October 1, 2021

Size - Anatomy of a Target Business

Alex Bilney

Business, as they say, is booming.

However, that’s not to say that business is booming equally for all.

Some have been big players in their own markets for decades (some even longer!), whilst others are just starting to blossom.

How large certain businesses are can have a huge impact on their purchasing behaviour and how likely they are to take a serious look at your offerings.

For example, if you’re big on cloud engineering, you might not want to target companies on the small end of the scale for several reasons.

Firstly, if a company has under 10 employees and a limited annual revenue, they could be reluctant to make an investment not deemed essential for the business.

As such, your marketing strategy shouldn’t be guided by a one-size-fits-all approach designed to attract as much business (no matter the size of the companies) as possible.

To put it simply – size matters, and you need to be paying close attention to ensure that your marketing efforts reflect that understanding.

Size can mean more things than one - it doesn’t merely account for the number of employees working for the organisation in question or their annual revenue.

This is why it’s so important to take into account numerous factors in order to build a better understanding of your target business...

  • How many employees does your target business have?
  • What is the annual revenue of your target business? 
  • What is the geographic spread of the business in question?
  • What is the growth rate of the organisation?
  • Is the company about to make a transformational leap that may affect its needs?

All of these factors will influence a company’s purchasing decisions in different ways, so it really is critical to think about the makeup of each target client through all of these lenses to build a real picture of who they are and what they need.

To sum up, actively considering a broad range of factors under the umbrella characteristic of ‘size’ can yield some interesting guidance on what kind of business they’ll likely be prepared to engage in.

Anticipating what challenges certain organisations could be about to face as well as considering the obstacles others are facing right now due to their size – obstacles your offering could help them overcome – can be invaluable in building an effective marketing strategy.

Size is just one of the characteristics we will be covering as part of our ‘Anatomy of a target business’ series - stay tuned for more! 

Read our previous article ‘Product Specific Criteria - Anatomy of a Target Client’.