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TechTarget Refines The B2B Lead-Gen Model Into A Finely Tuned Machine

This article is more than 5 years old.

In the vast $1.6 trillion information technology sector, if you’re shopping for new tech products, chances are you’ve come across TechTarget, the 20-year-old digital-media pioneer in lead-generation technologies.

Over the last decade, as data management has increased in importance for B2B media, a lot of media companies have shifted to "decision-based content," moving away from the traditional models of news and trend analysis and toward content specifically geared to driving purchases.

In that period, many B2B media companies have leveraged data extracted from content-engagement patterns into account-based marketing and predictive analytics programs, building new revenue streams that complement or supersede advertising.

But TechTarget, a publicly-traded company based in Newton, Massachusetts, has gone beyond most of its peers in data analytics. It's built a comprehensive system that tracks buyers and influencers, builds behavioral models, and puts all the vast intelligence it generates into the hands of its marketer partners.

TechTarget

“We’re now enabling the marketer, not just executing a campaign,” says Josh Garland, vice president of product marketing. “With our automation capability and other tools, our customer has more information in how to go to market. We bring both the media platform and the data to the table, and we can do the legwork for the marketer.”

That’s the key to the new B2B model, at least for TechTarget. The legwork—the sales intelligence gathering—has moved in house to the publisher and away from the marketer. “We’re producing content for IT professionals to help them make purchase decisions,” Garland adds. “And we connect them to vendors. If someone is searching for a tech solution, they’re most likely going to land on a TechTarget page at some point in the journey.”

At the core of the TechTarget process is what it calls its Priority Engine, which tracks interactions with various forms of content by IT industry buyers and influencers. Priority Engine's model is different from many other models in several ways, including the specificity of the information it develops; the range of influencers and decision makers it identifies; the trigger activities that emerge that signal a purchase decision; and the information and counsel it shares with its customers (advertisers and vendors) as they seek to close a sale.

TechTarget

“We’ve made a transition from data capture to determining purchase intent,” says TechTarget CMO John Steinert. “There’s a subtle difference.”

The numbers are staggering.  The process starts with TechTarget’s 19 million registered opt-in members. The company has a deep content footprint—it produces about 75,000 pieces of content annually across 10,000 topics. Organic searches lead to 200 million inbound visits, 18 million monthly users and about a million daily interactions.

Priority Engine serves as the central warehouse for all this account-activity intelligence.

In a recent conversation, Steinert and Garland described a typical process. Company X is searching for an all-flash array to support a virtual desktop project. TechTarget identifies and tracks the content-consumption behavior of two employees of company X. The first person, an influencer, accesses 44 pieces of TechTarget content in the seven months before they make a purchase. The second person, the ultimate decision maker, accesses 18 pieces of content before the deal closes.

The research conducted by the two people from company X takes them across eight TechTarget sites. They’re exposed to hundreds of ads related to their search. They download white papers from 15 different vendors. At a point when their behavior signals purchase intent, TechTarget’s lead-qualification team reaches out to them to learn more about their objectives and investment plans.

In the end, company X does make the purchase, and one of TechTarget's Priority Engine customers makes the sale.

This process, Garland says, has been the basic approach from the beginning at TechTarget. it extends across more than 400 customers in all the IT sub-sectors. Last year, he says, 8.2 million prospects were exported from Priority Engine, and 19,000 account lists were created in support of 5,400 ABM campaigns. "We have all this stuff happening on our network—people asking questions and reading stories," Garland says. "Content is tagged at a very granular level. We roll up multiple people in a company to identify what is going on at that company. That’s when we provide prospects to our customers."