Imagine that you work at a telco and have developed a product that is perfect for manufacturing businesses. You fire up your web browser and research tells you that the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) estimated that in June 2019 there were 48,000 manufacturing businesses in Australia that employed 1 or more people. About 7,000 of these were medium to large businesses (20+ employees) and 41,000 were small businesses (1-19 employees).

It is relatively easy to find information on medium to large employers through their websites and resources like LinkedIn but what about the 85% of employing manufacturers that are classified as small businesses?

The 2020 Telstra Business Intelligence Study found that only 49% of the small businesses surveyed had a website. If more than half of Australian small businesses don’t even have a website, researching their contact details to tell them about your product gets a lot harder.

One way is to use the List Factory Core B2B Database to target manufacturing businesses in Australia. Core B2B has contact information for approximately 34,000 manufacturing businesses and is getting more in each quarterly update.

Selecting Records from Core B2B

If we use the manufacturing example described above, then the ABS survey tells us that of the 41,000 small manufacturing businesses in Australia about 25,000 employ 1-4 people and 16,000 employ 5-19 people.

“That’s great, give me the 16,000 5-19 employee businesses!” you might say, but unfortunately it is not quite that simple.

Of the 34,000 manufacturing businesses in Core B2B, only 3,900 are flagged as having 5-19 employees.

In fact, around 18,500 don’t have any employee number flags at all.

This is because very few small businesses have any available data on how many people they employ. Therefore, the best option is to have an offer or offers that appeal to all businesses flagged as manufacturing or similar.

Focus on Cost Per Acquisition

Another issue that can shock first time list users is mailing 5,000 records and then receiving a few hundred back as return-to-sender. This can be unsettling to some people but it is unavoidable due to the dynamic nature of list data – people and businesses are constantly moving.

The key is to focus on whether new customers are being acquired at a cost that allows your business to make a profit over the lifetime of the customer. If not you might need to review your product offer and/or the list selection criteria.

Please contact List Factory for more information about using Core B2B.