Targeted Data Archives - whoiswhere

What is whoiswhere?

siteadmin — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 21:27:40 +0000

What is whoiswhere™?

Where Does whoiswhere™ B2B Data Come From?

If you believe that a business list can be solely originated from LinkedIn, I challenge you to rethink this assumption.

I bet you have been in touch with a new breed of young digital marketers who provide a service of searching LinkedIn and collecting details about people in your target market. Then offer you this b2b contact list as a list of sales leads.

While there is nothing wrong with this approach of building a list of your target market using one source, there is a sound reason why it’s not a solution for me, and possibly you, because:

Not every executive, every business owner, or every other significant market player has a LinkedIn profile. If you think people without a profile are an insignificant minority, in NZ and Australia we found that 40-50% of senior executives do not have a profile at all.
On top of this, many top execs and business owners of any size of business are too busy running their everyday life and business. So, they rarely visit LinkedIn, and often don’t update their profile when they are in between jobs. Sometimes for months or even years.

Of course, there are hundreds of people who keep their profiles up-to-date and are easy to connect with. Sadly, for B2B companies there often aren’t enough of these active profiles in their target market, especially in New Zealand where a lot of people are still getting accustomed to the use of LinkedIn.

When you are operating B2B sales team, you have to reach out to as many in your target market as possible. Often the market is quite small. It could be as little as 300 companies, 700 companies or just 1,000.

What do you think? I believe you can’t afford to miss 40% of businesses that could be perfect clients simply because they did not register on LinkedIn. Do you agree?

So where can you go for a list of quality b2b contact details?

You can go ahead and read all about the key New Zealand B2B data players in this complimentary report.

In this report, you will discover the pros and cons of different B2B data providers in New Zealand and the merits of investing in a database on oppose to the organic growth of your list. In the end, it will empower you to choose the best B2B data supplier for your needs.

This research is provided by whoiswhere™, New Zealand’s largest verified business database since 2005.

What is whoiswhere™?

whoiswhere™ is New Zealand’s leading B2B database with over 200,000 business locations nationwide. Every day we call 100s of businesses to meticulously check their information so you can focus on sales prospecting instead of worrying about who to contact.

Imagine having access to high-quality information about businesses based on commercial premises. You can use B2B data for research, sales and direct marketing purposes. It doesn’t matter if you have a product or service, as long as the end user is businesses.

whoiswhere™ offers the most verified B2B data set in NZ because our data is phone verified every 121 days. It allows you to understand your target market, save time searching for prospects and grow your business through effective Lead Generation. If you want to grow your B2B sales – just ask, because we have the experience and expertise to help right now.

Did you know that the companies in whoiswhere™ NZ represent 74% of businesses with more than 8 staff members nationwide, and 89% of companies’ 100+ staff?

That makes us the largest business list in New Zealand with companies’ 100+ staff.

Doing business with these larger companies is a real game changer for sales and marketing professionals like yourself.

Companies just like yours are already using whoiswhere™ to:

Identify the size of their target market
Increase the productivity of their sales teams by having access to accurate B2B data about their target market, with names of up to 5 key decision-makers
Easily segment and identify their target market
Contact the right people

Where Does whoiswhere™ NZ B2B Data Come From?

Do you know how many sales professionals today are walking the streets to pick up who is where and then come back to the office to research?

Well. I do hope these days there are fewer and fewer of them BUT for decades this was a top way to get contact data – “walk down the street” or “drive around”.

Personally, I think this is a low productivity task not worth of time of your well-paid sales professionals.

Is there an alternative?

The alternative seems pretty obvious – get someone else to gather and verify contact data and buy their list.

Back in 2005, a client of ours needed to send a direct mail campaign to companies with 20+ staff in the Wellington CBD. So off we went to a reputable supplier of B2B data at the time asking for a list of businesses with 20+ staff in Wellington CBD.

First, they said the minimum purchase is 1,000 records, which I thought was a good starter B2B contact database for our client. Then they said 1,000 records with 20+ staff would cover the entire Lower North Island, from Wellington all the way up to Taupo.

Oh?

And it also included every branch which had 20+staff in it. Needless to say, I was shocked.

Since there was no other option, we took the list of 1,000. After removing companies outside of the Wellington region we were left with only 500 prospects to work with. I thought it was better to have something than nothing, and if they’re the leaders in this field they must know what they’re doing. What a mistake that was!

The whole experience was really frustrating and disappointing for me. Because even though we purchased more data for b2b marketing, none of these lists had accurate data.

I went through a number of options trying to find B2B marketing data :

NZ Post and Yellow pages were not able to segment by number of staff
Google search was hugely time-consuming (and at the time not very effective)
Chamber of Commerce only has a list of members, which represents a somewhat random section of the business community, because membership was not widely ingrained in the business community
Other contact information suppliers either didn’t cover all industries or only concentrated on Auckland data

So that’s how in 2005 I made the decision to throw my hat into the ring and start our own in-house business dataset.

I decided that we can create an operation where someone would walk the streets, but just once. Then someone would research and make calls, just once to these businesses. So that many sales professionals could reap the rewards of these activities.

We decided we would do things differently from everyone else:

we would cover the entire market
we would cover every regional centre and small towns
we would start by walking down every street and writing down ‘who is where’
we would verify data on the phone three times a year
we would collect a wide range of company data
we will use the power of internet research to get more information
we will create new innovative campaigns to further sharpen target market selection where necessary

So that’s exactly what we did and that’s why our business data is called whoiswhere™.

Because it is, quite simply, who is where.

If you ask me again, where do we get our data? My answer is, off the street.

That is why we specialise in businesses based on commercial premises with a small exception of tradesmen and consultants who traditionally work from home. Yes, in doing so we do not have all NZ companies, but we sure have the bulk of those who are actively participating in the marketplace.

Since 2005 we grew and grew and now have over 200,000 businesses in whoiswhere™. There were heaps of lessons learned along the way and I might share some of them one day.

The two most important lessons are:

Lesson #1. Data is changing all the time and the next minute after it has been verified, there is a huge change. And it will change again! So, the only salvation really is to establish a robust process for data verification and stick to it.

Lesson #2. No amount of technology can fully accomplish data gathering and data verification as well as a human can. That’s why 17 years later we still walk the streets (not lately though for obvious reasons, but we will resume), make phone calls and use the internet as a source of data.

Talking about the internet, we know there is a growing number of people who do data collection online. Good luck, because the outcome of scraped data has three major faults:

According to our research up to 40% of New Zealand businesses (excluding start-ups and home-based businesses) do NOT have a website, i.e. their online presence is ZERO, so no one can scrape any data about them
Online B2B data accuracy is largely dependent on the company/human to update and record and format it correctly – the quality of this information is questionable in 37% of cases (our research confirms that)
Data formatting is a mission because there is no one standard for data recording

We continuously review our numbers against Statistics NZ and we learned to understand that when it comes to larger enterprises, we have the largest list compared to any other B2B data provider in NZ.

If you know of someone who has more verified B2B data, let me know.

Because yes, from time to time we get to work with B2B data from some of the world’s leading suppliers who claim they have a lot more top NZ companies. Guess what, we feel anyone claiming to provide more large companies than Stats NZ is reporting must be dreaming.

Would you agree?

That is why we often quiz people if they know how many companies’ 100+ staff there is in NZ.

Because it’s a little-known fact that there are just a bit over 2,500 companies with 100+ staff in NZ and after 200 we are going to see this figure drop by at least 10% according to our research.

Oops!

What is an unexpected piece of bad news for you is that there are only 2,500 or fewer companies with 100+ staff. It is what it is, the NZ market is small in numbers and we all have to live with it.

Sales and business are all about numbers. And we are passionate about knowing more about the numbers and how they define the NZ market.

Back to The Story

Street walking and calling on businesses is not for the faint-hearted.

Yet it has proven to be an excellent learning possibility for many.

Over the years we have had many people working with us as a stepping stone to returning back to employment or as a lifestyle choice because most of our team is working from the comfort of their homes. Engaging overseas callers has proven unfavourable by NZ businesses, so we only use mature NZ voices.

Of course, working from home became commonplace in 2020, but we’ve been doing this since 2005 and I believe this set-up positively contributed to many happy moments our people spent with their families instead of being stuck in some traffic.

Unlike many data companies, we at E-ideas Limited are a marketing and sales implementation company.

And in 2020 we launched a new service offering Smarketing to tie together our data and market knowledge with practical actions needed in today’s market to for B2B success.

That is why our view and understanding of data are very different from most.

I will be delighted to talk to you when you have a challenge making sense of your B2B target market, struggle with your own old list or even if you are just starting in business and need a bit of guidance. Just get in touch or ask questions in the comments below.

Our team knows a lot about NZ businesses and over time we’ve developed many robust solutions based on our observations about the key needs many businesses crave.

Are you ready to learn how to set your B2B operation up for greater success and growth? We can definitely help you to create your own B2B blueprint for success.

Book time with me today.

To enjoy a better tomorrow and be amongst our clients, some of which experienced the best year in business in 2021, some grew up to 90% and some had their best month in 2021.

👉Discover what 1% of successful B2B companies do differently and so can you.

It’s absolutely free and will show how to save thousands of hours and dollars to grow your B2B company.

The post What is whoiswhere? appeared first on whoiswhere.

Your Ultimate Guide to Sizing the Market

Assia Salikhova — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 01:45:44 +0000

Your Ultimate Guide to Sizing the Market

Pop Quiz! Which one do you agree with most about sizing the target market??

You only need to estimate the size of your target market when you are starting out in business.
The size of the target market does not matter because we are so good that business keeps coming to us through word of mouth.
Knowing the size of your target market is essential for every business. You have to review your understanding of your target market at least once every few years.

If you agree with the first or the second statement you have a fixed mindset fuelled by the illusion that nothing changes and the market is the same as when you started in business. You would believe me when I say 2020 is different from 2019, yet may struggle to see the difference from the year you started in business.

If you agree with the first or the second statement and feel that after 10, 20, 50 or 70 years in business you no longer need to understand the size of your target market, then you are not alone.

You belong to the vast majority of business owners who are focused on the sole task of running a business day to day.

You are lucky, because you keep getting business without even knowing how large your target market really is.

If you think for a moment that this is just a New Zealand thing, think again. The world is full of businesses like yours, who would agree with one of these two first statements.

Why Does Knowing the Size of the Market Matter?

If you agree with the third statement, you have a growth mindset – well done!

By agreeing with the third statement, you are likely to have the desire to grow your business, and it’s likely that you’ve read a fair few business books.

Which ones?

Any. There must be hundreds of business books out there that say you have to understand your target market and have a fair idea about its size. This allows you to create better sales and marketing strategies and have a more realistic financial projection.

I treasure every connection with a person who has read these books and knows this fundamental of business. In over 20 years on New Zealand market, I’ve learnt that these people are far and few in between.

Wouldn’t you agree?

Do you feel that most business owners have read this in a book, or learnt it at University, or at some stage of their career?

I used to think this back in 2005 when we made the life changing decision to redirect the focus of our Art Studio to develop New Zealand’s largest business database. This would allow us, our clients, and anyone who needs it, to discover the size of the market available, and consequently how large their target market could be.

We thought we were building a tool for every B2B business. But it turned out that the fundamental idea about the value of knowing the size of one’s targets market, requires a lot more education.

Let me share a real-life story first, which happens more often than you might think – with some variations.

Imagine you have a product or service that is so specific, that there are only 10 companies in the whole country who you can target.

When you are not aware about the size of the market, then you will likely waste time and money by:

Printing 1000s of promotional material,
Hiring a team of sales professionals,
Arranging a call centre to set appointments,
Planning a Direct Marketing campaign,
Etc

When you are aware that there are only 10 companies that can ever possibly buy from you and that you have competition on top of that, you will conserve a lot of time, energy and money by acting smarter:

Reviewing your financial projections to understand if your business can survive if only one out of those 10 companies will buy from you … after 3 years of courting – because this is how it can easily go.
Re-thinking your value proposition and reviewing if there are other markets you can approach.
Innovating ways to WOW these 10 companies and the right people involved in decision making.
Investing a lot more time, effort and money to have one-on-one conversations with the right people. This is where corporate gifts or unusual direct mail is not an overkill, but is rather an essential part of getting your foot in the door.

Can you see how knowing the size of the market is 10 companies leads to a completely different set of actions and saves resources, time and money?

Fortunately, most businesses are in a better position. Even when your market is limited, you still have 100s or even 1,000s of companies you can target.

And that’s great!

The moral of “Why do you need to know the size of the market” is still the same, whether your target market is 10, 100, 1,000 companies or more. You can still waste resources when you are not aware of the actual size of the market. You might not get a precise figure because that’s challenging, but at least a reasonable figure that you can work with.

Read on to discover where and how you can get a better understanding of the size of your target market.

When you know the size of your target market, here is what you can do better:

Better forecasting. You and your accountant can make much more accurate financial projections, do realistic forecasting and project growth of your business based on more accurate raw data starting from size of the market, and your target market as you understand it.

Better budgeting. It goes without saying that when you are in control of numbers you can budget better. It all starts from how realistic your financial projections are based on market realities: size of the market + your historical ability to generate revenue + costs vs margin

Better marketing. The choice of marketing strategy and tactics depends on the actual size of the market. What’s the point in having a billboard or placing ads (any ads) targeting everyone when you only need to reach to a couple 100 or a couple 1000 of companies and people that are out there.

Better brand awareness. By knowing the size of your market, you can choose the best ways to build brand awareness with people who are directly involved in making purchasing decisions rather than to a random crowd who has no interest in your brand.

Better sales strategy. Even if you are a well-known and influential brand, you can only grow so far. Imagine that you currently service 10% of the local market, then you definitely can aspire to double sales. But what happens when you service 55% of the market? There is no way you can double your sales! In fact, you can barely grow in this situation and have to put serious thinking about making efforts in order to capture more of the market share vs exploring other locations or offering different products and services to your existing customer base.

Action time.

With all the valuable information you have so far, are you ready to take action and uncover the true size of your market?

If you already have a strong knowledge about what kind of companies you want to target, then you can submit an enquiry following this link right now and get an email with information about the size of your market based on your target market criteria.

If you are not quite sure how to define your target market – which is very common – then read along. You will get to know how to understand your target market better, so you can come close to this very important number: the size of your target market.

Ask and You Shall Receive

The size of your target market, is not hiding from you on purpose.

All your business has to do is ask for it.

FAIR WARNING. There is one challenge on the way.

You have to define your target market, otherwise sizing the market becomes mission impossible.

LITTLE KNOWN FACT: Most businesses find it really hard
to define their target market and choose
to leave this matter in the “too hard” basket!

Every day I get the chance to speak to at least one business which says exactly the same words: “Our target market is very hard to define, because we offer a highly specialised product/service”.

And every day, in response to that, 9 times out of 10 it only takes 15-20 minutes to define their target market at a reasonable level. Certainly, there is room for improvement but we have been able to uncover the base of who their target market is.

Guess what? My observation is that most people don’t know how to go about understanding their target market. While they can do it in 15-20 minutes with me or one of our data consultants, they certainly need hours doing it on their own.

You may have heard from other marketers that identifying your target market is a matter of careful research and various considerations.

While this is true and you can invest a hefty sum in market research, the idea about the usefulness of focus groups, and other types of research originates in business to consumer (B2C) marketing.

When it comes to business to business (B2B) marketing, education, socio-economic parameters and even gender plays less of a role in the way companies go about their purchasing decisions.

Think about when a company imports tools and consumables for hairdressers, then that means that the hairdressing industry is their ideal target market. Full stop and no questions asked.

Then, of course one can look into products more carefully to assess if beauty, medical and some other industries may benefit as well. They may be useful to be included in their target market, but definitely only as a second choice, right?

Over the years we’ve created a lot of useful resources to help you define your target market. I’m not inviting you to do any heavy lifting of trying to estimate the size.

I’m merely asking you to decide for yourself: who do you want to target?

Then leave us do the rest.

Take a few minutes out of your busy day to specify who you want to sell to. From there we will help you to get an assessment of the size of your market.

Here is how.

Download a simple two page crash course on defining your target market the right way.

It will prompt you to answer a handful questions on two pages, and then get ready to enquire about the size of your target market by following this link. In our experience, this is a great activity to do with your sales and marketing team to make sure their feedback and opinions count.

If you feel that this two page crash course is a it too brief to your liking, you can download ANZSIC 850 industry types from here and go over the whole list. While it will take a bit of time, it will also allow you to define your target market at a deeper level. Allowing you to get a more precise, and ultimately a more accurate sizing of your target market.

What about the size of the market?

While this article is about identifying the size of your target market, it’s not possible to measure the size until you understand what is your target market.

That is why the whole previous part was about identifying your B2B target market, along with the tools we have to help you get going.

If you don’t understand what kind of businesses are in your target market, how can anyone even start thinking about the size. Because there is nothing to measure, isn’t it?

Once you know the type of companies you want to target, then we can help.

As suggested earlier, all you need to do is to submit an enquiry following this link to the whoiswhere team and we would be delighted to identify the size of the market list that we can offer. The larger the companies you want to connect to, the more chances that we can offer you; as much as 94% of New Zealand market. Of course, there is less data for smaller businesses.

Is there a better way to identify the size of your target market?

It would be unfair of us to claim that whoiswhere™ is the only place you can get an idea about the size of your market. There are other ways to establish it as well.

The important thing is to be clear about what the limitations are for the source you are using.

Here are some alternative suggestions where you can source your market size, which you might want to examine, and a brief description of limitation of each source.

New Zealand Companies Register

This is the most official resource when it comes to New Zealand business’s. It lists every registered company, trust and incorporated society in New Zealand and is updated daily.

Did you know there is an average of 4,000 new companies registered in NZ every month?

The limitations of the Companies Register that nobody is talking about:

There is no legal requirement to register a company in New Zealand, so you can be in business and employ staff, without even being registered.

The implication of this limitation is that not every business can be found in the Companies Register. Some would argue that every serious business is registered, we have facts and figures to show that this is not true. There are plenty of well-established companies that trade without being a registered entity.

And there is at least one whole industry in New Zealand where hardly anyone is registered.
The other limitation is that the entities listed in the Companies Registry might be not actively trading even when they are active. There is absolutely no way to establish if a company is actually operating by checking the register.
Most companies don’t have any additional information about what industry they operate in, or how large the company is. There is now an option to voluntarily share this information. However, from what we have understood the number of companies who have shared any kind of additional information stands at about 10%.

Last but not least, and the most disappointing of all, is that most entities listed do not have a phone number or other ways to reach out to them. In fact, there is very little information listed for the majority of companies apart from who owns them.

You might ask, but what about the registered address?

Great observation.

Often the registered address is the address of an accounting or legal firm, which completed the registration and has nothing to do with the actual company.

In fact, it could be in a different city, or even a different island (for example, an Auckland company can be registered by an accounting firm in Timaru).

If it is an address of one of the Directors, then it’s usually a residential address and also has little to do with the location business is operating from.

In conclusion, the Companies Register is a fantastic tool to find if the company is in liquidation, check how many years it has been in business, or check the spelling of a Directors name. But beyond that, it absolutely cannot help you size the market.

In fact, even using the total number of registered companies (around 500K) as an indication of the total size of New Zealand market is not possible, because according to our research over 50% of them are not individual trading participants in the market. They’re family trusts, property trusts, and other 0-employee holding companies.

StatsNZ

The source of official New Zealand data. StatsNZ produces a lot of useful information that every business can benefit from. It’s official. It’s current. It’s based on the best statistics and information that you can get hold of.

The limitations of StatsNZ that nobody is talking about:

It is statistics, i.e. it’s accurate on a nationwide level.

So when an accountant in Timaru registers a company operating in Auckland, from a statistical view point this company is counted as a business in Timaru.

This happens more than you might think, and affects the results of you market size if you are interested in a particular location.

Another example is 1000+ businesses counted against the address 105 The Terrace, Wellington. No, you didn’t miss the largest building in NZ with hosts 1000+ companies. This is the net effect of a legal firm which has registered over 1000 companies – with the registered office as 105 The Terrace.
Part of statistics is to use the industry classification to understand the market. Assigning an industry to a company or other entity is an interesting and somewhat blurry process, which might require additional work to understand.

Reach out to me directly if you want to know more about the relationship between statistics and real life. You really have to understand the source of StatsNZ information to make sure your conclusions are relevant to the reality of businesses you can identify and trade with.

Statistical data does not go down to the micro level of individual business, so it might be all good and well to establish the size of your target market, and then what? There is no way to identify who these companies are.

Bottom line? StatsNZ is a much better source of information than the Companies Register to help you size the target market.

The biggest downside?

It does not provide you with actual details of the companies in your target market. And let’s face it, understanding the size of your market is very important. Once you know it, the next logical step is to find out who they are!

Business Databases

There are a number of databases in New Zealand and we have an overview of what they are, how much information each one provides, and how to understand which ones will be a good fit for your project.

Find out How to Choose a NZ B2B Business list here.

The limitations of Business Databases that nobody is talking about:

Most databases don’t even tell you what they are doing to ensure that they have a good market coverage. This means any number of businesses, in any niche they have, are hard to understand in relation to 100% of the market.

For me this is the fundamental challenge of any business database.

What is the relation to 100%?

Because if I don’t know the relation to 100% then what is the value of any list.

Over the years I discovered that many business owners are not worried about it.

Until they want to grow. Or until their overseas head office wants to assess the potential of the market.

If you were ever in a position to understand the true size of your target market in New Zealand, you would know that it’s a hard and un-rewarding job. Mainly because there is no one to turn to for the answers.

In reality though, that’s a lie. In 2005 we recognised this problem, and established the whoiswhere business database in an attempt to record all businesses based in commercial premises. The aim is to get as close to 100% of all businesses based in commercial premises as possible.

Yes, this does not cover all businesses in New Zealand.

Yes, not every business in commercial premises has signage, and without the signage they are invisible to the world and to our street walkers.

Yes, some signage in New Zealand is in a foreign language and we can’t always capture it.

But, despite all of this, whoiswhere is the only database in NZ and Australia, which is focused on getting to know every business in commercial premises.

We are doing this expensive and labour intensive work to be able to say, we know more commercially located businesses in New Zealand than anyone else. Yes, it’s not 100%, but it’s as close as we – or any other database – can possibly get it.

This is the reason why we typically have 40-60% more businesses than any other business database provider.

Many business databases do not distinguish between a head office and a branch of the company. That effectively inflates the numbers, doesn’t it?

Let me explain: there is only one true head office for the Warehouse, Fonterra, McDonalds, etc.

I bet you wouldn’t be impressed if between the three companies above, you only found 300 contacts … not unless you specifically need that small number of contacts for whichever reason.

Can you imagine how inflated those numbers could be if 300 various business addresses were counted instead of 3 overriding companies?
Business databases are maintained differently. To ensure the accuracy of data you are receiving, you’d better check what the database maintenance routine is first.

The bottom line is that business databases are a really valuable source of information (that is hopefully accurate enough!) about the exact businesses in your target market.

They can also provide an indication of the size of your market, which you then can compare with StatsNZ to ascertain if you are getting access to sufficient percentage of the market.

Does that all make sense? Are you ready to take action?

Lets get going and use one of the links throughout this article.

Once you’re ready to gain access to best size of your target market, get in touch by emailing assia@whoiswhere.co.nz

Assia Salikhova, Managing Director, E-ideas Ltd

Boutique B2B Marketing Implementation Agency

www.e-ideas.co.nz
www.whoiswhere.co.nz

DDI +64 4 973 4949
M +64 27 231 8631

The post Your Ultimate Guide to Sizing the Market appeared first on whoiswhere.

Successful B2B Marketing Starts From Understanding Your Target Market

siteadmin — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 01:06:16 +0000

Working from home lead many businesses and their sales teams to start thinking about better ways to approach the market. Many are tossing around the merits of using Social Media vs phone calling, vs planning a stunning DM campaign after this is all over.

When else do we have time to think?

Did you hit the brick wall of not exactly sure what is the SIZE of your target market and what kind of companies are in your target market?

If the answer is yes, then this article is for you if you if you are one of these special people:

you want to have more sales
you want to launch a new product or service
you want to sell to different businesses
you dreamed up a new business

Then there is nothing more important than defining your target market.

This is because often B2B products and services are designed for a specific type of business or to address a common business problem. Or at the very least there is a set of users more likely to get value out of it.

Through my years of working with businesses, I’ve seen that many B2B businesses rarely focus on understanding their target market.

All too often businesses assume that their target market is EVERYONE or their target market is too hard to define and identify.

I challenge you to reconsider and embrace the journey to find out who are in your ideal target market.

In other words I suggest you to ask and think once again to understand what kind of companies will benefit the most from your products and services. And then to question: “How many of them you can identify and find”. And remember, help is at hand because we already know over 200,000 business locations nationwide.

The good news is that it’s never too late to have a conversation about your the definition of the ideal target audience for your business!

While the world is changing and businesses are rapidly reviewing the way they operate, it’s an ideal time to sit down and identify who your best customer, your target market, is.

Let’s take it one step at a time starting from the basics.

What exactly does target market or target audience means?

These are the people or businesses you have chosen to target, because

• your product or service is designed for them

• you know your products and services will provide value to their business

Even when you have a product or service that has wide appeal, you will still benefit from creating a persona of your best clients.

Here is an example of good find if you supply stationary, because then you can figure our that an office-based company uses more paper and pens than a manufacturing business.

Another example is if you are in importer, you can decide to bring products that are created for a particular industry.

This is how simple really it is to find out who will be a better target.

What size Target Market is good?

Ideally your audience needs to be of a significant size in order to make your business viable and direct marketing feasible. A significant size will be different for every situation.

A commercial real estate agent may only need a list of twenty prospects to achieve a goal, whereas a stationery supplier may require a list of thousands of business prospects.

In New Zealand the size of your target market is often limited by the number of existing businesses. Depending on the size of the audience you can then choose a direct marketing approach with greater confidence.

Did you know that NZ has the same numbers of businesses per capita as other developed countries? The actual quantity in every specific niche is drastically smaller.

What this means is while overseas if you have a total market size of 10,000 it could be fine for you to know only 2,000 – you may not be able to sell to more than that. But in NZ if the total market size is 2,000, you’ll want to know pretty much all of them to ensure you get enough customers to sustain your business.

That’s why identifying more businesses in your target market should become your priority goal on the way to growing your sales.

Because as you know, in the end, sales is a numbers game.

How Can You Discover Who Is Included In Your Target Market?

If you are already in business you can analyse the characteristics of your top clients to see what makes them outstanding, different, or more desirable than others. This can help you to define your direct marketing audience.

If you are a startup or an existing business introducing something new, then you really need to test different audience characteristics and profiles. You’ll have to end up making some assumptions, and find a way to test these out. Another good place to start is having a chat with a list broker – these companies often have years of experience segmenting data and will be able to provide a starting point.

You can choose to target in many different ways, here are examples:

· By Business Size (by number of employees)

· By Location – which could be by location (City or Town), or street/s, or even building

· By Particular Business Executive (e.g. CEO, HR, Accountant)

· By Industry Classification (using what is called ANZIC Codes)

· By separating Start ups from Established businesses

· By Having a Website or Not

It is very important to take time in defining and refining your target market.

Because the more accurately you can define your target audience/market, the less money you’ll spend marketing to unsuitable companies, and therefore the better your results will be.

Still Not Sure About Your Target Market?

Reach out to either myself or one of my team members through www.whoiswhere.co.nz because we created New Zealand’s largest business list from scratch. Years of data maintenance and data verification plus conversations with 100,000+ businesses made us experts in helping to identify target markets.

We’ll be glad to have a no obligation chat and help you understand your target market.

Discover a heap of resources on our data blog which explain different aspects of data.

Assia Salikhova, Managing Director, E-ideas Ltd

Boutique B2B Marketing Implementation Agency

www.e-ideas.co.nz www.whoiswhere.co.nz nz.kompass.com

DDI +64 4 973 4949 M +64 27 231 8631

For a free report that shows you what business data providers exist in NZ and whom do you need depending on your purpose. Grab a copy of Assia’s “How to Choose a NZ Business List”. It will save you plenty of chasing the information around and help you to make an informed decision.

The post Successful B2B Marketing Starts From Understanding Your Target Market appeared first on whoiswhere.

Data Basics: Identifying your target market

siteadmin — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 01:14:30 +0000

When you first start your business there are a number of decisions you have to make. The first of course is what the business will sell in terms of products and services. Second is who you’ll sell your products and services to. A lot of companies get this step wrong, and go on to create businesses which don’t have a market. Or perhaps they do have a market, but it’s positioned incorrectly. In either case, this is a fundamental step in any businesses journey and is called identifying your target market or market sizing.

From our perspective, we are masters in sizing a market. Why? Because each time we provide a list of businesses, the conversation starts with “Who are you trying to target?”. So, after over a decade of helping businesses answer this question, we think we’re pretty good at it. To the point where we can often suggest markets that you may not have considered.

Over the years we’ve noticed that when we ask this question, businesses tend to answer it in the same manner. And that’s to say, barring a few exceptions, they don’t really know who their target market is. There’s nothing wrong with this; nothing to be ashamed of. Usually a business was started a good number of years prior and any memory of any target market is long forgotten.

Having said that, knowing who your target market is, and how many of them there are, is kind of a crucial part of running a business! If you don’t know your target market you will never be in control of your business. This is because you’ll always be at the mercy of the market to find your business.

The reality of modern business is that you can’t allow the market to find you. Most markets are crowded. And if you’re doing something new, then most people won’t think to look for you in the first place. A much better way of doing business, is having a way to find your market yourself. And the simplest way of doing this, is a good old-fashioned list of your target market. Commonly called a list of prospects. This is exactly what we can help you with – we have over 180,000 businesses nationwide and as mentioned above, consider ourselves pretty good at sizing a market.

Now that I’ve plugged our services, let’s get into how you can easily size your market!

If you’ve ever sized a consumer market, I’m going to have to ask you to leave all of that at this paragraph. I’m afraid when it comes to sizing a business market you won’t have the luxury consumer markets offer. Business spending data simply isn’t captured well enough to use demographics data. In addition, it probably wouldn’t be particularly useful. When you’re sizing a market, it doesn’t really matter what the person in the business likes or dislikes. Right now, all you’re trying to find out is how many companies you can target with your gadget or gizmo.

We like to size the market using three criteria.

Location

First is location – pretty self-explanatory really. Depending on your business you might want to target by area, city, suburb, or even street. The great thing is our data allows you to be very granular. Want to target every odd numbered building in Ponsonby? DONE. What about every business on Level 3 in the Auckland CBD? Piece of cake. What I’m trying to say is you can go really granular with our data. On the other hand, you may want to expand your search if you have a very niche product.

Industry

Second is industry – what does your target market produce and sell? This is probably the hardest section. And the reason it’s difficult is because the ANZSIC industry classification system used in NZ and Australia isn’t always intuitive. For example, would you consider a printing company to be a manufacturer? ANZSIC would. What about a corner Bakery? ANZSIC would.

The other stumbling block is limiting your industries too much. You really need to think of what industries could use my product/service. Even if it’s just a section of the company that would use it. Our team of data experts is well trained in this area and can really add some value.

Size of the Business

And last is the size of the company. Because in NZ we don’t have any legal reason to report revenue, we usually can’t use revenue as a gauge for company size. Instead we use a proxy of number of staff. Number of staff tends to be a pretty solid indicator of size of the company, as long as you keep in mind the type of industry you’re targeting.

One hot tip we have for size is to really understand that in NZ most companies are small. We classify anything between 5 and 50 employees as a medium sized business. And 50+ is really where the large businesses market starts. As a contrast, a 50-staff strong business in Europe could be considered a small family business. So, when we say NZ is a small market, we really do mean it. There are just over 2,200 businesses with 100+ employees.

And that is how you size a market. Simple enough. So, what is missing?

The number of course! And this is a bit of a sticky point. I should probably apologise. I’ve made you read 907 words as of now only for you to find out that you won’t be able to get a final number. You see businesses aren’t counted very well in NZ. Government agencies do a fairly mediocre job of it. They may have some list but wouldn’t be able to help with the size or industries.

And so, businesses must rely on list providers such as ourselves for their market sizing. The reason we excel at this compared to other companies is we simply have more data than they do. We’re on a never-ending quest to have a full list of businesses in NZ. And even though this is an unachievable goal we persevere!

You’re now armed with all the information required to size the business – if you’d like a hand please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Either myself or another of our data experts will be glad to assist you.

Artem Axenov

Operations Manager

E-ideas Limited

The post Data Basics: Identifying your target market appeared first on whoiswhere.

Data Basics: Why staff # is important

siteadmin — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 23:36:00 +0000

When someone comes and enquired about a list of companies, we often start off with asking three questions:

What location would you like to target?
What industries would you like to target?
How large are the businesses you would like to target?

Now for this last question, at whoiswhere we use the number of staff as a proxy. The reason for this is because in NZ there isn’t a legal requirement to report revenue as in some other countries. So while we do have financial data for some companies, for the vast majority we’re in the dark.

This is where the number of staff comes in as a shining beacon of hope to gauge the size of a business. The number of staff can be used as a proxy to estimate turnover of a business based on their industry. Reputable data providers in NZ will be recording the number of staff per business specifically for this purpose.

Have more questions about number of staff? Chat to one of our data experts today, call us on 04 977 7877.

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Data MythBusters: Role-Based Generic Emails in the New Zealand Market

siteadmin — Mon, 18 Jun 2018 02:53:00 +0000

We are often asked to deliver emails as part of our business lists and inevitably we end up having a discussion about role-based business emails and their place in our data as a legitimate method of contacting a business.

When you’re wanting to run a cold email marketing campaign, it might seem obvious to only want to email to personal emails. The logic is very basic here – a personal email goes to a specific person. However the not so obvious thing is that a lot of smaller businesses don’t have personal emails.

The reality on the market in NZ is that because so many businesses are small and have less than 5 staff, it’s very common for a generic email address to be used by the owner. In many businesses with 5 staff or less, a generic email is used as the main business email. And as the vast majority of companies in NZ have 5 or less staff. So we are faced with a world where role-based emails must be used for marketing purposes.

This isn’t to say that every small company uses a role-based email as the main email. It’s simply pointing out the fact that there is a large percentage where this is the case. And it’s a percentage that is simply too big to discount.

Unfortunately companies like Mailchimp have chosen to take a hard stance against these types of email addresses. Mailchimp will reject any email you try to import if it’s a generic or role-based one, and that gets very frustrating if you have clients who may have been purchasing for years from you using an info@ email. Fortunately not all companies are so short-sighted and there are other email marketing programs which will let you add in generic emails for your campaigns.

So the next time you consider purchasing an email list, reconsider discounting role-based emails. And if you’re not quite sure where to begin – drop us a line or give us a call. We’re in a privileged spot to see what companies are doing and what is working. And we’re happy to share this knowledge with you before you plow money into emails that might not even work for you.

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