When it comes to marketing to attract your ideal customers or clients, whether it’s a consumer (B2C) or a business (B2B), you’ll get the most effective use of your advertising dollars if you TARGET.
You see, if you advertise very broadly such as in mass media for example, city newspapers, radio or television you’ll attract all whole range of potential customers (or clients) including tyre-kickers, cheap customers as well as average customers and perhaps a few ‘ideal customers’. If your goal is to attract your ideal prospects then you need to know something about them.
There’s a multitude of ways to do this – usually by something we call demographics (and other methods as well).
One such demographic in business-to-business marketing (B2B) is called business size.
For example, you may wish to promote your business services to enterprises that have over 20 employees. You’ve found, by experience, that these businesses have a need for your services and can afford them.
When it comes to marketing it helps to understand a little about how many businesses may fall into this category. The good news is that the government has already done all the hard work.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) uses the below terminology to group businesses by size. Other countries have a similar definition.
- Non-employing businesses: sole proprietorships and partnerships without employees;
- Micro: businesses employing less than 5 people, including non-employing businesses;
- Small: businesses employing 5 or more people, but less than 20 people;
- Medium: businesses employing 20 or more people, but less than 200 people; and
- Large businesses – businesses employing 200 or more people.
In our B2B marketing example (above), our desire to attract the ‘ideal’ client is in the category of ‘medium-sized’ businesses.
Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)