91% of cybersecurity companies worry they don’t have an excellent content strategy. Is this you?
Since it now takes 65% more time to create effective content than in 2014, you’re no doubt drowning in work, lacking content, and spending too much on hiring freelancers.
Without an automated, targeted cyber risk content strategy, you’re doomed in 2021.
Luckily, this guide offers a step-by-step walkthrough on how to create and execute a flawless cybersecurity content strategy to boost lead generation, increase adoption, and convert sales.
Still copying content into WordPress?
You’re doing it wrong… say goodbye forever to:
- ❌ Cleaning HTML, removing span tags, line breaks, etc.
- ❌ Creating your Table of Contents anchor ID links for all headers by hand,
- ❌ Resizing & compressing images one-by-one before uploading back into your content,
- ❌ Optimizing images with descriptive file names & alt text attributes,
- ❌ Manually pasting target=“_blank” and/or “nofollow” attributes to every single link
Table of Contents
What is a Cybersecurity Content Strategy?
For a successful 2021 cybersecurity content strategy, you’ll need to create and distribute regular, personalized content targeted to a segmented audience.
The aim of this content should be to solve specific problems for key buyer personas, and to educate prospective customers on the value of your product.
Personalized content is the #1 tactic used by email marketers to improve performance. Tailor every aspect of your content strategy to how your target audience prefers to receive content:
- The cybersecurity topics you’ll cover in your content plan
- The tone of your content
- The delivery schedule
- The content format
- The content placement
In doing this, you’ll experience a boost in brand awareness and trust, brand authority and expertise, and click-through rates and opens. In fact, a consistent, regular content campaign can increase conversions by 23%.
To ensure consistency, try marketing automation software, such as social media scheduling tools, email marketing software, and content management apps.
To effectively structure your content strategy, you should aim to create a topic-focused library of resources that pinpoint and solve potential customer problems.
Utilizing multimedia content formats, like text, video, and image, your content strategy should use a cross-platform method to reach your audience where and how they like to be reached.
Doing this increases brand visibility to the right people for the right reasons. By appealing to consumer preferences, you nurture leads and build brand credibility.
In 2021, education-based content reigns supreme. Consumers want tutorials, how-tos, and guides that explain how to garner the best user experience from your products.
For example, 36% of people want to see more educational videos from brands so they can see how products function.
High-caliber educational content teaches the values of your product, while entertaining and engaging prospective customers across multiple platforms.
The ultimate key to executing a flawless 2021 cybersecurity content strategy lies in analyzing and interpreting your marketing data.
Personal data insights will show you how consumers respond to your content marketing tactics. Analytics will tell you what your audience consumes, when, where, and how.
By monitoring, measuring, and utilizing insights from your cyber network security content strategy, you’ll be able to identify:
- Your most effective content strategies
- Your most prosperous audiences
- Key trends and behaviors in your target audience
- Where your marketing efforts and resources are being wasted
This will help you to generate more accurately personalized content for each specific niche in the cybersecurity space.
To get started, the top two free SEO analytics tools are Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Try those.
If you’re wondering what all this looks like in action, check out Entersoft’s cybersecurity content strategy below:
The application network security firm exemplifies most of the principles outlined above:
- A consistent brand image
- A regular social media campaign that informs, educates, and engages
- A multi-platform approach, that leverages Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and email marketing
- The topical information security content is tailored to today’s global conversation
How to Execute a Flawless 2021 Cybersecurity Content Strategy
Rock-solid content is the key to establishing your cybersecurity brand image and connecting to customers on a level that understands and solves their pain points.
Without understanding how to identify, target, and reach these customers, your cybersecurity content strategy will fall on deaf ears.
This section will give you a step-by-step walkthrough to how you can structure, create, and execute a dynamic content strategy that reaches your cybersecurity audience to convert leads into sales.
Step 1: Know Your Audience
Personalized content converts for a 202% better than content that isn’t tailored to your cybersecurity audience.
Since 52% of consumers feel recognized by network security brands when sent personalized offers, it’s in your interest to tailor content to solve customer problems.
To do this, you need to create ideal buyer personas, based on your top existing customer. From here, target your content to these personas to capture lookalike audiences.
Funnel these audiences through lead capture mechanisms, like landing pages and social media groups to collect customer data for future marketing efforts and lead nurturing.
Beware. 63% of buyers won’t accept anything but personalization as a standard service.
Equally, as 43% want to be recognized across all touch points, failing to personalize your content will leave you overshadowed by your competition.
Check out how network protocol analyzer, Wireshark is personalizing its cybersecurity content.
With a simple landing page of links, Wireshark offers targeted email marketing campaigns.
Wireshark’s ideal buyer personas put themselves into the relevant sales funnel.
Notice the direct call-to-action (CTA) for prospective customers with high traffic.
These customers are top earners for Wireshark, do they draw more attention to targeting this cybersecurity sector directly.
Here are some quick best practices for content personalization:
- Analyze existing cybersecurity customers
- Identify where you provide value
- Create lookalike buyer personas and target audiences
- Tailor content
- Use analytics tools to enhance
Step 2: Find the Conversation
45% of cybersecurity content marketers complain that it’s difficult to create content that resonates with the security technology sector.
As you already know, 72% of buyers will only interact with cybersecurity brands that personalize content to their interests.
In this respect, you need to find and join the conversation.
This is a simple two-phase process:
Phase One – Find the Conversation
Use SEO and analytics tools to assess your best existing customers and your competition.
Find out:
- What your audience is talking about
- Where they hang out
- What problems they experience
- What security solutions they’ve already been offered
- When your audience consumes content
- The types of content your audience consume, and so on
Phase Two – Join the Conversation
Execute content strategies that not only educate your audience, but also engage and interact with your prospective customers.
For those with the budget, deploy targeted advertising and automated email marketing to do this.
If you have a low budget, try creating and joining social media groups and interacting with key players within these networks.
Alternatively, try Gary Vee’s $1.80 Strategy:
- Use a hashtag tool to find the top 10 hashtags for your cybersecurity niche
- Find the top 9 posts with these hashtags
- Interact with each of these posts, giving your ‘Two Cents’ worth
Two cents ($0.02) x 9 posts x 10 hashtags = $1.80
Ask questions, offer free advice, and encourage conversions to your platforms.
To find key phrases to join the right cybersecurity conversation, use Ubersuggest.
Let’s look at the security app firm, Websecurify.
Ubersuggest gives plenty of topical app security subjects for Websecurify to focus its content toward.
Step 3: Optimize Your SEO Strategy
67% of marketers say that optimizing SEO is the most effective content strategy and 73% of marketers use SEO tools to do this.
Looking at those cybersecurity marketing statistics, it would be wise for you to do the same.
SEO is the critical infrastructure on which your topic-focused cybersecurity content strategy should be based.
Use it as a map to target all the conversational touch points in your target audience. This will:
- Show expertise and demonstrate brand authority
- Improve your E-A-T rating on Google for higher brand visibility
Bear in mind that Google gets nearly 85,000 searches per second and nearly 70% of clicks go to the first five search results.
In this vein, you must rank highly for key phrases or no prospective customers will see your technology security solutions.
To optimize your SEO strategy, follow Metasploit’s lead.
The penetration testing framework has performed a SERP analysis to rank highly for popular, relevant keywords.
Using a consistent, multi-platform campaign, Metasploit distributes personalized, educational content in various content formats.
This updated content is structured to solve pain points — identified as key phrases in the conversation.
By optimizing its SEO strategy in this way, the cyber attack testing framework increases its visibility on Google.
Step 4: Create Targeted Educational Content
Over a third of people want educational content from brands. In this respect, customers want you to teach them how to solve their problems so they don’t encounter these cybersecurity issues again.
Teach how your tech security solution solves issues in all different ways across the cybersecurity space.
36% of content marketing teams are using “how to” guides and educational content to tackle this task effectively.
The best practices to encourage prospective clients to engage with your educational content are:
- Image-heavy blog posts and articles
- Topical SEO so your content easy to navigate
- How-to/Tutorial videos
- Step-by-step infographics
- Gamification and interactive posts
Take SEC Apps, for example…
Notice how the security app company has created an educational toolkit that shows users what each app is and how it works.
The content is peppered with images and screenshots to show users rather than simply explain.
Step 5: Leverage Audio Marketing
With voice searches and podcasts booming in 2021, audio marketing should be a big consideration for your cybersecurity content strategy.
Since the top three common keywords in voice searches are “how”, what” and “best”, you have a killer opportunity to educate your audience with audio content.
Use podcasts to establish your brand as an authority or as an advertising channel. Appear as a guest on industry-specific shows, and host industry leaders in your audio content.
As the average regular podcast listener listens to seven podcasts a week, this gives you seven touchpoints to nurture each audio lead.
And considering almost half of monthly podcast listeners have home incomes over $75k, there’s money to be extracted from this cybersecurity audience.
Take the Down the Security Rabbit Hole cybersecurity podcast as an example.
Featuring current events in the cybersecurity space, this podcast opens conversation on cybersecurity themes.
Educating the audience, guests speak about their cybersecurity solutions in a relevant context.
Optimizing ample opportunity for advertising, featured guests establish themselves as cybersecurity thought leaders.
Step 6: Create Shareable Videos
Video is the best content marketing mechanism to increase engagement, shares, conversions, and revenue.
As the most used and shared form of content, marketers rave about the success of video marketing strategies:
- 37% of marketers say that producing video is the most efficient form of content marketing
- 89% of marketers say video returns good ROI
- 87% of marketers agree that video increases web traffic
- 80% say video marketing has increased sales
However, it’s important to recognize that making video can be complex and time-demanding. A third of the time, marketers need to outsource.
Since 62% of marketers plan to increase their use of YouTube this year, it’s important to consider a budget injection into video marketing.
LastPass, a strong password management firm, has a brilliant cybersecurity video marketing strategy.
Looking at the password company’s YouTube strategy, you can see that LastPass offers a range of video content formats, including:
- Webinars ons strong password protection
- Promo videos for their robust password services
- Tutorials on how to protect passwords
- Product videos for strong password risk solutions
- Videos in various languages
LastPass recycles this content into its Instagram and Facebook strategies, showing brand consistency.
For best results, try offering both long-form videos (1-5 minutes) and short-form videos (30 seconds or less) or different social media platforms.
Step 7: Build Cross-Platform Multimedia Social Media Marketing Campaigns
It’s no secret that social media campaigns are one of the most popular content methodologies to reach your target audience.
However, where it was previously common to share the same content across all social media platforms, the cybersecurity space now demands varied content formats, responsive to the relevant platform.
For example, 63% of marketers claim that Facebook stories are super effective, while
11% say that Twitter ads are more fruitful than TV ads.
Interestingly only 32% of marketers use LinkedIn for video, although videos get 20+ more shares on LinkedIn than anywhere else.
Use your social media campaigns to connect with your audience segments and encourage engagement to boost brand awareness and authority.
Harness these platforms as opportunities to distribute CTA links and convert cybersecurity sales.
Focus your efforts on where your audience are using analytics tools to find your relevant platforms.
Check out how information security automation firm, Tines, distributes a regular, consistent, multi-platform social media campaign.
Combining video, text, and imagery, the security software uses Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, a mailing list, and a blog.
Use a social media editorial calendar and social media scheduling tools to ease this process.
84% of businesses use social media publishing tools, while 72% of businesses deploy automated email marketing software.
Try automation software to ensure regularity and consistency in your cyber risk content campaigns. Try using:
- Hootsuite
- Buffer
- Facebook Publishing
- ClickFunnels
- Mailchimp
- Infusionsoft
Step 9: Measure and Improve With Analytics Tools
83% of cyber risk businesses use analytics tools to measure the performance of content campaigns and identify key areas of improvement.
69% of B2B organizations will focus efforts on analytics this year, as data-driven content insights can help to reduce wasted marketing resources and boost conversion rates.
Consider Cybereason.
The threat detection firm used Hubspot analytics to work out where to best target their content efforts.
Having experimented with webinars, the threat vulnerabilities protection firm found education-based content techniques to be effective.
Cybereason continues to release regular security risk webinars to capture leads, educate their audience, and increase ROI.
For best results, follow Eric Reis’ ‘Build-Measure-Learn’ cycle:
- Build content campaigns
- Measure their progress
- Learn how to improve upon them from the personal data
Conclusion
Hopefully this article has given you a better understanding of how to build a flawless cybersecurity content strategy that converts.
Don’t forget to use technology and tools to automate and execute on a regular basis.
And if you have any questions about building your cybersecurity content strategy, don’t hesitate to reach out to the experts at Wordable.
