161% return on ad spend using firmographics to build highly targeted account lists

Most teams think they understand their ICP, but when you look closely, their targeting is usually built on outdated personas, assumptions that no longer hold up, or a patchwork of accounts already sitting in the CRM. Firmographic analysis solves this by grounding your ICP in revenue reality.

Begin by reviewing the last 12-18 months of closed-won customers. Look for the firmographic traits that consistently appear across the accounts that generate the most value, such as industry, company size, revenue range, headquarters location, and even technographic signals like HubSpot, Salesforce, or specific go-to-market tools. 

Your goal here is simple: identify what your best customers actually have in common, rather than what you once believed they had in common.

Once you’ve identified the traits that appear again and again in your highest-value deals, consolidate them into a clear, practical ICP. This updated version of your ideal customer profile becomes the blueprint for the accounts you want more of, not based on aspiration, but on proven revenue behaviour.

This step is where teams unlock the most alignment. Marketing and sales now have a shared, objective definition of what “good” looks like. Not only does this prevent guesswork, but it also ensures your paid spend, ABM programs and outbound efforts are all anchored to the same foundation.

With your ICP defined, you can now scale it. Inside Cognism, apply the same firmographic criteria you’ve extracted from your closed-won analysis to surface net-new accounts that match your best customers. This turns your ICP into a real, validated universe of companies, not just a slide deck description.

What you get is a clean, revenue-backed account list that extends your true addressable market and eliminates the need to chase account suggestions or rely on manual intuition. Whether you’re building for ABM, paid targeting, outbound sequencing or territory expansion, this becomes your master list.

Firmographic precision has the biggest impact when it’s activated at scale, which is why the most effective next step is a 1:Many ABM program. This is where Cognism runs this play internally.

Once the lookalike list is built in Cognism, push it straight into your paid platforms and run tightly aligned creative that speaks directly to the shared characteristics of that segment, whether that’s region, industry, company size or a specific challenge. 

This gives your campaigns an immediate lift, because you’re finally speaking to an audience that genuinely matches your highest-value customers.

This approach has driven significant results for Cognism: more than 884,000 impressions, 3,842 clicks, 8,197 visitors, 271 influenced opportunities and $8.6 million in influenced pipeline value, with a 161% return on ad spend. The targeting works because the list is grounded in firmographic truth.

Firmographic data removes the ambiguity from audience selection, and that’s why this method scales so easily. 

Instead of resetting your targeting every time you move into a new region, launch an industry campaign or build pipeline for a new product line, you simply repeat the same process: analyse revenue, extract the traits, rebuild the list, and activate it.

It’s predictable. It’s efficient. And it keeps every go-to-market motion aligned to the accounts that are most likely to buy.

Firmographics give you the clearest, most reliable way to build highly targeted account lists. When your ICP is built from closed-won data, and when you replicate those traits in Cognism, you eliminate the guesswork from your go-to-market strategy and dramatically increase the odds of success across every channel.

FAQs for firmographic targeting

What are firmographics, and how do they differ from personas?

Firmographics are data-based company attributes (industry, size, revenue), while personas are assumption-based buyer profiles. Firmographics show who actually converts.

Why start with closed-won revenue data?

It grounds your ICP in real customers, not guesses. You target accounts proven to generate revenue, making spend and outreach more efficient.

Which firmographic traits matter most?

Industry, size, revenue, location, and tech stack. These reveal the shared characteristics of your highest-value accounts.

How do we turn patterns into a usable target list?

Combine recurring traits into a clear target list and use it across paid, ABM, and outbound. It becomes a practical blueprint for targeting.

How does firmographic analysis align sales and marketing?

It creates one data-backed definition of a “good” account, so both teams target the same companies and reduce wasted effort.