TechTarget Stock

TechTarget, Inc. is a global data, software and analytics leader for purchase intent-driven marketing and sales data, which delivers business impact for business-to-business (B2B) companies. The company’s solutions are designed to enable B2B technology companies to identify, reach, and influence key enterprise technology decision makers faster and with higher efficacy. The company offers products and services intended to improve information technology (IT) vendors’ abilities to impact highly targeted audiences for business growth using advanced targeting, first-party analytics and data services complemented with customized marketing programs that integrate content creation, demand generation, brand marketing, and other advertising techniques.

The company’s content strategy includes three primary sources that enterprise technology and business professionals use to assist them in their pre-purchase research: independent content provided by its professionals, vendor-generated content provided by its customers and member-generated or peer-to-peer content. In addition to utilizing its independent editorial content, registered members and users appreciate the ability to deepen their pre-purchase research by accessing the extensive vendor-supplied content the company makes available across its virtual events, webinar channels and website network (collectively, Network). Likewise, these members and users can derive significant additional value from the ability to seamlessly interact with and contribute to information exchanges in a given field on the company’s Network.

The company had approximately 31.8 million registered members and users, which it refers to as its audiences, as of December 31, 2023. While the size of its audiences does not provide direct insight into its customer numbers or its revenue, the value of the services the company sells to its customers is a direct result of the breadth and reach of this content footprint. This footprint creates the opportunity for the company’s clients to gain business leverage by targeting its audiences through customized marketing programs. The targeted nature of its audiences enables B2B technology companies to reach a specialized audience efficiently because the company’s content is highly segmented and aligned with the B2B technology companies’ specific products.

Through its ability to identify, reach and influence key decision makers, the company has developed a broad customer base and, in 2023, delivered marketing and sales services programs to approximately 2,600 customers.

Solutions

The company’s solutions consist of:

IT Deal Alert: A suite of data, software and services for B2B technology companies that leverages the detailed purchase intent data the company collects on enterprise technology organizations and professionals researching IT purchases via its network of websites and its webinar community platform. Through its proprietary data-capture and scoring methodologies, the company uses this insight to help its customers identify and prioritize accounts and contacts whose content consumption and online research activities around specific enterprise technology topics indicate that they are in-market for a particular B2B technology product or service. The suite of products and services includes Priority Engine and Qualified Sales Opportunities. Priority Engine is a subscription service powered by the company’s Activity Intelligence platform, which integrates with customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation platforms (MAPs), including Salesforce.com, Marketo, Hubspot, Eloqua, Pardot, and Integrate. The service delivers lead generation workflow solutions designed to enable marketers and sales forces to identify and prioritize accounts and individuals actively researching new technology purchases or upgrades, and then to engage those active prospects. The company launched IntentMail AI in December 2023, which is Priority Engine's AI-powered messaging feature, which enables sellers to automatically generate personalized email copy. Qualified Sales Opportunities is a product that profiles specific in-progress purchase projects via surveys and interviews with business technology professionals whose research activity and content consumption is indicative of a pending technology purchase. Qualified Sales Opportunities includes information on project scope, purchase criteria and vendors considered.

Demand Solutions: The company’s offerings enable its customers to reach and influence prospective buyers through content marketing programs, such as white papers, webcasts, podcasts, videocasts, virtual trade shows, and content sponsorships, designed to generate demand for their solutions, and through display advertising and other brand programs that are aimed at influencing prospective buyers. This allows B2B technology companies to maximize ROI on marketing and sales expenditures by capturing sales leads from the distribution and promotion of content to its audience of enterprise technology and business professionals.

Brand Solutions: The company’s suite of brand solutions provide B2B technology companies with direct exposure to targeted audiences of enterprise technology and business professionals that are actively researching information related to their products and services. The company leverages its Activity Intelligence platform to enable significant segmentation and behavioral targeting of audiences to improve the relevancy of digital ads to the researcher’s needs. Branding solutions include on-network banner advertising and digital sponsorships, off-network banner targeting, and microsites and other related formats.

Custom Content Creation: The company delivers market insights and guidance to B2B technology companies through its Enterprise Strategy Group annual research and advisory subscription programs, custom market research services, and consulting engagements. In addition, the company’s Enterprise Strategy Group experts author custom content products, including technical and economic validations, white papers, infographics, videos and webinars. This content can be leveraged by B2B technology marketers to support product launches, enable demand-generation campaigns, and establish overall thought leadership. The company also creates white papers, case studies, webcasts or videos to its customers’ specifications. These customized content assets are then promoted to the company’s audience within both demand solutions and brand solutions programs. Additionally, the company offers off-the-shelf editorial sponsorship products on topics aligned to customer markets, enabling them to engage and generate demand via packaged content created by its editorial staff to educate technology researchers on new technology trends and feature options.

BrightTALK platform: Allows the company’s customers to create, host and promote webinars, virtual events and video content. Customers create their own hosted Channels on the platform where they schedule both live and on-demand webinars for promotion to BrightTALK’s community of in-market accounts and individuals. The BrightTALK Channel also enables customers to self-administer lead generation campaigns, set up workflow integrations between the Channel and their CRM and MAP systems, and access reporting detailing the size and growth of their community of subscribers over time. Customers may also create an off-network embedded Channel page on their own corporate website featuring content in their BrightTALK Channel, as well as an embedded BrightTALK registration form that captures and converts interested individuals to marketing leads.

Strategy

The company intends to continue to innovate in the area of data-enabled marketing services; expand long-term contractual relationships with customers; expand into complementary sectors; and continue to expand its international presence.

Platform and Content

The company’s content platform consists of a network of specialized websites and webinar and video channels that serve the needs of enterprise technology and business professionals who are making corporate purchase decisions. At critical stages of the purchase decision process, these content offerings through different channels are designed to meet the needs of enterprise technology and business professionals for expert, peer and B2B technology company information and provide a platform on which B2B technology companies can launch targeted marketing and sales campaigns that generate measurable, high ROI.

Market Categories

Based upon the logical clustering of the company’s audiences’ respective job responsibilities and the marketing and sales focus of the products being promoted by its B2B technology customers, it categorizes content offerings to address the key market opportunities and audience extensions across a portfolio of distinct market categories. Each of these marketing categories services a wide range of enterprise technology sectors and sub-sectors and is driven by the key areas of enterprise technology and business professionals’ interests described below:

Security: Every aspect of enterprise computing depends on secure connectivity, data and applications. The security sector is constantly growing to adapt to new forms of threats and to secure new and traditional technologies, such as mobile devices, wireless networks, virtualized systems and cloud environments. The company’s compliance regulations, cloud adoption, and highly publicized data breaches are driving interest and investment in increasingly sophisticated security solutions such as zero trust and endpoint detection and response (EDR) that supplement or replace traditional perimeter security solutions such as firewalls and antimalware. The company’s online properties in this sector offer navigable and structured guides on B2B technology companies and enterprise technology solutions in key subsectors, such as network security, intrusion detection, ransomware and malware defense, identity and access management (IAM), data and application security, managed security services, cloud-native security and security program management.

Networking: Broadly defined, the networking market includes the hardware, software and services involved in the infrastructure and management of both enterprise and service provider data and voice networks. As new sectors of networking have emerged and grown in importance, network professionals have increased their organizations' investments in wireless and mobile computing, cloud networking, software-defined defined wide area networks (WAN), secure access service edge (SASE), application performance, network virtualization and automation, and evolving network operations, as well as collaboration, video conferencing, unified communications as a service (UCaaS), and voice over internet protocol (VoIP). The company’s online properties in this sector, which include TechTarget Networking and TechTarget Unified Communications aim to address the specialized needs of networking professionals by offering content specifically targeting these growth areas.

Storage: The storage sector consists of the market for disk, flash, cloud and tape storage systems that store and manage data. Growth is fueled by industry trends, such as the ongoing need to maintain and supplement data stores that are exponentially escalating, and by external factors, such as expanded compliance regulations and increased focus on disaster recovery. Recent trends reflect an increased emphasis on solid-state storage and cloud storage. At the same time, established storage sub-sectors, such as network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks (SANs), have been invigorated by technologies, such as data deduplication and storage virtualization. The company’s online properties in this sector, which include TechTarget Storage, TechTarget Data Backup, and TechTarget Disaster Recovery, address enterprise technology and business professionals seeking storage systems in key areas such as Fibre Channel SANs, iSCSI SANs, solid-state storage, NVMe, NAS, backup hardware and software, storage management, container-based storage, storage security and cloud-based platforms.

Compute, IT Operations and DevOps: As more organizations have embraced cloud computing, IT decisions makers must navigate the best ways to manage operations across a diverse set of IT platforms. Data centers that house servers, storage devices, routers and switches must be optimized to work alongside distributed multi-cloud environments. IT operations staff must design and manage flexible computing environments capable of scaling to meet the demand of cloud-native applications. The company’s key online properties in this sector provide targeted information on the B2B technologies and services that serve these sub-sectors. The company’s properties in this sector include sites, such as TechTarget Data Center, which covers power and cooling, mainframe, colocation, data center infrastructure management (DCIM), software-defined data center (SDDC) architectures, and private cloud. TechTarget Cloud Computing and SearchAWS.com cover public, hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure, as well as the key tools and strategies cloud administrators need to deploy and manage those environments. SearchVMware.com focuses on managing and building out virtual environments on the most widely installed server virtualization platform. TechTarget IT Operations covers DevOps, container deployment and management, IT automation and the impact of microservices and event-driven computing on enterprise technology operations.

The company also covers servers, application and desktop solutions deployed in distributed computing environments. Given the breadth of the Windows market, the company has segmented its Windows-focused media based on enterprise technology and business professionals’ infrastructure responsibilities and purchasing focus. The company’s online properties in this sector include SearchWindowsServer.com, which covers server, storage and systems management, as well as the integration of on-premises Windows environments with the Microsoft Azure cloud; This network of sites provides resources and advice to enterprise technology and business professionals pursuing solutions related to such topics as Windows backup and storage, server consolidation, and upgrade planning. TechTarget Enterprise Desktop focuses on the deployment and management of Windows, Linux and macOS end-user computing environments. This market has evolved to focus on digital workspace technology, in which IT professionals can manage end-user access to a variety of resources and workspaces. TechTarget Mobile Computing covers the enterprise technology management issues surrounding the deployment of tablets and smartphones in the workplace. Combined with the company’s properties that focus on server virtualization, TechTarget Virtual Desktop focuses on desktop virtualization, giving it a comprehensive offering addressing the area of virtualization technologies. This site also covers the growing area of desktops as a service, as well as application streaming and other virtual and cloud-based delivery methods.

CIO/IT Strategy: The company’s CIO/IT Strategy site provides content targeted at chief information officers (CIOs), senior enterprise technology executives and business executives with technology responsibility, enabling them to make informed enterprise technology purchases throughout the critical stages of the purchase decision process. Their areas of interest generally align with the major sectors of the IT market: AI, BI and big data, business applications, cloud, data center, DevOps, end user computing, networking, outsourcing, risk management, security and storage. The focus of this elite purchasing group, however, is on how these technologies can be used in tandem to give their companies a competitive edge. In an environment where the mega-tech companies set the pace of business and customer expectations, enterprise IT leaders are called on not only to enable business strategy and operations but to also reinvent them as conditions change. With the pandemic-driven shift to remote work and the rise of digital-first customers, the purview of CIOs has expanded to include a deeper focus on front-facing business concerns, such as customer experience and product development, in addition to the oversight of IT infrastructure and services. Cybersecurity and data privacy are also of strategic importance to CIOs. Accordingly, the company’s targeted information resources for senior IT executives focus on digital transformation and the supporting technologies, methodologies, business processes and skills required today for a digital-first business model. Technologies that support enterprise speed, agility and customer service are of paramount importance. They include the use of machine learning and AI for faster and better insight, cloud for scalability and flexibility, software automation technologies, such as robotic process automation (RPA) for offloading rote work, intelligent business applications for optimizing the employee experience and boosting productivity, and emerging technologies, such as digital twins and quantum computing that could provide business value.

Business Applications: The company’s Business Applications and Analytics market category focuses on mission critical software such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), databases and business intelligence, content management enterprise resource planning, and customer facing applications such as CRM software for mid-sized and large companies. Because these applications are critical to the overall success of the businesses that use them, there is a high demand for specialized information by IT and business professionals involved in their purchase, implementation, and ongoing support. HR professionals are faced with challenges around employee experience, remote workforce management and new best practices around recruiting, hiring, learning and development and more. The company’s applications-focused properties in this sector include sites, such as TechTarget Customer Experience, TechTarget HR Software, and TechTarget ERP. These sites are leading online resources that provide this specialized information to support mission-critical business applications such as CRM, sales force automation, databases and ERP software.

Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI): Businesses are using artificial intelligence to improve internal processes and tools, and technology providers are increasingly adding AI capabilities to enhance their products. AI also has the potential to disrupt jobs and various technology markets. TechTarget Enterprise AI covers the quickly evolving technologies of AI and machine learning, giving insight into the enterprise use cases for AI, how AI development functions, and how businesses can capitalize on the new possibilities around machine learning in enterprise applications. Businesses are also collecting more data that they need to understand how to best use this data for key insights. The information produced by these business applications is seen as a corporate asset that is essential for gaining competitive advantage through informed, data-driven decisions. New tools and techniques to analyze, model and visualize data can help organizations drive more value. Leveraging this data can help improve operational efficiency, enable business agility, and improve sales effectiveness and customer service. As a result, business intelligence and analytics have become pervasive as various organizations increasingly rely on mission-critical information to optimize their businesses. TechTarget Business Analytics, TechTarget Data Management, and TechTarget Content Management cover the business intelligence, data management, content management and collaboration disciplines associated with such initiatives. These sites combine with Data Science Central to cover the wide-ranging topics under the umbrella of information management. Built on a community of data science experts and contributing writers, Data Science Central targets a highly technical audience. The site covers data science and analytics, machine learning and AI, as well as more strategic topics such as remote work and data trends.

Application Architecture and Development: The application architecture and development sector consist of a broad landscape of tools and languages that enable developers, architects and project managers to build, customize and integrate software for their businesses. The company’s application architecture and development online properties focus on development in enterprise environments (including mobile and web development), the programming languages that developers use most, and the various tools used for modern application builds and distributed systems management. In particular, the desire for increasingly streamlined and modular application development cycles has fueled interest in innovative software approaches, such as decomposing large business applications into microservices and introducing event-driven architecture capabilities. Given the scope of challenges associated with application architecture, especially at the enterprise level, the associated tools and products also tie in heavily with application integration, performance testing, data security, citizen development and API management. The company’s online properties in this sector include sites, such as TheServerSide.com, which hosts independent communities of developers and architects, TechTarget Software Quality, which covers application testing, quality assurance and Agile development methodologies, and TechTarget App Architecture, which serves architects, developers, IT managers and line of business executives who are interested in adapting existing architectures to meet the speed, scale and agility needs of modern applications.

Channel: The company’s Channel site addresses the information needs of business and technology professionals in the IT services and solutions industry. The company’s coverage encompasses managed service providers, managed security services providers, cloud consultancies, systems integrators and resellers. Those companies deliver products and services to SMB and enterprise customers, becoming trusted advisors and the preferred source for technology. In light of this status, B2B technology companies actively seek alliances with channel partners. The resulting dynamics in the B2B technology channel are well-suited to the company’s integrated, targeted content strategy. The company’s flagship online property in this sector is TechTarget IT Channel. In addition to this website, TechTarget channel media is able to profile channel professionals accessing information on any website within the TechTarget Network. As channel professionals recommend, deploy and manage hardware, software and cloud services from vendors in a particular enterprise technology sector, the key areas of focus tend to parallel those for the sub-sectors addressed by its IT-focused properties. Those sites cover a wide spectrum of technology: for storage, backup, storage virtualization and network storage solutions such as SAN, NAS, cloud storage, NVMe and flash memory; for security, vulnerability assessment, threat detection and response, and identity access management; for networking, wireless, network security, SD-WAN and VoIP; for systems, public cloud, hybrid cloud, converged infrastructure and server virtualization.

Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG): The company’s TechTarget Sustainability and ESG site helps IT professionals and corporate leaders understand this emerging sector and implement new ESG initiatives. Several factors are pushing businesses of all sizes to focus more on ESG, including consumer and employee expectations, investor relations and government regulations. Business leaders and IT practitioners need new processes and tools to track, measure and report on efforts to meet these requirements. In addition to measuring their own energy efficiency, carbon footprints and environmental impacts, many technology buyers must also consider the sustainability of their partners and technology providers. The company’s coverage helps these buyers understand how existing and new technologies can help them meet complex expectations and regulations. Many organizations are also beginning to measure and track social commitments or diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) factors when making business decisions. Business leaders must understand the social and human impact of their business decisions and research technology that supports DEI.

Healthcare Technology: The Xtelligent Healthcare Media properties provide healthcare executives and IT professionals who support healthcare initiatives with news and information about the latest healthcare technology trends. As the industry leans more on new and emerging forms of technology, Xtelligent sites focus on topics and trends affecting the industry's daily operations and continued digital transformation. The company’s EHRIntelligence.com site connects with subject matter experts in the field to share best practices for streamlining implementation, improving usability, and enabling the technology to improve outcomes. HealthITSecurity.com leverages security and privacy experts across the continuum of care to help readers address potential threads and adopt best practices for health data security and privacy. HealthITAnalytics.com features real use cases in data analytics that improve the health of individuals and populations and the cost of providing care. RevCycleIntelligence.com covers news and firsthand experience managing claims, improving A/R management and performance and adopting new models of reimbursement. mHealthIntelligence.com provides the latest news, featured stories, and emerging trends in mobile health, telemedicine, remote patient monitoring, and connected health for providers. By connecting with subject matter experts from the nation’s top payers, the editors at HealthPayerIntelligence.com share actionable insight drawn from real-world experiences working with providers, employers, beneficiaries, and policymakers under commercial and public contracts. PatientEngagementHIT.com includes news that reports on how to leverage health information technology to engage patients and communities. HITInfrastructure.com covers the latest technologies and trends that support the development of flexible, reliable IT infrastructure for healthcare providers. PharmaNewsIntelligence.com shares insights with pharmaceutical executives interested in learning more about value-based care, managing clinical trials and building relationships with payers and providers. HealthcareExecIntelligence.com responds to the needs of healthcare executives by offering the latest news from the industry. It provides clear and direct coverage of recent and emerging developments across the healthcare industry with a focus on innovation and strategy. LifeSciencesIntelligence.com provides coverage of healthcare science focused on major trends in pathology, genetics/genomics, biotechnology, medical devices and reproductive health. The company’s reporting also extends to a weekly Healthcare Strategies podcast and quarterly Insights research reports.

Customers

The company markets to B2B technology companies targeting specific audiences who are actively researching purchasing decisions. The company maintains multiple points of contact with its customers in order to provide support throughout their organization and during critical stages of the sales cycle. As a result, individual customers often run multiple marketing/sales programs with it in order to reach discrete portions of its targeted audience. The company’s products and services are delivered under both short-term contracts that run for the length of a given marketing/sales program, typically less than six months, and through integrated, contracts in excess of 270 days (longer-term contracts) covering various client needs. The company has developed a broad customer base and delivered campaigns to approximately 2,600 customers in 2023.

Sales and Marketing

The company has an internal direct sales department that works closely with existing and potential customers to develop customized marketing programs that provide highly targeted access to enterprise technology and business professionals. The company organizes its sales force by the sector-specific market categories that it operates in and has a global accounts team that works with its largest customers. Additionally, the company organizes certain individuals into Customer Success Teams. Those teams facilitate the usage and renewal of certain of the company’s products. The majority of the company’s sales and marketing staff is located in Massachusetts with additional staff located in California, London, England, New York, New York and Sydney, Australia.

The company pursues a variety of marketing initiatives designed to support its sales activities by building awareness of its brand with B2B technology companies and positioning itself as a thought leader in ROI-based marketing. These initiatives include purchasing online sponsorships in media vehicles that reach technology marketers, as well as engaging in direct communications with the database of relevant contacts the company has built since its inception. Examples of the company’s direct communications include selected e-mail updates on new product launches and initiatives. The company also produces videocasts, blogs and white papers for technology marketers where it provides information on the latest best practices in the field of online B2B technology marketing.

Through its Press and Public Relations activities, the company seeks to develop and maintain relationships with key analysts, publications and influencers covering B2B marketing and sales topics.

Online Member and User Acquisition

The company’s primary source of traffic to its websites and webinar channels is through non-paid traffic sources, such as its existing registered member and user base and organic search engine traffic. Organic search engine traffic is also a key source of new registered members and users for its sites. Because the company’s sites focus on specific sectors of the enterprise technology market, its content is highly targeted and is an effective means for attracting search engine traffic and from this, growing its member and user base. The company also makes marketing expenditures designed to supplement its non-paid traffic and registered members and users including, keyword advertising on the major search engines and targeted list rentals of e-mail subscribers from a variety of targeted partners, media sources, and data providers.

Technological Infrastructure

The company has developed an expandable operations infrastructure using leading Cloud infrastructure providers and off-site data centers to maintain its websites and online offerings. All of the critical components of the system are redundant, allowing the company to withstand unexpected component failure and to undergo maintenance and upgrades. The company’s infrastructure is scalable, enabling it to make additions that fit into the existing environment as its system requirements grow based on traffic, member, and customer growth. The company’s critical data is copied daily to an online backup storage solution. The company maintains a quality assurance process to constantly monitor its servers, processes, and network connectivity. The company leverages industry standard network and perimeter defense technologies, DDoS protection systems, web application firewalls, and enterprise grade DNS services across multiple vendors.

Competition

The company’s primary media competitors, each of which possesses substantial resources to compete, are Ziff Davis, Inc., Madison Logic, Inc., and Foundry, an IDG, Inc. company. The company also competes for the members who comprise its target audiences primarily with the media companies that produce content specifically for enterprise technology and business professionals, such as Ziff Davis, Inc., and Foundry, an IDG, Inc. company. In the data-oriented businesses, the company competes with providers of predictive analytics and internet-based analysis including companies like 6sense Insights, Inc., Infer, Inc., Bombora, Inc. and Aberdeen Group, LLC. In general marketing services, the company competes with list and lead providers of various types, such as ZoomInfo Technologies Inc. As a result of its acquisition of BrightTALK, the company competes with a number of web-based meeting, webinar and virtual event providers and physical event providers, such as LogMeIn, Inc., Intrado Corporation and ON24, Inc.

Intellectual Property

The company’s TechTarget and BrightTALK trademark and logo, as well as certain other marks and logos, are registered in the U.S. with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in select foreign jurisdictions and it has applied for U.S. and foreign registrations for various other marks. In addition, the company has registered over 1,675 domain names that are, or may be, relevant to its business, including www.techtarget.com, www.knowledgestorm.com, www.bitpipe.com, and those leveraging the search prefix used in the branding of many of its websites.

Seasonality

The timing of the company’s revenues is affected by seasonal factors, with revenues generally lower during the first quarter relative to subsequent quarters in a given year. The company’s revenues are seasonal primarily as a result of the annual budget approval process of many of its customers, the normal timing at which its customers introduce new products, and the historical decrease in marketing and sales activity in summer months. The timing of revenues in relation to the company’s expenses, much of which do not vary directly with revenues, has an impact on the cost of revenues, selling and marketing, product development and general and administrative expenses as a percentage of revenues in each calendar quarter during the year (year ended December 31, 2023). The majority of the company’s expenses are personnel-related and include salaries, stock-based compensation, benefits and incentive-based compensation plan expenses.

Consumer Protection and Privacy Regulation

The company’s e-mail practices comply with the requirements of the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003, state laws and applicable foreign legislation.

History

TechTarget, Inc., a Delaware corporation, was founded in 1999. The company was incorporated in 1999.