reliable field for private companies, because in most jurisdictions they never publish it.
That difference in provenance is worth knowing when a filter behaves oddly. Industry and location are recorded facts, while revenue and headcount for a private company are estimates, so treating all four as equally precise leads to segments that look tighter than they are.
Frequently asked questions
Demographics describe a person: age, gender, education, income. Firmographics describe an organisation: industry, headcount, revenue, location. B2B targeting needs both, because the firmographics choose the account and the demographics and job attributes choose who inside it receives the message.