I have been posting my articles as LinkedIn posts for the past few months, but I wanted to link some of the recent articles. The biggest recent announcement was Informa’s bid to merge its Informa Tech division with TechTarget. I also covered their new IntentMail GenAI capability.
Informa Tech CEO Gary Nugent said, “This combination brings a new revenue scale, resilient revenue growth, and increased revenue stability.”
TechTarget Merges with Informa Tech
Informa PLC, a FTSE 50 UK Group company, announced a definitive agreement to combine Informa Tech’s digital business with TechTarget. The combined business will “create a leading global platform in B2B Data and Market Access, focused on helping vendors in enterprise technology and other markets accelerate revenue growth.”
The “New TechTarget” will be positioned as a “unique end-to-end solution provider across the go-to-market: from strategy, messaging and content development to in-market activation via brand, demand generation, purchase intent data and sales enablement,” declared the firms. “The combination brings scale benefits, diversified revenue streams, and strategic expansion opportunities by expanding TechTarget’s current addressable market and enhancing the resilience of its business by increasing its presence in new markets and new buyer personas.”
Informa is contributing its Informa Tech digital business and $350 million in cash in exchange for 57% of the combined company. The cash is to be paid to existing shareholders when the deal closes. TechTarget’s shareholders will retain a 43% equity stake in the combined company…
IntentMail employs GenAI to draft Priority Engine Emails framed by Prospect-level intent.
TechTarget unveiled IntentMail AI, a beta GenAI feature that drafts Priority Engine emails. TechTarget emphasizes its intent data as it is tied to opted-in readers of its 150 B2B Technology websites. Thus, IntentMail AI offers opted-in prospect-level intent that supports precision messaging around top-of-mind topics when buyers are in-market.
“Unlike other offerings recently reaching the market, only IntentMail AI combines recent, relevant account information together with deep insights on what the specific targeted recipient has been actually researching on TechTarget’s global publishing network,” explained TechTarget. “As such, IntentMail AI will not only help drastically reduce the time it takes for sales teams to more effectively personalize outbound outreach, it stands to dramatically increase conversion.”
IntentMail AI is part of TechTarget’s “personalized assist AI-driven product strategy.” CEO Mike Cotoia believes that opted-in prospect-level intent will differentiate its GenAI offerings from competitors across three dimensions: relevancy, efficiency, and precision focus…
TechTarget released the latest update to Priority Engine, with expanded sales intelligence insights, workflows, and data syncing. Enhancements support greater Salesforce functionality and additional Prospect-Level Intent use cases. Prospect-level intent is generated from GDPR-compliant activity across its network of 150 enterprise technology media sites and over 1,000 topical video channels.
“To serve the more than 30 million opted-in members (your buyers) across our information networks and keep them coming back, we have to stay on top of their rapidly evolving information needs,” blogged CMO John Steinert. “We need to anticipate where categories and organizations are going and be there for our members. And that means, for our tech vendor clients, we can be the best possible source of insights into what’s happening in their hyper-specific categories, for both strategic and tactical – lead gen or otherwise — purposes. We help them turn our audiences (represent their markets) into more demand, better leads, and healthier opportunity pipelines.”
Furthermore, Prospect-Level Intent improves both sales and marketing performance. For example, email nurture campaigns that target active buyers and prospect interests “commonly result in dramatically higher CTRs vs. cold contact outreach.”
Likewise, outbound sales activity targeting active prospects with demonstrated intent enjoy “significantly higher” call conversion rate.
A TechTarget analysis of over 350,000 opportunities across 90,000 accounts found that TechTarget-influenced deals progressed to closed/won status 35% faster than other opportunities.
“When B2B tech buyers need to solve business problems, they come to TechTarget first because we provide both the independent decision-support editorial content they respect and the vendor content they seek in a context that caters to their buying ‘jobs-to-be-done.’ Priority Engine provides our clients with deep insight into these buying team and buyer’s journey interactions so they can better capitalize on real demand taking shape in their markets. This release gets this proprietary data directly into more GTM users’ hands and makes it easier for them to drive critical impact for their organizations.”
TechTarget CEO Michael Cotoia
TechTarget improved its Salesforce syncing and real-time territory management. Syncing supports both standard Account and Opportunity objects and custom fields associated with these objects.
For example, customers may now build and dynamically update Priority Engine Account Lists using customer first-party account attributes such as target account lists, accounts in specific geos, or by opportunity status.
Priority Engine also supports syncing of third-party data sources stored in Account custom fields such as 6sense stages, Demandbase minutes, or Bombora scores to build Account Lists.
TechTarget VP of Corporate Communications Garrett Mann provided additional detail on the benefits of improved syncing to GZ Consulting: “The ability to dynamically sync and automatically update Priority Engine Account Lists based on customer first-party data and third-party data enables several benefits across sales, marketing, and ABM use cases, for example: (1) The ability to set and continuously update sales rep territories based on Account Owner, ensuring sales reps using Priority Engine are always seeing insights and new prospects from current account targets; (2) the ability to integrate separately purchased 6sense, Demandbase, and/or Bombora data with Priority Engine Account Intent for a single source of truth; (3) the ability to export into MAP nurture opted-in TechTarget prospects from Accounts where both TechTarget and 3rd party intent providers are seeing down-funnel demand; (4) and the ability to target TechTarget lead generation or advertising campaigns using this data.”
Other Priority Engine enhancements include:
An improved user experience and navigation that expedites account monitoring. Intent insights include new buying team members engaging, named prospects and customers researching competitors, or accounts accessing late-stage decision-making content.
A new account journey visualization that displays valuable demand-related activities at accounts across both client systems and the TechTarget network.
Streamlined user management and administration for target account lists and territory management. Admins will also benefit from simplified seat license administration and usage dashboards.
A new Opportunity Dashboard in Salesforce that displays the progression of opportunities, where go-to-market teams should take action, and where TechTarget has influenced deals.
The new Opportunity Dashboard may be viewed by deal counts or dollar volume.The Opportunity Dashboard Top Influenced Accounts.
“No matter your stack, realizing the value of RevOps sinks or swims based on the accuracy and quality of the intent and contact data – and TechTarget has that in droves,” said Sales Community Founder Randy Seidl, “The backbone of any successful GTM revenue motion isn’t how many tools you have, it’s about the insights and data that you’re using in them that unlocks value.”
B2B content syndication vendor NetLine launched INTENTIVE, their buyer-level intent platform at last week’s Forrester event in Austin. INTENTIVE offers “real-time insights into truly ‘who’ is actively expressing intent within a B2B account.”
INTENTIVE is similar to TechTarget’s Priority Engine but broader in focus. Whereas Priority Engine’s intent data is focused on enterprise and health tech, INTENTIVE supports a wider range of 247 industries, including pharma, aviation, manufacturing, and enterprise technology, etc.
“By design, TechTarget is highly focused on supporting the needs of B2B marketers and is targeting technology decision makers. They expanded to healthcare, but that’s about it,” noted Chief Strategy Officer David Fortino to GZ Consulting. “We view our platform as persona-agnostic and diversified” due to the broader scope and depth and breadth of NetLine’s audiences which now also includes Informa media properties and events.
Fortino described TechTarget Priority Engine as a “phenomenal product” but geared toward a more select audience of technology buyers. As such, Priority Engine is “Apple-esque,” while INTENTIVE is the “Android alternative in the marketplace.”
NetLine’s intent data is all “first-party-sourced data” and not cookie-based. Furthermore, it is transparent and includes professional bios, job types, job levels, locations, and engagement activity.
By surfacing individual activity data, NetLine is going beyond “black box metrics.”
INTENTIVE provides buyer-level activity data within accounts. Both online (e.g., webinars attended) and offline (e.g., conference sessions attended) activities are displayed with weights applied based on activity type.
Fortino also emphasized that INTENTIVE is both persona and industry-diversified, so not limited to IT Buyers.
INTENTIVE’s buyer-level intent activity spans 11,000 topics. Intent data is captured from millions of first-party content registrations, 285 distinct event activity types, and 329,000 keywords.
“With nearly 15k+ pieces of content on the platform, a given customer’s assets usually account for 0.03% of all content. For years, our clients gladly worked with us to source first-party leads that specifically engaged with their own content,” blogged NetLine Content Marketing Manager Jonathan Steiert. “The reality, however, is that 99% of their ICP were engaging with content on our platform—they just weren’t engaging with their content. They were missing nearly all of their buyer’s journey.”
NetLine was acquired by Informa in late 2021, so it benefits from Informa’s content and event registration data across 100 million event activities. Event Intent is gathered from over 500 annual B2B events hosted by Informa.
“We were acquired not because of what we were doing at the time but based on the vision of filling out a buyer-level intent platform on top of all of the various content consumption signals that we’re processing every single day of the year,” explained Fortino. “By being part of Informa, we were able to aggregate not only all of the content consumption and buyer behaviors occurring through all of the NetLine powered content experiences, but also all of the Informa properties and all of the Informa offline events.”
When Informa met with NetLine before acquiring it, “Informa was sitting on a massive amount of event-specific intent data that was looking for a mechanism and impetus to action that data into a subscription-oriented product.”
Fortino sees two high-level categories of intent vendors (he omits second-party review sites): Vendors such as Bombora that provide third-party intent based on page views and firms with a broad set of B2B content that drive buyer-level intent. Firms such as TechTarget and Foundry provide “some transparency into what individuals are doing on the sites that they own and operate.” The transparency gives users “a bit more granularity into downloading a white paper, webinar, and so on.”
Fortino argues that NetLine’s advantage is the scope of activity generated across Informa, NetLine, Industry Dive (34 B2B publications and newsletters), and events. Activities go beyond page views.
“There’s everything from…submitting a demo request to expressing an interest in learning more about a given topic, to taking a course and being certified, to the most extreme: going to an event and sitting in countless sessions and being scanned each time you’re going into one of those sessions. All of these 285 things are visualized inside the product as well. So, you can know that this person downloaded a toolkit that helps them predictably model X or they’ve registered for this event.”
Thus, NetLine is marrying online, offline, and customer-content-based intent data.
The signal intensity of some activities is much greater than that of others. “While pageviews can be brief, attending a conference is a very robust form of intent…Compare that to a group of people, let’s say it’s a CEO, a CTO, a director of DevOps, are flying to Vegas for four days to attend the Black Hat conference,” argued Fortino. “They’re sitting in six and a half hours of material each day for three days about malware [and] other enterprise security topics.” The difference in signal intensity is “night and day,” continued Fortino. “Those three people spent maybe 30 grand for three days going to that event.”
Furthermore, “We are looking at the seniority of the person taking those activities. We’re looking at the types of activities that they are actually doing,” including how those activities map to buyer journey stages.
Conversely, if the user is anonymous, “we’re actually disinterested in scoring that information and playing up the value of that information,” argued Fortino. Pageview-based intent is interesting but not actionable for sales reps. “If you’re telling me someone at SAP is trending for these three topics, I don’t even know where to begin.”
INTENTIVE’s real-time dashboard consolidates activity at both the buyer and account-level. Additional insights include buyer trends and confirmed projects, “a buyer-first view of professionals who have confirmed they have an active pain point, identified challenges, and shared their timeline to invest.”
Daily Buyer-Level Intent email alert
Other features include customizable email notifications, a native Salesforce app, and real-time buyer and account scores.
“Prior to today, there has been significant buzz about intent,” argued NetLine CEO Robert Alvin. “But the majority of existing intent-based products relied solely upon company IP recognition and webpage visits which doesn’t tell you “Who” is intending to do what. With INTENTIVE, NetLine has changed the meaning and raised the bar when it comes to intent. Marketers now have access to deeper buyer-level insights allowing them to accelerate the sales process from their marketing endeavors.”
Furthermore, Alvin noted that buyer-level insights eliminate hours of guesswork and accelerate prospecting, messaging, and understanding a prospect’s timeline.
Most intent solutions deliver account-level intent but lack buyer-level insights. They identify accounts (or accounts and locations), but do not usually indicate the individual behind the activity. Furthermore, other intent solutions capture their intent from one primary touch point – Pageviews.
“The basis for 99.9% of all intent data on the market comes directly from pageviews. Sans INTENTIVE, these solutions curate these data sets based upon this behavior, which lasts seconds, if not milliseconds, long,” expounded Steiert. “These pageviews are then referenced against historical baselines at the IP address and company domain. Effectively, every single existing intent vendor (thanks in large part to Bombora’s mostly commodified status sets) offers the same level of insights as their competitors.”
INTENTIVE provides a wider array of business intent at the buyer-level.
However, NetLine offers a broader array of buying activity that includes analyst reports, demo requests, disclosed areas of interest, event attendance, and confirmed projects.
“The age-old questions for anyone in sales are: 1. Who do I call next? and 2. What should we talk about?”, said Heinz Marketing President Matt Heinz. “Buyer-level intent data answers both of those questions.”
The baseline INTENTIVE license includes three explorers, corresponding to three targeted intent categories with up to 25 topics per explorer. Explorers can have multiple audiences for segmentation (e.g., size, industry, geography) and email notification.
Keywords are tied to topics, but free-form keyword selects won’t be available until the V2 release.
Account and buyer Intent Trendlines and activity are available as soon as an explorer is defined.
The Explorer Dashboard displays buyer and account trendlines, accounts with buyer activity, and buyer-confirmed projects. The dashboard is displayed immediately after defining an explorer and uniquely loads historical intent data for immediate review and actioning.
Fortino noted that other intent platforms typically take 45-60 days to curate data for optimal use.
Confirmed Projects were initially sold as NetLine Intent Discovery, but that product was transitioned to a core feature within INTENTIVE.
NetLine collects first-party project data as readers register for and consume content. NetLine “intercepts those users, asks them a very short survey about their pain points, their urgency to address those pain points, challenges that they have, and most importantly, the timeline to invest in correcting those things.”
Account Activity details include confirmed projects, activity type, engaged buyers, and trending topics.
The Account Activity dashboard is filterable by function, level, and firmographics. Users may drill down to any account to see who is displaying intent and the nature of their activity. Saved filters can be set as daily email alerts.
Users can drill down from Accounts to Buyers or the reverse.
While buyer-level intelligence is provided, NetLine does not display PII beyond customer content interactions. Fortino noted that sales teams already have other vendors for contact data (e.g., ZoomInfo, Dun & Bradstreet, Clearbit), but they are not providing buyer-level intent.
“This just comes back to permission data use. I know a lot of vendors love to throw in this idea of recommended contacts where they’re really just using ZoomInfo data,” explained Fortino. “We may do that, but honestly, it’s a bit disinteresting again because it’s just commoditized data sets that everyone has access to.”
Fortino’s near-term focus is building connectors with other platforms. At launch, Salesforce is natively supported, but others will soon follow.
There is currently a waitlist for INTENTIVE access. NetLine is offering a 14-day free trial.
Pricing is similar to existing account-level intent providers but obviously delivers buyer-level insights. The license includes three explorers, unlimited seats, and the Salesforce app.
Fortino argued that the unlimited seats are a “strong differentiator when you’re evaluating existing solutions,” particularly at enterprise accounts with many users.
IT Sales & Marketing Intelligence vendor TechTarget enhanced its intent capabilities with Confirmed Projects, a set of verified projects obtained via direct interviews with a buying team member. Confirmed Projects are planned for the next twelve months and include purchase requirements, challenges, desired outcomes, location, timeframe, and the vendor short-list.
Confirmed Projects are available through TechTarget’s Priority EngineSales Intelligence service. Project contact data are triple verified (email, phone, and employment) along with the contacts’ role in the purchase process.
“Confirmed Projects include specific insights on the technical and business purchase considerations in-market accounts are looking to address — intelligence that will dramatically increase seller efficiency and productivity because they now know where and how to concentrate their efforts to get in on real deals,” stated the firm.
Priority Engine’s enhanced territory filtering helps sales reps home in on their best opportunities.
“Thousands of B2B sellers use Priority Engine every day to fuel their outbound efforts by discovering new active buyers in their territories plus prospect-level intent that helps them break through,” said CPO Andrew Briney. “The integration of Confirmed Projects into Priority Engine gives them a unique ability to attack and revive stalled mid-funnel opportunities with precise, actionable details on verified purchase plans.”
The value proposition of Priority Engine with Confirmed Projects
Technology Sales and Marketing Services vendor TechTarget ($TTGT) believes it is in a much stronger marketplace and revenue position than in 2008, the last recession not caused by a pandemic. It has shifted away from economically sensitive brand revenues to a “robust product suite, which allows us to address the evolving needs of our customers.” As a result, brand revenues have declined from 30% of total revenue to 10% since 2009.
TechTarget is fundamentally much stronger than in 2008. It has trebled its revenue over the past fourteen years and doubled its Adjusted EBITDA margin. In 2009, the firm had virtually no long-term contracts; now, 42% of revenue is associated with longer-term contracts. Other positive signs: TechTarget has grown its customer base from 1,000 to 3,200 customers and is much less reliant on legacy global customers, reducing its revenue share from 32% to 20%. Furthermore, its largest customers have shifted from hardware to cloud and software vendors with subscription customers. Whereas its top customers in 2009 suffered revenue downturns, its current customer base is more likely to struggle to grow revenue than to suffer declining revenue.
“The modernization of the sales and marketing organization is a strong and durable trend. It is hard to compete in today’s IT market without a data-driven go-to-market strategy,” argued CEO Michael Cotoia on TechTarget’s Q3 earnings call earlier this month. “As the leading provider of first-party purchase intent data in the enterprise IT market, we will continue to benefit from this trend.”
Priority Engine
Priority Engine, its subscription sales intelligence platform, grew revenues by 15% last quarter. TechTarget will continue to invest in Priority Engine after doubling the number of engineers working on the product in 2022.
In 2023, Priority Engine will further bolster its Salesforce integration with “bi-directional data flow, campaign orchestration from within Priority Engine, additional program impact reporting, market insights to inform marketing and sales outreach, and alert-driven account and prospect intelligence for our sales users.”
Priority Engine also plans to ingest Salesforce data for analytics dashboards around ROI, open pipeline, and won/lost opportunities. The dashboards will answer the question, “how do we set up our sales reps within our customers’ environment to make the most appropriate and relevant follow-up?”
“We also want to make sure that we are working with our customers to provide more insights across their total campaign with TechTarget, both on the sales side and on the marketing side. So, what you’re doing with their lead generation and demand gen, their content, their branding, the visitors on their website to really bring that end-to-end view into Priority Engine to help fuel and help modernize…both sales and marketing.”
TechTarget CEO Michael Cotoia
The firm sees significant opportunity for growth in TechTarget’s sales-specific module, which is still in the early adoption phase as it was rolled out less than a year ago.
TechTarget does not break out the number of customers licensing Priority Engine or the Priority Engine sales module. However, CFO Daniel Noreck said that the module is “growing nicely but still a small base.”
More broadly, the firm has 3,200 customers, but there are over 18,000 global technology companies with at least $50 million in annual revenue, providing plenty of market opportunity.
“We believe most of those companies are good candidates for the Priority Engine sales module,” stated Cotoia. “While we expect that our rollout to those customers will be slowed by macroeconomic weakness in the short term, we think the long-term opportunity is enormous.”
Content to Close
TechTarget’s fastest-growing service is Content Enablement which powers its Content to Close strategy. In conjunction with its customers, TechTarget produced content “to fuel their marketing and sales outreach.” The service is aligned with the growing focus on self-service research among younger purchasing and business professionals.
“Most technology companies’ current go-to-market strategy is very sales rep heavy. We believe this approach is going to need to transform in the coming years to adjust to the changing buyer dynamics. The companies that win business will have a comprehensive content strategy to effectively influence buyers before their sales reps get involved.”
TechTarget CEO Michael Cotoia
The acquisitions of Enterprise Strategy Group (“ESG”) and BrightTALK have “uniquely positioned” TechTarget to support growing self-service requirements. Content Enablement via these subsidiaries will continue to be an “aggressive” investment area.
TechTarget also believes it has a market advantage due to its opted-in, privacy-compliant intent data sets gathered from its B2B media websites and BrightTALK. Cotoia argues that customer sensitivity to privacy issues and growing government regulations will offer an ongoing competitive advantage for its intent data from permission-based audiences owned and operated by TechTarget. This advantage “will become even more apparent when Google eliminates third-party cookies.”
TechTarget will continue to look for acquisitions like BrightTALK and ESG that expand the firm’s product capabilities. It is also interested in acquiring vertical media companies like Xtelligent Healthcare that expand the firm’s TAM into verticals that share similar attributes as Enterprise IT: significant purchase price, complex buying process, long lead times, and large buyer teams.
Priority Engine for Healthcare Highlights for Top Accounts.
Priority Engine for Healthcare supports over 400,000 opted-in healthcare contacts, including Providers, Health Systems, Payers, Pharmaceuticals, Life Sciences, Accountable Care Organizations, and Federal/State Healthcare Agencies. TechTarget claims that 90% of the US healthcare system is covered. Xtelligent said its audience contains “70% Business & Finance Executives and Clinicians who have critical involvement across healthcare technology purchases that are becoming increasingly complex.”
To demonstrate confidence in the company, TechTarget began a new stock buyback program to repurchase up to $200 million in common stock and convertible debt over the next two years.
“Being able to provide our customers with 1st-party intent data on the largest healthcare technology and information audience on the web is a true game changer in our industry,” said Sean Brooks, Co-Founder of Xtelligent Healthcare Media. “Sales and marketing teams will now have direct access to entire healthcare buying teams, including Clinicians, Line of Business, and IT Decision-Makers, to find more opportunities and accelerate technology deals.”
Priority Engine for Healthcare Highlights for Top Accounts.
Priority Engine for Healthcare supports over 400,000 opted-in healthcare contacts, including Providers, Health Systems, Payers, Pharmaceuticals, Life Sciences, Accountable Care Organizations, and Federal/State Healthcare Agencies. TechTarget claims that 90% of the US healthcare system is covered. Xtelligent said its audience contains “70% Business & Finance Executives and Clinicians who have critical involvement across healthcare technology purchases that are becoming increasingly complex.”
The service is available for ten segments:
Analytics
Electronic Health Records (EHR/EMR)
Healthcare Security & Compliance
Health IT Infrastructure
Life Sciences
Patient Engagement
Payer
Pharma
Revenue Cycle Management
Telehealth
Intent data is gathered from 14 B2B healthcare media properties. HealthTech sites include EHR Intelligence, Health IT Security, and Health IT Analytics. Clinical research and medical sites include LifeSciences Intelligence, PharmaNews Intelligence, and HealthPayer Intelligence. Over 400 healthcare topics are covered, with roughly half focused on Healthcare Tech.
Priority Engine for Healthcare also offers visitor intelligence and content view tracking. Healthcare intent data from BrightTALK, TechTarget’s digital webinar and event platform, is also included.
Xtelligent, also based in Boston, has a similar content model to TechTarget. When acquired last year, it had over 1.5 million healthcare-related visitors per quarter across ten websites, but lacked a platform for enabling its contacts and intent datasets.
Xtelligent content focuses on healthcare-related software and technology decisions, aligning with TechTarget’s enterprise software focus but in an adjacent market. Xtelligent topics include telehealth, healthcare analytics, revenue cycle management, healthcare IT security, and electronic health records.
The new intent topics identify HealthTech content consumption at the account and prospect levels, gathered from TechTarget’s 150 enterprise and health technology websites.
“By expanding the amount of permission-based, relevant 1st-party purchase intent data our customers have access to and delivering a full suite of marketing, sales, and go-to-market services to engage real buyers, we help companies of all sizes achieve better results at scale in this market,” said Michael Cotoia, CEO, TechTarget. “As a leader in coverage of B2B enterprise tech for more than 20 years – combined with working very closely with our almost 3,000 customers – TechTarget has unique visibility into the buying dynamics across every major sector of the market. Our experience positions us well to bring our model to adjacent vertical markets with similar attributes to enterprise B2B tech – long/complex-sales cycles, large purchases, multiple members of the buying team, and a strong need for 1st party data to enable marketers and sellers – just as we have done in healthcare.”
TechTarget announced a set of enhancements to its Priority Engine Sales Intelligence platform, including second-party intent data from its BrightTALK digital event platform and a refreshed user experience. As a result, TechTarget now provides intent data for 32 million opted-in technology researchers and purchasers across twice as many accounts.
Millions of BrightTALK contacts are fully integrated into Priority Engine, providing intelligence around individuals actively researching technology purchases at BrightTALK webinars, virtual events, and videos. The expanded content provides richer intent data with additional messaging hooks for sales reps.
Prospect-level insights include content preferences, recently viewed content, and each buying committee member’s top interests.
Prospect Insights provide rich details for messaging.
BrightTALK was acquired twelve months ago. BrightTALK hosts 30,000 new webinars and videos each year, providing multi-media content that complements TechTarget’s text-based research content. Prospect-level BrightTALK intent data and buyer contact intelligence are now being combined with second-party intent data from TechTarget’s 140+ enterprise technology media sites, bringing the combined pool of buyers and influencers to 32 million. As these individuals are opted-in, intent data can be tied to the individual instead of the account, allowing for improved messaging and targeting. Not only is the enterprise software topic collected, but TechTarget gathers competitors under consideration and buying journey stage. Furthermore, opted-in contact data ensures that the shared contact intelligence is GDPR and CCPA compliant.
BrightTALK Prospect Insights include webinar registrations, views, view times, webinar types, and titles.
BrightTALK Intent data indicates which content was viewed and the duration the demand unit member spent viewing the content.
TechTarget noted that buyers and influencers have distinct digital research styles, with some preferring multi-media content and others opting for white papers and related text-based reports and articles. Thus, bringing in BrightTALK significantly expanded TechTarget’s ability to identify buyer intent based on different learning preferences.
“Despite strong similarities in overall audience makeup (company size, industry, and job title/function are remarkably consistent), there’s only a 10%-20% overlap in members between the databases, depending on geo,” wrote TechTarget SVP of Products Andrew Briney in April.
“Learning preference and behavior is quite different for members of BrightTALK,” continued Briney. “While the content topics, focus, and quality is [SIC] very similar to what’s offered on the TechTarget network, BrightTALK members prefer the immersive, interactive learning experiences delivered by webinars (85%) and videos (61%) over downloadable PDF content like whitepapers (47%) and e-Books (42%). Given this preference, it’s not surprising BrightTALK members average more than 30 minutes in view-time per webinar/video.”
Priority Engine Personalized Rankings view
The enhancements also provide insights into “overall buyer content preferences (content type and topic), and interactions with customer content across multiple channels help inform more personalized sales outreach and marketing engagement strategies.”
“Priority Engine delivers the actionable purchase intent data our customers need to drive superior performance. This new release gets exponentially more data into their hands and gives them the ability to deliver customized experiences their marketers and sellers need to thrive.”
TechTarget CEO Michael Cotoia
UI enhancements include a new view that calls out “untapped, high potential accounts” for initial engagement in a rep’s territory. There is also a new timeline for viewing account journeys and recent engagement. The new timeline helps reps “easily monitor buying changes to better optimize pipeline, identify cross-sell/upsell opportunities and grow revenue.”
Other UI changes include a set of shortcuts located in the left-side navigation bar. The shortcuts display the following user views:
Top Accounts – The 500 most active accounts and prospects (default view)
Untapped Potential – Accounts or prospects with whom the rep has not yet interacted in Priority Engine
Viewed your Content – Accounts or prospects that have viewed or downloaded company content syndicated through TechTarget’s content syndication program
Visited your Website – Accounts that have visited the company’s website (Inbound Converter)
Confirmed Projects – Any projects that TechTarget has confirmed are active in the rep’s territory based on direct outreach
Favorites – Accounts or prospects that you have selected to favorite in Priority Engine
Finally, the platform now contains separate modules that support sales and marketing use cases.
The Highlights view provides buying journey interactions and new contacts at top accounts.
After a weak second quarter, TechTarget’s revenue rebounded in Q3, rising 7% to $36.2 million (it was 1% in Q2). Year-to-date revenue hit $102.5 million, up 4.5%. Long-term revenues, which are primarily subscription contracts to Priority Engine, represented 35% of revenue, the same percentage as Q3 2019. International sales are up 30%, with strength in both lead-gen services and Priority Engine.
Priority Engine revenue grew 4% during the quarter, with growth slowed by weakness at “smaller customers hesitant to commit to yearlong subscriptions to new products and services.”
TechTarget continues to invest in Priority Engine, releasing a significant upgrade in September that supported prospect-level intent and an improved Salesforce.com integration. With the release, they initiated a “double-digit price increase” that has been accepted by the market. “We have not had pushback on the pricing so far,” said CEO Mike Cotoia. “So we see that as a positive sign going into 2021.”
Priority Engine’s “early usage is encouraging,” with page views up 80% since January; furthermore, “portal interactions by users that self-identify as salespeople are up over 40% since we released the new sales-friendly version.”
Cotoia called the release the most significant since Priority Engine’s launch. Unlike previous releases that focused on the marketing function, the latest enhancements were centered around UI enhancements and the sales use case. Combining account-level intent with prospect-level intent is “really enabling and empowering” sales teams, helping them “rank and prioritize within their own territories.” Reps now have access to two views: a territory account report and an active prospects report.
Sales reps can now discover intent data and insights for active accounts and prospects within a Visualforce tab in Salesforce. If a contact isn’t in Salesforce, they can quickly add the contact.
“Building a cohesive and easy-to-use workflow for both marketing and sales has always been in our roadmap,” summed up Cotoia. “The September release has been really, really impactful.”
TechTarget will focus on “leveraging our customer’s first-party data along with our data. We have other key engagement opt-ins that we are going to be integrating into this as well.”
TechTarget also saw weakness in the large legacy IT vendors, though it was above Q2 numbers, and they anticipate growth in their Global 10 in Q4. TechTarget has been diversifying its customer base, with the Global 10 accounting for 20% of its customer base, down from 40% a decade ago.
TechTarget anticipates that the shift from event sponsorships to online lead generation will persist after the pandemic.
“We believe that much of this shift will become permanent as we do not believe the face-to-face business will return to its previous spend levels pre-COVID,” said Cotoia. “This is showing up mostly in our International numbers as those markets had significantly more events as part of their budget mix than in North America. Today, most of those deals are short term, mirroring the event buy. The opportunity that we are focused on here is to migrate those budgets from face-to-face to intent-based lead generation and then graduate those customers to annual Priority Engine subscriptions. We believe this is achievable as the vast majority of our customers have a strategic initiative to use data to make their sales and marketing organizations more intelligent, efficient, and effective.”
Customers are focusing on their digital strategy, and TechTarget offers content syndication, content marketing, lead generation, and Priority Engine. All of these digital offerings help tech firms “get in front of their prospects and their existing customers.”
“Even if it starts with lead-generation and content marketing offerings integrated with some of the brand solutions, at the end of the day, our customers are really focused on leveraging the right intent throughout their marketing and sales cycles when they’re in market,” said Cotoia.
These lead-gen campaigns provide a beachhead for upgrading to subscription services. “Priority Engine plays a really good place in that as we start transitioning folks from events to content syndication from content syndication to integrated online solution from integrated online intent-driven solutions to Priority Engine integrated campaigns,” said Cotoia. “I think this plays well for us in the long-term.”
“Let’s unpack what we are seeing and what we’ve learned from the pandemic. First, IT spending is no longer a discretionary item for most companies. They see digital transformation as a necessary investment to remain competitive. This dynamic has benefitted our customers. Second, the migration of IT spending to a subscription model has built in significant resilience and predictability to most of our customer’s business models, which in turn has kept their spending levels on sales and marketing fairly stable as compared to more volatility in past downturns.”
TechTarget CEO Michael Cotoia
Cotoia credited the shift to subscription revenue as a significant contributor to its success during the pandemic. “We are very pleased at how our business has performed during the pandemic. It reinforces that the changes we made to transition our business to a data subscription business is paying off in terms of building a stronger company with a more sticky and predictable revenue stream.”
TechTarget announced Q4 guidance between $42 and $43 million, almost 20% growth year-over-year. Some of this growth is the transition from events to online, but some is “pent-up budget” from event marketing that has been held in reserve.
“They have end-of-the-year budget, [and] they want to use it,” said Cotoia. “TechTarget is viewed as a trusted resource.”
Cotoia was asked about ZoomInfo’s acquisition of Clickagy but wasn’t overly concerned about the real-time intent solution, saying that Zoominfo simply acquired its supplier. Cotoia called it a “smart move,” but not one that significantly changes its offering. He also applauded Zoominfo’s contact quality, then pivoted to the differences between their services with opted-in reader intent derived from their media sites.
“What we have is what we call real and observed first-party purchase intent. You have to start with investing in content. We are 100% focused on the enterprise IT market. We have the right engagements coming in. What we know [is] which people are looking at which vendor content or which editorial content or peer-to-peer content, or were doing a search on a very specific technology segment within a very specific region. That’s real. It’s very difficult to leverage things like third-party cookies or bidstream data…[with] a lot of questions about that. It’s only at the account-level.”
Cotoia said that TechTarget’s approach is “very transparent” in its practices, focusing on the “right” engagement and intent signals. “We’re the largest place on the web where enterprise IT vendors publish their content through their marketing efforts.” TechTarget generates this content across 146 enterprise IT community websites and can tell its Priority Engine customers which articles were read, which white papers were downloaded, which webcasts were viewed, which terms were searched, which competitors are being evaluated, and by whom. Owned media sites with opted-in readers deliver “real and observed intent and engagement signals that will help power and transition our customers’ sales and marketing efforts” that are data-driven. What’s more, TechTarget’s intent surfaces opportunities at the beginning of the buyer’s journey.
Continuing my coverage on TechTarget’s Prospect-Level Intent from yesterday…
Prospects are scored and ranked within accounts and across all accounts based on “their recent research activity across the TechTarget network as well as their direct engagement with the customer’s content, website, and advertising.”
To assist with account planning and messaging, Priority Engine added Entry Points, a set of user-defined talking points based upon “a prospect’s recent technology and vendor interests mapped to the particular company’s strengths.” Entry Points are also delivered at the account-level. They are defined by client teams to call out the topics most salient to company positioning and capabilities. Client-defined Entry Points are visible within Priority Engine, Salesforce, and export files and are reflected in both the account and prospect rankings.
Prospect-Level Intent is also available within Priority Engine’s Connected App for Salesforce. Sales reps can quickly fill sales cadences and call lists with high-priority prospects and focused prescriptive insights. With a single click, Sales reps can add new prospect names to Salesforce, providing a direct path from buyer intent to active leads and contacts. Prospect and account-level insights, including Entry Points and behavioral intelligence, are displayed within Salesforce Account, Contact, and Lead records.
When uploading Accounts, domains are used for account matching and duplicate prevention. If a Prospect cannot be associated with an account record, it is uploaded as a Lead.
Account-level fields include account rank, domain, employees, industry, revenue, account address, and up to ten account entry points. Other account insights include five account signals (e.g. Widespread, Sustained, Late Stage, Stakeholder, Cross-Vendor), an account active this week flag, and behavioral flags for marketing (e.g. visited website, engaged with content, clicked banner), ICP match flag, and their Account Star Ranking.
Contact-level fields include name, title, email, content downloaded, a prospect active this week flag, up to ten Prospect Entry Points, contact address, contact phone, LinkedIn URL, and Priority Engine Contact URL.
Ongoing Salesforce enrichment is not yet available but is on the Priority Engine roadmap.
Priority Engine also supports Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, and HubSpot out-of-the-box, with custom support for other platforms.
Prospect-Level Intent is available in both Priority Engine and the SMB Priority Engine Express subscriptions. The Salesforce connector is included as part of a standard Priority Engine license.
TechTarget announced Prospect-Level Intent within its Priority Engine technology sales and marketing intelligence platform. Prospect-Level Intent builds on the inherent strength of its second-party intent dataset. The intent data is collected from over 140 enterprise technology media sites owned by TechTarget. Because its readers have opted into the platform, intent data is associated with buyers and influencers at target accounts and derived from content carefully tagged by topic, buying stage, competitors, etc.
Unlike third-party intent, which is both anonymous and limited to account-level buying patterns, second-party intent identifies account-level activity and surfaces active members of buying teams, including technology decision-makers, economic decision-makers, administrators, or influencers. Selected via TechTarget algorithms, Priority Engine prospects – individuals intensely engaged in specific research – are likely members of an active purchase decision.
TechTarget’s Prospect-Level Intent informs sales and marketing professionals when prospects are active in their market category or have downloaded content related to the company or its competitors, regardless of whether they are current or net-new contacts.
“Account-level surges do tell you what’s popular with a set of personas right now, but tell you relatively little about who might actually be making a purchase,” blogged Rebecca Kitchens, SVP of Market Development. “News-based surges tell us something about the mood of the market, but explain very little about impending purchases except in the macro sense. They may give you something to talk about with accounts, but they don’t tell you enough about actual buying motions to warrant aggressive prioritization.”
Kitchens warned against weak intent signals. “Most content is designed to be broadly appealing to maximize eyeballs but provides only weak purchase intent at best. Real-purchase intent is generated by high-quality content that applies to the research task at hand.”
Adds Andy Briney, TechTarget SVP of Products, “Many in the intent market have been wrongly focused only on accounts, when it is the people and teams at those accounts who actually buy…while TechTarget has always provided named, active prospects within accounts, these new enhancements empower revenue organizations with unmatched visibility into opted-in buyers in active buyers’ journeys to accelerate engagements.”
TechTarget has over 20 million opted-in technology decision-makers and influencers. Depending on the category, around 70% hold technology titles, with the remainder being buying committee members from other departments also engaged in technology decision-related research. With rapidly evolving changes in tech decision making, TechTarget data capture prospect functions and roles reflecting a wide range of players often not predicted by historically focused models.
TechTarget is so confident in the value of its intent data that it now labels Priority Engine as “The industry’s only opt-in, Prospect-Level Intent™ data.”
“At the end of the ABM process, it is all about having stronger relationships with the customer. And delivering improved customer experience is achieved in two ways: By caring to do so and then having the insights necessary to cut away noise and speak directly to customer’s needs. Prospect-Level Intent is the best way to do this. In study after study we’ve done, we find that when the properly trained salesperson or whoever’s doing the outreach uses the insights successfully, they will get better response and conversions — ultimately leading to more pipeline.”
John Steinert, TechTarget CMO
A redesigned Priority Engine user interface “provides faster access to buying team contacts within the context of their buyer journey, making it easier for sellers, marketers, and ABM teams to act on Prospect-Level Intent.” The UI also offers a customized view of top prospects based upon a firm’s ICP and research activity, helping define account rating and list ranking.
“You have to make it easy for [sales] to be able to quickly assess what they need to do in order to take the next best action with the accounts and prospects that they’re going after in their territory – it’s all about enablement,” said TechTarget CMO John Steinert. “Having that [data-based] connection with marketing allows sales to easily do this and take the easiest, fastest path to revenue easily leveraging precise data and intelligence.”
