Today’s MarTech Top Voice: Informa TechTarget, Chief Marketing Officer, John A. Steinert.
In the latest installment of our MarTech Top Voice series, we host MarTech specialist and industry thought leader, John A. Steinert, the CMO of Informa TechTarget.
John’s professional history is a perfect mix of content, strategy, and demand operations. He was trained as an anthropologist, a nd he found himself captivated very early on by the relationship of people and patterns to the decisions they made — a principle which took him from content creation to strategic and operational leadership. Every move has been his refining of the skill of audience engagement, market prioritization, and workflow integration to deliver measurable outcomes.
As CMO, John is chiefly responsible for demand generation marketing, and sales services that target the enterprise technology companies. The main achievements of his time at the helm of Informa TechTarget include the increase in proprietary intent data by 41% the launch of the new Informa TechTarget Portal, and the extension of coverage into new verticals such as Pharma, Sustainability, and Finances, all this without giving up on accuracy and client relevance.
John’s philosophy is the B2B mentality of tomorrow: token-based GTM plans that go beyond the profiling of demand to being the ones who actually get hold of it in real-time, a concept that is entirely based on trust, openness, and accurate data gathering.
MarTech Insights (MTI): Hi John, welcome to the Marketing Technology Top Voice Series. You’ve had an impressive journey leading marketing at Informa TechTarget. How has your background shaped your approach to driving growth and innovation in the B2B tech marketing space?
John: I majored in anthropology, which gave me a really strong foundation in thinking about people and patterns.
Making my way into the business world, I got into B2B marketing first through content, then through strategy, and finally via operations.
Content taught me to think about the needs of the person on the other end of a message.
Strategy taught me how to prioritize – whether across markets, segments, accounts, and these days, around buying groups.
And, demand operations taught me the importance of integration, workflow, and change management.
MTI: Informa TechTarget is known for its data-driven marketing. Could you explain how your team leverages intent data to tailor campaigns and engage prospects more effectively? How do you see the role of intent data evolving in B2B marketing over the next few years?
John: The short answer, and maybe it’s over-simplification, is that business success has always been about looking for signals and then making bets about where things are going.
So, the signals, or “intent” revolution, is really just a continuation of best practice in seeing opportunity and taking action on it. As a business, Informa TechTarget has always been about understanding markets, choosing among them, and then serving their needs for information.
That’s our direct service to B2B professionals, our editorial readers.
Our business depends on delivering valuable information to business people in exchange for permission to learn from them. This learning, this understanding of people’s needs and wants, is how we are able to deliver to them efficiently. It’s what keeps them coming back to our 220+ digital properties and why those audiences keep growing.
Our ability to continuously engage people like this is a measure of the trust they put in our editorial expertise.
We serve their needs, which builds their trust; they keep coming back, and the audience grows. This isn’t as easy as it can sound. And over the years, we’ve gotten very, very good at it. So good that thousands of B2B companies understand that to efficiently find, engage, and convert B2B buyers, Informa TechTarget’s network is a critical piece.
If you think about how a buyer’s network of inputs for their decision-making actually works, if you recognize the role of digital content in today’s buying decisions, you can begin to understand the role Informa TechTarget has in connecting buyers and sellers.
MTI: Tell us more about the Informa TechTarget Portal.
John: Informa TechTarget Portal is the next logical phase in our continuous effort to help our clients accelerate their growth.
Because our intent data is at the person level, it’s very unusual in the marketplace and unusually powerful for a wide variety of use cases. It’s much more precise than others’ and it’s available at a remarkable scale. Building on that foundation and in collaboration with our clients, we’ve been able to continuously innovate to serve a diverse set of use cases and go-to-market personas.
Simply put, our data delivers substantive value for everything from strategy (planning and product), to content (messaging, positioning, and more), to demand (identifying and converting people, buying groups, and accounts), to pipeline (supporting sales prioritization, personalization, acceleration, a nd growth). The big aha for us was realizing that while some customers only want one piece, more and more are understanding the power of the data and want the experience to be more holistic.
At the same time, as you know, we have a huge portfolio of service offerings designed to strengthen B2B marketing performance and reduce the workload of always-stretched teams.
So Portal is also the logical next step to increasing the ease with which customers can achieve the outcomes they come to us for. The big idea that knits it all together is the reality that, given our scale in B2B, our audiences can serve as an indispensable asset to any tech vendor’s market team. As such, the better we can provide easy access to them, the better our client will be able to accelerate their growth. And that’s really thinking behind everything we do.
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MTI: With a 41% expansion in proprietary intent data and the launch of the new Portal, how do you see this fundamentally changing the way B2B marketers approach ABM and demand generation in the next 12–18 months?
John: Well, the change in B2B marketing has really been accelerating over the last 5 years or more.
Every month, it seems, another customer starts to get more serious about re-thinking their understanding of how demand can be identified, intercepted, and captured. Forrester has called this Revenue Process Transformation, and I like the term quite a bit. Simply put, it means understanding market patterns better and taking action on them more effectively. And that’s the connection I see with our making 41% more proprietary data available now.
To understand your markets and prospects more effectively, you’ve got to have access to more good, accurate, and precise signals, so that’s really what we’re delivering. That’s the foundation you have to have in place.
Of course, in parallel, you need to adjust processes for sure, certainly some systems set u,p and perhaps some KPIs. Signals-based go-to-market is a refinement on the ‘data-driven’ terminology. Unlike cold contact data and other slow-changing information, signals are both fleeting and additive. Signals are where the world is heading, and we intend to always be an indispensable supplier to the markets we serve.
MTI: You’ve added 2,000+ new topics and expanded into industries like Pharma, Sustainability, and Finance — how are you ensuring that this breadth doesn’t dilute precision, but instead strengthens the relevance of insights for clients?
John: There are a few interesting variables at play here.
You’re correct in recognizing that signal precision is critical for certain objectives and use cases. Industry coverage is also a critical need for companies that either specialize in an industry or are looking to use an industry-based strategy to expand their business. For new concepts, there’s the challenge of trying to figure out which – call them ‘contiguous’ – audience is likely to be a source of momentum. And then there’s the challenge of understanding how audience behavior is actually evolving in a particular topical area – and doing some experimentation. So precision is a big piece. Discovery is also a big piece.
Establishing g connection is absolutely fundamental. From there, it’s about optimization. For all these reasons, we intend to maintain depth and expand breadth as it serves our audiences and clients.
MTI: Marketing technology is rapidly evolving. Looking ahead to 2026 and beyond, what’s your vision for scaling your martech stack? How do you balance adopting new technologies with keeping your team agile and focused?
John: This is an internal question, right?
Or maybe it’s both what we’re doing and doing in support of our clients’ needs?
What’s common to both is that for both ourselves and our clients, we’re becoming more and more signals-based.
Even while we’re pretty maniacal about keeping our stacks simple, we are investing more in technically skilled practitioners, strengthening opportunities to enable everyone. We’re naturally looking for significant time dividends from AI deployment internally, and that requires new-skilling across many functions. If I were to call out one critical area, it would be faster, more sophisticated analytics that help us understand the impact of experiments.
By getting better insights faster, we can run more, smarter experiments and accelerate our progress on the back of the winners. This applies both to our own stack – how we get insight out and how we innovate on that – and to our commercial stack, where it’s how we learn to better serve the needs of our readers and our clients.
MTI: Data privacy and ethics are top concerns in marketing today. How do you ensure your marketing practices maintain audience trust while maximizing the potential of data-driven insights?
John: Let me take ethics first, because that’s something that’s always distinguished both our editorial standards and our data collection methods. Journalistically, we’ve long been recognized for our impartiality.
That’s been essential to building trust with our audience. Commercially, our data collection approach has always stood out in the industry for its transparency. There’s no black box mystery – the behaviors are directly observed, and the content involved is 100% known. Clients understand it and know they can trust it. Coming from 50+ million permissioned B2B professionals, it’s accurate, precise, and actionable at scale.
Looking forward, data privacy and, in particular, data sovereignty are super important, especially as AI accelerates. In building value into our data sets and then building new solutions out of them, maintaining the sovereignty of our own data is both how we add value and how we protect our users from hallucinations and misuse.
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MTI: Finally, what advice would you give to aspiring marketing leaders aiming to make an impact in the MarTech space? What key skills or mindsets do you think are essential for success?
John: The simple answer is to be continuously upskilling and continuously producing work that others are not. Tools skills are good, but tools change. Techniques evolve as well. We have to evolve with them. You’ve probably heard the 10,000 hours and grit theories. I’ve also heard it called the learning-doing loop. If you were a company, you might refer to it as ‘building a business flywheel”. I’m talking about looking for jobs and managing yourself professionally in ways that you can learn as much as possible and do as much as possible of what it is that your function or company produces. Through learning and doing, doing and learning, you will start to identify patterns … patterns of what works and what doesn’t. And if you are ambitious, you will use that knowledge to make recommendations, for strategy, for improvements, for things that make the business better in some way. That creates value in your work. That you can share publicly to build your reputation and network. If you want to make professional progress, that still works, in sustainable, scalable ways.
MTI: As you look to 2026 and beyond, what’s your prediction for the next big shift in martech and digital advertising, and how is Informa TechTarget preparing to help B2B organizations stay ahead of that curve?
John: I think first we have to look at the buyer side of the equation, and we have to be a little more specific than martech and digital advertising as a whole. I think that there are meaningful differences between most consumer purchasing and enterprise B2B where we play. Over-simplifying, it’s a difference between little decisions and big decisions. My thoughts mostly apply to the latter. That said, overall, I think that for a while at least, we’re going to see a lot of polarization in buyer behavior. On the ‘little things’ side, there’s a whole lot of research activity that LLMs can make a lot easier for buyers. Then there’s the reality of personal and professional risk decision-making and the role of human-to-human validation.
Do you rely on the web for the health of your family?
Or, do you consult someone you trust?
Do you get a single opinion before you choose a life partner, or do you introduce them to friends?
Where research behavior and decision-making come together is where things will shake out.
Buyers will have a go-to set of LLMs and then a set of go-to experts and expert sources that they rely on.
There will be a consolidation of quality sources. Informa TechTarget intends to remain a quality source for enterprise tech audiences. As I said before, we intend to be indispensable to buyers, and that’s directly connected to being indispensable on the supply side as well. Now, let me say a little about the tech involved, because maybe you wanted me to stay specific to that.
About the tech, I think anything that can make the workflows involved in marketing will be considered, as long as it doesn’t a) increase overall complexity doesn’t increase and b) it helps quality go up. I say that because I believe buyers, when they’re between buys (which is most of the time) or in an active buyer’s journey, will continue to welcome quality interactions and the brands and vendors that address their needs well.
All our current research and analysis support this continuing to be the case.
MTI: Tag a marketing leader from the industry whose response you would like to see at the MarTech Insights Top Voice program:
John: I’ll tag Evan Liang, a founder over at LeanData, because I believe that middleware like his is a critical part of the glue that makes signal-driven go-to-market possible as we move forward.
Thank you so much for your time today! We look forward to having you again at our Top Voice Series.
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About John: John Steinert is the Chief Marketing Officer at Informa TechTarget, a position where helping technology enterprises to meet and exceed their business goals through solutions that are sales and marketing purchase intent-driven is basically what he does. Content creation, strategic planning, demand operations, and the development of strong marketing teams are all part of his career story. John is a retriever of customer engagement innovations in the B2B space through his unique fusion of an anthropological viewpoint and a data-driven mentality.
John Steinert is the Chief Marketing Officer at Informa TechTarget, a global leader in accelerating tech company growth. As CMO, John focuses on purchase intent-driven marketing and sales solutions, delivering measurable business impact for enterprise technology companies. He is excited to come to work every day because of his combined passions for quality content, continuously improving processes, and meaningful results.
About Informa TechTarget
TechTarget, Inc. (Nasdaq: TTGT), which also refers to itself as Informa TechTarget, informs, influences, and connects the world’s technology buyers and sellers, helping accelerate growth from R&D to ROI. With a vast reach of over 220 highly targeted technology-specific websites and over 50 million permissioned first-party audience members, Informa TechTarget has a unique understanding of and insight into the technology market.
Underpinned by those audiences and their data, we offer expert-led, data-driven, and digitally enabled services that have the potential to deliver significant impact and measurable outcomes to our clients:
- Trusted information that shapes the industry and informs investment
- Intelligence and advice that guide and influence strategy
- Advertising that grows reputation and establishes thought leadership
- Custom content that engages and prompts action
- Intent and demand generation that more precisely targets and converts
Informa TechTarget is headquartered in Boston, MA, nd has offices in 19 global locations.
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