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Development Partners: B2B Publishers
Take On Broadening BizDev Roles |
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21 February 2006 |
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The lead generation marketing techniques of TechTarget grew
up through servicing business technology buyers who knew
how to take full advantage of their highly targeted online
publications. Six years after their founding it adds up to
a highly profitable USD 70 million business that now is
moving into a broader array of services. As it does so
TechTarget looks more like a business development partner
that is capable of managing business development efforts
throughout the sales cycle. It's a formula that can be
highly profitable but not all business publishers are going
to be able to replicate it easily for their own sectors. |
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When
TechTarget first burst
onto the business content scene in 1999, its network of highly
focused Web-only sites that tied editorial, vendor and
buyer-generated content together with common lead management
tools for technology marketers was unheard of in B2B
publishing. Now with dozens of awards and more than 2,500
advertisers TechTarget has grown into a USD 70 million company
that nearly doubled its EBITDA earnings last year,
according to
its most recent announcement. Its ground-breaking
methods not only match high-quality prospects to ads and
marketing messages through its targeted online content but also
act as the core of a network of events and custom marketing
consulting services to drive up the total value of publishing
and marketing relationships. Now TechTarget even publishes its
own targeted print journals to extend its marketing reach.
The TechTarget formula has evolved to the point that it is
now possible to target not only buyers based on profiles but
also based on where they are in the buying decision cycle. As
Shore Senior Analyst
Janice McCallum
notes, "Essentially, through its qualifying process and the
LeadPRISM tools, TechTarget serves as an outsourced
prospecting, qualifying, and tracking process for vendor sales
departments." In other words, the process of working the
sales funnel for product and services vendors is moving
from being fed by publishers to being maintained
by publishers. The key to this phenomenon is content that acts
not only as information but as a relationship-building tool
that allows a community of buyers and sellers to engage one
another in the most profitable manner possible. Sellers pay a
price for this kind of relationship, but in the fast-moving
world of enterprise technology sales it's a price that few can
afford not to pay if they are to engage the right buyers at the
right times in complex and lengthy sales cycles.
The potency of this approach to business development has not
been lost on other publishers, though the scaling and
techniques will vary from industry to industry.
ALM, the
leading commercial publisher of law journals,
announced recently a new program to deliver lead generation
services to sellers and buyers in the legal sector through
three of their key publications. The program contacts
subscribers via phone to understand their sales lead status in
conjunction with the publishing of print journals, information
which is onpassed to advertisers and marketers. With ALM's
potent and growing online presence and events program, one can
see how these tools can be expanded to bring TechTarget-like
precision to big-ticket services marketing in the legal
industry. The mix of content platforms and methods may differ
from industry to industry, but the general formula of using
content to bring buyers and sellers into much closer and
effective business development relationships is bound to be
very attractive across those sectors.
This emerging process of using content to establish and
maintain sophisticated business development services poses a
number of opportunities and challenges to traditional business
publishing. Here are a few thoughts as to what business
publishers should near in mind when approaching a broader role
in business development services:
- First movers will have first dibs on managing business
development relationships. A conservative approach to
managing business development relationships in more depth via
publishing services may be in order for many publishers still
trying to cope with the impact of ad dollars drifting online,
but those who are willing to take some initiative to move in
this direction are going to be rewarded with what is hardest
to replace: unique communities of buyers and sellers. In any
given market segment buyers will have limited interest in
having intermediaries acting as their matchmakers for
commercial relationships, so those who do it best and do it
first are going to be rewarded handsomely.
- Think beyond the subscription/controlled circulation
paradigm. The traditional battles between those valuing
the quality of paid subscription bases and those valuing the
coverage of broader free access via controlled circulation
publications seem to be relatively moot in the face of highly
targeted and managed lead services. What good is either if
you can't maintain a relationship with buyers in a way that
makes it clear where they are in the buying cycle for very
specific products and services? Subscription services will
still pay the bills in many general types of business
publishing, but the more specific and high-ticket your
advertisers the more important it becomes to open your mind
to the possibilities of expanding your marketing services
model.
- Be ready to sign on new talents to make business
development programs successful. Business
development-oriented content marketing programs are likely to
be far beyond many staffs used to traditional interfaces with
ad agencies and ad accounts; they will even be beyond those
who are beginning to get adept at search engine marketing.
This is in large part because the nature of how audiences are
engaged takes on a much broader dimension, becoming more
interactive both through their contributions to the content
pool and their self-identification as willing and able
prospects. All of this may sound like monitoring
click-through rates and reader response cards, but there's a
whole lot more to consider in your on-board skill sets before
trying this out.
The enormous potential of expanding lead management programs
into sophisticated business development services is hard to
resist, but it will take some careful homework by leading
publishers to become effective at it. And in a lot of instances
business development-oriented marketing solutions may just not
match up with either the audiences or marketers or both. But
where it does make sense publishers are going to have to become
far more adept at managing their value propositions dead in the
heart of that intersection of content, technology and people
that Shore terms vContent.
Companies like TechTarget that started early on with a
tech-savvy audience reaped the early rewards of these
techniques, but as business audiences in general move to online
venues the sophisticated partnerships being mastered by
TechTarget are likely to become far more common across a more
complete range of market sectors. Happy BizDev hunting for
those who do.
-
John Blossom
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