Outsell Now e-briefing, November 09, 2004,
Outsell, Inc.

TechTarget: New Offering Goes Mid-Market

In a move with implications for both high-end IT research players and B2B trade publishers, TechTarget launched a new magazine today, CIO Decisions. It is targeted to CIOs and IT executives at mid-market companies: the market between the Fortune 1000 and the small business sector. A CIO Decisions Conference and a sister Web site, CIODecisions.com will be launched later this year.

The notable piece here is TechTarget’s continued razor-sharp focus on identifying and serving its target market. The new magazine’s tag line, “Aligning IT and Business in the Midmarket Enterprise” describes the "who" and the "what" of it. This offering will serve a middle range of enterprises with content at the intersection of IT and business.

TechTarget is eating the lunch of the major IT research firms on this front. The larger, older players maintain their focus on the needs of the Global 1000, but many of them lack midmarket and lower end strategies. They are on a path to Nordstrom status – catering to the needs of high-end, high-maintenance customers but relegating themselves to a slow growth curve.

Some additional observations:

• TechTarget is not only focusing on its market, but it remains dedicated to serving that market in all relevant media. The announcement leads with the story of a new dead tree magazine, but the Web site and conference are right on its heels. It's a medium-neutral approach – the important thing is that all the offerings have the target market in focus, getting users the information regardless of their preferred media.
• In September TechTarget acquired two senior IDG executives from ComputerWorld and CXO Media, Maryfran Johnson and Joe Levy, a move we noted here. Surprise, surprise, these are the folks who will be heading up these new offerings for TechTarget. It’s easy to imagine that this was an idea they couldn’t sell within IDG, so they took it to a place where there was more fertile ground for this kind of initiative.
• Think about what’s happening among the IT companies themselves – Siebel, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, you name them. They all going down market because they have saturated the big companies they sell to. You’d think the IT Research sector would see the writing on the wall and followed the same strategy....

Copyright 2004 Outsell, Inc.