• June 19, 2019
• Content, Demand Generation, Intent Data

Award-Winning Content Delivers Better Purchase Intent

Steve Niemiec

Chief Operating Officer & Chief Revenue Officer

Share This Post

This past week, we welcomed our full editorial team from all around the world to our headquarters at TechTarget for our annual meetings. It was truly amazing to see the impressive force we have dedicated to producing the quality content that serves our audience of enterprise technology buyers all gathered together in one place. I would like to take this time to congratulate them – this past month the American Society of Business Publication Editors (ASBPE) announced the winners for the 2019 Awards of Excellence (the “Azbees”) and once again, TechTarget took home an impressive haul, winning 22 national and regional awards (or those who don’t know what the Azbees are, think of them as the “Oscars” of B2B editorial).

More than just the volume of awards we received, it was even better to see the volume of awards across a wide set of categories – everything from web-based features to podcasts, conference guides, e-zines, Q&As, investigative articles and infographics. As with the Oscars, when a movie is nominated across an array of awards like “Best Picture”+ “Best supporting Actress” + “Best Supporting Actor”+ “Best Screenplay”, etc., we know it’s worth our time on the couch when looking for a good movie. That’s the case in TechTarget editorial.

These 22 awards this year mark our continued and unfailing commitment to excellence in editorial.  Including the 2019 total, TechTarget has won over 200 ASBPEs over the course of its history. Let me say that again — more than 200 WINS!

The secret to good marketing is simple – be where your buyers are

The reason I’m calling attention to them is that in the exploding landscape of MarTech where everyone has a fancy new tool or claims to have a way to do it better, I often feel like a very simple aspect of marketing is getting muted – the need market to and place your message where your target audiences go to find information to support an upcoming B2B purchase.  In other words, to “be where the buyers are” and make your solutions relevant and appealing to them. Do you think your target audience of buyers thinks about your marketing stack when they need to research? The answer is no. Buyers go and they look for good content to enable their process. It’s quality content that attracts them, just like how you and I are drawn to quality content in our consumer lives.

Reach audiences of buyers early and influence them throughout their entire purchase journey

B2B buyers act, live and breathe like us as every day consumers. They go to Google and type in a key-word query – this is the starting line. It’s Google that then goes and scours thousands of articles to produce for the B2B end-user the most relevant content to fit the information need on the 1^st page.  The truth is that Google could care less if it’s a TechTarget site or even your own, it cares only about only surfacing to the end user the best information to suit the search query. However, more often than not, it is TechTarget content that they see on the first page. And why? Well, it’s actually simple – we write a lot of really good content and we have been doing it for a long time. Over the last 20 years, we have built a rock solid content footprint and deep, wide-ranging topical authority across our network of over 140 enterprise technology-specific websites and more than 10,000.

With a critical mass of hyper-relevant content intentionally built for every stage of the buyer’s journey, TechTarget is able to attract highly qualified audiences of buyers at scale. They come in to our network first and continue to consult our independent editorial as they gather requirements, evaluate vendors and develop shortlists.

This year alone we will:

• Organically rank on the first page for hundreds of thousands of keywords.
• Produce thousands of original articles, buyers guides and tips for IT. Yes, original.  In just our first 3 months, we produced over 1,500 original pieces and 33 buying-centric product guides alone.

Better content drives real purchase intent

TechTarget’s expert writers and editors know the enterprise tech industry, understand buyers’ needs, and the quality, informative content they create empowers our audience of technology buyers to make better purchase decisions. This leads to highly valuable purchase intent insight for TechTarget’s sales and marketing clients, who leverage outputs rolled up in our Priority Engine platform to target the right buyers at the right point in the journey. There is a lot of buzz in the market about purchase intent data right now, but know this: real purchase intent data can only be as useful as the relevance of the activity it comes from.

Real purchase intent is also being able to know not just the accounts, but identify the actual buyers that that are actively in-market and researching solutions so that you can immediately activate. Ownership of your content and network is absolutely essential for this.

Other intent providers in the market may provide expansive networks which they mine for surge related to keyword at strictly an account level, but they don’t own or create the content so they lack the context to actually understand if those accounts are in-market or merely false positives. And without individual contact-level information, you’ve already put yourself behind schedule in activating against this intent.

Make sure you’re asking your intent providers the right questions

As you evaluate vendors in the market, I would encourage you to ask the hard questions about where the data comes from and how it’s created and sourced. Please ask us the same questions as we’re happy to show you because we’ve got a lot to be proud of coming from our editorial team. To learn more about how TechTarget’s award-winning content drives real purchase intent insight for enterprise technology companies, view this video.

actionable purchase intent, b2b purchase intent data, content marketing, editorial content, purchase intent insight