Q&A with Stuart Sumner, Editorial Director at Incisive Media

Media 7 | May 20, 2021

Q&A with Stuart Sumner
Stuart Sumner, Editorial Director at Incisive Media, is an experienced journalist, editor, presenter and broadcaster with expertise across all enterprise technology areas. He has successfully lead and developed editorial teams, set editorial strategy, improved brand integrity and focus, developed audience numbers and engagement, and built communities of C-suite executives.

Without that audience understanding, brands will struggle to produce relevant content. There’s no substitute for knowing your audience.



MEDIA 7: Could you please tell us a little bit about yourself. What inspired you to pursue a career in writing?
STUART SUMNER:
I’ve always been interested in writing. As a child I filled exercise books with stories, later I wrote comedy for TV and radio. After a decade working in IT, I realized I wanted to turn my hobby into my profession – and managed to combine it with my experience of IT by becoming a journalist with Computing.

M7: What is your approach to branding your company, its products and services?
SS:
The key is to approach it from the audience’s perspective. What response are they likely to have to your brand, your message, your personality? What are their pain points, their needs? If you understand all of that you’ve got a good chance of success.


The best way to win the content war is to have better, more valuable, and more timely content than your competitors.You need to offer audiences a regular supply of high-quality, in-depth content which they can’t get elsewhere.



M7: How do you ensure that your content team understands the requirements and curates content in an engaging manner?
SS:
Again it comes down to understanding the audience. The best way to develop that understanding is to spend time with them and develop industry contacts. Ensuring the team is regularly interviewing the right people, and attending events (virtual or otherwise) is a good way to do that. As for writing engaging content, that’s harder to develop. Hopefully, if you’ve built your interview process properly you’ll already know something of their writing style, and that ability will come built-in. Otherwise, you’ve got a job on your hands!

M7: What channels do you think are the most relevant for Content Marketing? How do you gauge which ones are the most promising, given your target customers?
SS
: It’s important to understand what your channels are for. I see a lot of brands treating every channel as yet another opportunity to fling sales messaging in front of audiences, most of whom don’t want it. Content marketing works best when it’s entirely native and fits seamlessly with the brand’s other content. That means it needs to be every bit as colourful and interesting as the best editorial, and meet audience needs just as effectively. You can gauge effectiveness by measuring the usual things like engagement, bounce, etc. But there’s no replacement for having a steering committee of senior audience members who you can ask – what do they think of your content marketing and what works best for them.


It’s important to understand what your channels are for. Content marketing works best when it’s entirely native and fits seamlessly with the brand’s other content.



M7: The COVID-19 pandemic has affected businesses worldwide. What has been Incisive Media’s strategy of survival during the tough time?
SS:
Incisive Media moved quickly at the start of the pandemic to move our face-to-face events online. We very rapidly developed a brand new style of a virtual event called ‘Deskflix’, a half-day, multi-sponsor event filled with panels, presentations, networking and even a quiz! The series generated £4.6m of revenue, had over 100 sponsors and served more than 100,000 delegates. We were lucky that we were already very well set up to put on virtual events, given our expertise with webinars, and our dedicated teams of events organizers – not to mention our wealth of excellent editorial presenters.

M7: How do you target content to your audience, and what are the challenges that you face while producing effective content?
SS:
Every brand today faces challenges to secure eyeballs online. Audiences have content thrown at them from every angle, and it can be hard for them to separate the wheat from the chaff. That’s why it’s more important than ever to build and safeguard trust with your audience. Once they start to see your content as trusted and view your site as a safe place away from misinformation and empty marketing, you’ll see improve engagement and lots of returning ‘super users’. You need to offer audiences a regular supply of high-quality, in-depth content which they can’t get elsewhere. Of course, that’s not easy to produce – and thank god for that, because that’s how we differentiate ourselves!

M7: What are your views on content shock? Is it a worrisome trend or a content marketing myth?
SS:
It’s a long-standing trend that will continue, and it’s what I’ve been talking about already in this interview. The way to win the content war is to have better, more valuable, and more timely content than your competitors. How do you do that? Proximity to your audience. If you really know them, including their sub-groups, niches and quirks, then you should understand what they want, how and when.

Computing is very lucky to have an experienced team who’ve worked with the technology sector for many years. We have long-standing ties to hundreds of senior technology leaders, and we speak to them all regularly. We believe we understand our audience better than anybody, and that gives us huge confidence, even in the face of rampant competition and ‘content shock’. Without that audience understanding, brands will struggle to produce relevant content. There’s no substitute for knowing your audience.

ABOUT INCISIVE MEDIA

Incisive Media is an award-winning business to business digital media and events business. It inspires, connects and informs through its market-leading brands. It is the APO digital publisher of the year 2010, 2013, 2016, 2017 and 2020.

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Telecoms are clearly in need of space-related infrastructure for satellites, and there is a huge opportunity here. Meanwhile, the telecom industry has clearly picked a favorite cloud provider, as research around Amazon Web Services (AWS) increased by 287% in Q1 2023, compared to a 72% increase for Microsoft Azure. Additional highlights from the research include: -Manufacturers are focusing on building resilient supply chains, implementing AI and automation solutions to optimize operations, and investing in marketing and brand building as direct-to-consumer sales grow. -The healthcare industry is researching emerging technologies, such as AI automation, remote patient monitoring, and the Internet of Healthcare Things (IoHT) to address major challenges and improve healthcare delivery. -Financial services and banking professionals are focusing on research in areas such as market volatility, pre-bankruptcy planning, and debt management while also investing in long-term wealth preservation strategies. -Software businesses are leveraging tools like ChatGPT, conversational AI, and chatbots to improve operations and customer engagement while also adopting proactive defense strategies against cyber threats. -The cybersecurity industry is staying ahead of the curve by investing in advanced security measures, addressing workforce shortages, and preparing for future risks to protect against cyber threats in the digital age. -Professional services research trends show increased demand for advisory, consulting, and specialized services, while technology investments center around an open architecture, payment processing optimization, and core banking operations. -Telecommunications businesses are exploring investments in infrastructure and innovative services to meet growing customer expectations and capitalize on new revenue opportunities. The media and advertising sector is putting considerable resources into social media marketing, data management, and video advertising, while also focusing on improving customer experience and engagement to retain a loyal customer base. About Bombora Bombora tells businesses which companies are researching their products and services. With this understanding, sales and marketing teams can be more relevant and consistent and improve performance across all activities. This intent-driven approach revolutionizes the way businesses market and sell to other businesses through transparent data built on an ecosystem of quality, collaboration and innovation. With direct integrations with dozens of leading data and media-buying platforms, Bombora is building a world in which business buyers value sales and marketing for its relevance, timeliness and accuracy. To learn more, visit www.bombora.com.

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CORE ABM

ABM Trailblazer Demandbase Announces Buying Group AI, the Next Breakthrough in B2B

PR Newswire | June 06, 2023

Demandbase, the Smarter GTM™ company that helps B2B organizations hit their revenue goals, today introduces the biggest breakthrough in B2B since ABM — AI-powered buying groups. Demandbase One™ will be the first and only platform to use cutting edge, generative AI to analyze millions of data points, drawing from more than 150M B2B contacts combined with the industry's deepest advertising, intent, and engagement data to generate dynamic B2B buying groups, assign roles and personas, and recommend new contacts. It also will aggregate buying signals across the group and streamline engagement, unlocking a clear competitive advantage and saving hours of manual research and guesswork to drive greater revenue growth. "As a company that heavily relies on ABM, Demandbase's new Buying Group solution will be a game changer," said Dan Cafiero, senior program manager, Account-Based Marketing and Paid Media at Seagate. "The ability to automatically identify and engage with accurate buying groups, understanding their personas and roles, will revolutionize our sales and marketing efforts. This tool truly understands the complex dynamics of B2B decision-making processes, cutting through the noise to reach the right people at the right time. We can't wait to get our hands on it." "B2B GTM teams have known for a long time that the traditional lead-based approach really misses the mark, because individuals don't buy solutions in the enterprise — that focus is too narrow," says Brewster Stanislaw, chief product officer, at Demandbase. "That's why account-based marketing came into existence… but the reality is an account-based approach has its drawbacks as well. It's too broad because it's not every person at an account that participates in a buying decision. The sweet spot is in between; it's the buying committee, made of influencers, champions, blockers, etc., that actually determines where and when an enterprise will invest in a given solution." Stanislaw continues, "Until now, it's been too hard to implement buying groups because companies had to rely on manual guesswork and faulty data. Our AI-powered buying groups solve this once and for all by delivering on the audience that is 'just right.' We're using artificial intelligence to analyze massive behavioral data sets to generate accurate buying groups and automatically assign roles and personas to each of their constituent members. This empowers our customers to be optimally efficient across their entire GTM motion. By focusing on the buying group as their core GTM object, they can generate more demand with greater velocity through the customer journey, while minimizing waste by investing resources where they are most impactful. This is a revolution for B2B GTM teams that will unlock efficient growth, and those that adopt will be the CMOs and CROs of the future." The industry has recognized the need to target and reach buying groups, with Forrester Research saying that the goal of this approach is to "better align with the true buyer in virtually all B2B buying decisions — a group of people (the buying group) all working together to solve a business issue." "Identifying and engaging with the buying committee is the key to winning deals but it's really hard," commented Craig Rosenberg, chief platform officer at Scale Venture Partners. "That's why the introduction of AI-powered buying groups is so powerful for GTM teams. It eliminates the manual guesswork for B2B GTM teams thus allowing these teams to focus on driving increased demand." Historically, teams have relied on guesswork, manual processes, and missing and inaccurate data, resulting in systematic under-estimation of all personas that make up the full committee. With Demandbase Buying Group AI, this will all change. For the first time, companies will be able to use AI to automatically generate their ideal buying groups, create different buying groups for different products and journey stages, find the right contacts for each persona — adding them to their CRM, if not already there — and engage them with accurate contact information. The result will be fewer missed, lost, or delayed deals and vastly superior go-to-market execution. Demandbase pioneered the ABM movement and is now leading the way in this latest evolution of B2B go-to-market. The company is uniquely positioned to deliver on AI-generated buying groups with its massive data set that combines the customer's engagement data with Demandbase's B2B data — including AI-validated contact data on more than 150M buyers plus expansive advertising and behavioral data — to see how individuals interact across products and with each other. Demandbase Buying Group AI will launch out of beta in Q3 of 2023. See how it works to learn more and discover why buying groups are the foundation of a modern, Smarter GTM™ platform. About Demandbase Demandbase helps B2B companies hit their revenue goals using fewer resources. How? By using the power of AI to identify and engage the accounts and buying groups most likely to purchase, powered by combining your sales and marketing data with our validated B2B data — what we call Account Intelligence. Better data makes better AI, that's Smarter GTM™.

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