firmographic data

Firmographic data is types of information that can be used to categorize organizations, such as geographic area, number of clients, type of organization, industry, technologies used and so on.

The data is used to segment organizations into meaningful categories. Designations of public or private corporation, non-profit or charity, for example, are relevant firmographic data but data specific to a given organization, such as name, address or CEO are not. Applications of firmographics include industry and market studies, business-to-business (B2B) marketing and competitive intelligence (CI).

Here are a few examples of firmographic categories:

• Performance, which might be further categorized according to annual revenue and average sales cycle.
• Size, which could be broken down into numbers of employees and locations.
• Ownership, broken down as public, private, government or cooperative.
• Trends, segmented as growing, declining or stable.

Firmographics is the corporate equivalent of Demographics, the statistical study of groups of human beings. Other terms for firmographics include firm demographics and emporographics.