An interview with tech marketing innovator, Alexander Pasch, Digital Marketing Transformation Manager at Schneider Electric
Schneider Electric is the leader in digital transformation of energy management and automation with operations in more than 100 countries. Alexander works in the Secure Power & Data Center Business of Schneider Electric in Europe and is responsible for enhancing the customer’s digital journey using real intent and activation data.
What challenges were you trying to address when first choosing a solution?
When we first approached [Informa] TechTarget, we aimed to address two main challenges: we needed a steady influx of new, high-quality contacts into our database, and access to intent data to better understand what those contacts are focused on during their online research.
One of the significant benefits of partnering with [Informa] TechTarget is their use of first-party data, which eliminated our concerns about data brokering and ensured that the intent data we received came directly from them as a publisher, providing us with clear and reliable insights we could leverage for our marketing programs.
[Informa] TechTarget’s powerful and precise intent data helps us personalize our outreach at both the account and prospect level to drive maximum impact.”
What is your current marketing and demand generation strategy?
Our marketing and demand generation strategy is centered around account-based targeting, focusing on specific strategic accounts for our organization. We aim to uncover additional contacts from the buying groups of these accounts for effective contact mapping. Given our organization’s diverse product offerings, we want to identify IT professionals within very specific industry segments that align to our offerings, which can be challenging. To address this, we create various audiences and export groups in [the Informa TechTarget Portal] tailored to these segments and deliver industry- or account-specific content to each of those groups. We run smaller drip campaigns using marketing automation to engage these prospects, ensuring that the content aligns with their topics of interest, as identified by the intent data in [the Portal].
In addition to intent data, we leverage [Informa] TechTarget Lead Generation programs to fill our pipeline with in-market leads, including content syndication and Confirmed Projects.
How are you leveraging the Informa TechTarget Portal to support this strategy?
[The Informa TechTarget Portal] is a crucial component of our marketing strategy. The platform enables us to acquire highly qualified, relevant and GDPR-compliant prospects for our database and precise intent data from specific accounts and segments. More specifically, we use [Informa TechTarget] Prospect Exports to uncover new prospects and prospect-level intent and [Informa TechTarget] Account Intent Feeds to deliver accountlevel intent into our systems. Before Account Intent Feeds, I used to manually aggregate account-level data myself. Now, we get account-level intent as a direct feed that helps inform our account targeting and marketing outreach.
In addition to uncovering new opportunities, [Informa TechTarget] helps us enhance our existing opportunities. We upload our existing opportunity accounts to [the Portal] so we can see what’s currently happening at those accounts, and we further leverage that intent to monitor progress and accelerate those opportunities. We also encourage our sales team to utilize [the Portal] to find valuable insights about their target accounts and support their outreach. Overall, [the Portal] helps us enhance marketing’s role beyond just generating marketingqualified leads (MQLs) to driving true business intelligence.
You were one of the first customers to try Market Monitor. What has your experience been using that tool to support your marketing program?
As a very data-driven person, Market Monitor is a goldmine to me. Market Monitor helps us better understand the current and near-future market interests, such as what the current research trends are within the market, especially around topics that are relevant to us, and which industries are showing a higher interest than others.
Market Monitor insights and trends are sourced from real people’s behaviors, so it’s a great resource for our content strategy. The tool can help us define and orchestrate the optimal customer journey and create the best content to map to those journeys. Plus, the data in Market Monitor is very easily accessible and downloadable.
Market Monitor is the next best thing to speaking with your customers directly to better understand what topics and content work best for them. I recommend spending time in Market Monitor to understand more about the market you’re in, your audiences’ buying habits, and the content consumption trends from buying groups in your target segments. It’s definitely worth digging into!
What KPIs are you tracking related to your Informa TechTarget program?
We track several key performance indicators (KPIs) related to our [Informa] TechTarget program, focusing primarily on digital engagement and commercial impact. One KPI we monitor is digital engagement: we assess how well the contacts from [Informa] TechTarget, whether from [the Portal] or our content syndication program, remain engaged across our digital platforms by tracking “returning active users.” Our goal is to have contacts engage with our content multiple times within a few months. Another primary KPI we track is commercial impact: how are these opportunities impacting our pipeline? Ideally, we want to create multiple marketing touchpoints over time to connect the contacts we have from [Informa] TechTarget to our existing business opportunities and measure that impact.
What results have you seen from your Informa TechTarget program?
Our [Informa] TechTarget program, [the Portal] in particular, has positively impacted our pipeline, even when faced with long sales cycles. The leads we’ve generated are high-quality, and we see strong performance with them through our marketing programs and follow-up conversations. Notably, over 10% of contacts sourced from [the Portal] are “returning active users,” indicating high engagement, “stickiness,” and interest in our offerings, compared to our benchmark rate for returning active users from other lead sources, which is in the single digits. This success reflects our effective audience segmentation and contextual outreach, as these contacts engage significantly more than those from other sources. This is due largely in part to [Informa] TechTarget’s powerful and precise intent data, which helps us personalize our outreach at both the account and prospect level to drive maximum impact. I’m pleased to say that we’ve achieved a healthy ROI and maintained a robust pipeline for sales through our [Informa] TechTarget program.
