Over the years we get asked a number of questions regarding selecting business lists however the most common one is “Why isn’t there anymore list data available for my business segment?”
Most people who do research for available data start looking at their targeted Industry segment as a keyword in google. This will produce 1000’s of entries – some related and most non-related to the industry or business segment the buyer is trying target.
They will then research a few on-line directories such as the Yellow pages. This will give them again 1000’s of record results- some relevant- some not so relevant. By now the buyer is getting a somewhat inflated figure in their heads of how many companies might be in their target market.
They then make enquiries with a List broker such as my company DataConsult asking for specific list counts of industries. We will run the counts and send the details to the buyer and invariably they say the counts are a lot smaller than Google or Yellow pages. And then the question comes; “Why isn’t there anymore list data available for my business segment?”
Well, let’s look at these Key Findings from the Australian Bureau of Statistics to get an idea of how many businesses there are in Australia;
- As of June 30, 2016, the number of actively trading businesses in the market sector was 2,171,544, an increase of 2.4% from 30 June 2015
- In June 2016, 60.7% of actively trading businesses in Australia had no employees
- 27.6% had 1-4 employees
- 9.2% had 5-19 employees
- 2.3% had 20-199 employees
- Only 0.2% of businesses had 200 or more employees
Here is a table that summarises these numbers.
So as these statistics reveal the total number of businesses in Australia with people working in them ( as opposed to just company name, trusts etc ) comes to approx 850,000. Of these 600,000 are below 5 employees.200,000 businesses have 5-20 employees and approx. 55,000 with 20+ employees.
You can see if we then select specific industry segments within the employee bands we end up with surprising results.
The other issue with comparing different data sources is that to run an effective B2B campaign you must contact or speak to a real person within the company ie the Decision Maker. Directories, Yellow Pages and Google searches will only provide you with the business name, address and maybe the telephone number however not the name of a contact in the company to talk to. Also with these on-line directories, there is no way of knowing the employee or revenue size of the business.
If you are interested in more Australian Industry statistics go to ABS Industry Statistics