While the importance of cybersecurity marketing can’t be understated, without a robust strategy, you can’t measure the success of these tactics.
Marketing personalization is key to prosperity. So, it’s vital that you plan how you’ll coordinate marketing efforts to tailor your messaging to each customer sector.
By strategizing your cybersecurity marketing, you can pinpoint where to best allocate your marketing resources to increase conversions and boost sales.
This article offers a comprehensive walkthrough of how to design and execute a cybersecurity marketing strategy that propels you to success.
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Table of Contents
What is a Successful Cybersecurity Marketing Strategy?
Don’t be fooled. A successful cybersecurity marketing strategy doesn’t need to be stuffed with endless marketing tactics.
Instead, a successful cybersecurity marketing strategy understands customer pain points and showcases ways in which your product provides value in solving these problems.
In this sense, you should be segmenting your target audience and delivering relevant content that directs each buyer down the right sales funnel to the correct cybersecurity solutions.
For peak prosperity, this campaign should recycle existing customers back through the marketing cycle to encourage regular and repeat sales.
But what does this look like?
First, all marketing should be personalized. For example, 91% of buyers are more likely to choose brands who deliver personalized offers. This is why personalization is the number 1 tactic used in email marketing to improve conversions.
Secondly, your information security marketing strategy should be structured to ensure regularity and consistency. As consistency in marketing campaigns boosts conversions by 23%, it’s wise to automate this process with marketing tools.
This consistent campaign should feature multimedia content posts, platform-appropriate marketing mechanisms, and cross-channel posting.
Thirdly, your marketing efforts should educate your audience rather than hound them with tacky sales copy.
Two-thirds of people want to see more educational content. So, focus your cybersecurity marketing strategy on teaching how to use your product and how it benefits customers.
Lastly, it’s imperative that you monitor and measure your marketing tactics to recognize feedback and adjust your mechanisms to account for this.
Use analytics tools to identify the marketing techniques that are working and the areas where you’re wasting marketing efforts.
Consider how technology management service, ConnectWise, leverages its marketing efforts.
The security management service has structured a clear funnel to capture leads.
Using social media posts and adverts, ConnectWise qualifies security leads at the point of capture with a multi-field landing page form.
Educational content is used to show the company’s security expertise and the value of its IT management solution.
How to Propel Your 2020 Cybersecurity Marketing Strategy to Success: A Step-by-Step Walkthrough
While designing a solid cybersecurity marketing strategy is a big task, you don’t need to feel overwhelmed.
By deploying a series of integrated cybersecurity marketing tactics, you can build and measure your security tech marketing campaigns with ease.
That way you’ll understand where best to focus your marketing efforts.
This section will give you a step-by-step walkthrough to how you can use various digital marketing methods to boost awareness and drive conversions in the cybersecurity sector.
Step 1: Study Your Target Audience
Companies who don’t provide targeted, personalized marketing, are missing out on big sales.
Tailored content converts over twice as well as non-personalized marketing messaging.
Equally, two-thirds of buyers expect service to be personalized.
When you consider these two marketing statistics together, it’s clear that your cybersecurity digital marketing strategy must resonate with your buyer personas.
To do this best…
- Know your Unique Value Proposition (UVP) intimately
- Use analytics tools to discover trending conversations and issues in the cybersecurity sector.
- Match these issues to ways your UVP solved these technology security issues
- Create buyer personas that imitate the common customer with this issue
- Target marketing to educate each buyer persona on your value in solving these cybersecurity issues
- Customize marketing to reflect how your audience behaves on each marketing channel (43% of customers want to be recognized across all marketing platforms)
A top market growth hack for this is to use a chatbot.
Cyber threat company, CyberSmart, is a great example of this.
The chatbot qualifies customer problems immediately and directs them to the correct resources or sales channels.
The data from the chatbot is analyzed to identify the most asked questions. From here, the malware security firm can create content that attends to these issues.
Step 2: Find the Buzz
Find the trending conversations in the cybersecurity industry.
You need to know:
- The marketing platforms your audience likes
- The buzzwords they use
- The content formats they prefer
- The times they consume marketing content
As half of digital marketers struggle to create content that connects with their audience, it makes sense to start with what the audience wants.
Use analytics tools to make this market research process easier.
Use an analytics tool like Ubersuggest to find top keywords and phrases.
You can perform an SEO audit on your website and compare keyword density to competitor cybersecurity firms.
Use these SEO tools to find trending conversations and problems in the cybersecurity industry.
A great growth marketing hack to use here is ‘thank you’ tagging:
- Find 10 top industry-specific LinkedIn hashtags
- Interact with the top 10 posts of each
- Thank thought leaders, potential customers, industry visionaries for their perspectives, ideas, and engagement.
- See how they react and factor this into your marketing messaging
Step 3: Create a Rock-Solid SEO Architecture
Don’t ignore SEO. 67% of digital marketers know that SEO is the most important marketing strategy you have.
SEO is the backbone of your cybersecurity marketing strategy for two reasons.
One. A cleverly-designed SEO strategy creates a clear map for Google’s spiders. It tells Google what your cybersecurity solutions are, who it’s for, how you offer expertise, and in what format.
Google ranks you on these key search terms.
This brings us to point two…
Since there are 85,000 searches per second on Google, and 70% of all clicks go to the first five search results, you need to rank at the top.
This is why nearly 3/4 of marketers use SEO tools. They know that using tools to analyze audience conversations and behavior will improve marketing performance.
For example, when you perform an SEO audit of network monitoring firm, Flowmon, you can see how well the security company is doing:
- 7667 organic keywords
- 60K backlinks
- Only 1 critical error
To craft a bulletproof SEO strategy,
- Perform a SERP analysis of your key phrases
- Do an SEO audit using UberSuggest
- Create a topical, educational content strategy
- Tighten up your technical SEO
- Distribute it regularly across all platforms
Here’s a great SEO growth marketing hack: try refreshing old content.
Step 4: Leverage Educational Marketing
By teaching your potential customers how to use your product, you not only show how you solve their problem, you can also demonstrate your value in enhancing their systems in the future.
When customers understand your product, they’re more likely to buy. That’s why a third of digital marketers use ‘how-to’ guides, tutorials, and educational content to market their product
Since a third of people want educational marketing content from brands, try angling your marketing strategies to teaching customers how to use your products.
Check out how virus protection firm, AVG, does this. Offering a library of tips for security and performance, AVG teaches customers how best to use the product to enhance threat protection.
Equally, AVG executes a regular video marketing campaign that offers tutorials on their security product.
Be aware that image-heavy content and videos work best to visually connect with your audience across all social media marketing channels.
Step 5: Create a Strong Video Marketing Campaign
Video is the most important marketing strategy of 2020. Video is shared and consumed more than any other content format.
In terms of ROI, 89% of marketers say video has good returns, while 87% say video drives organic traffic, and 80% say video marketing boosts sales.
Two-thirds of marketers plan to increase use of YouTube
With videos, you can teach potential customers about your product, show them how to use it, engage them in your value, and entertain them with your brand voice.
When it comes to choosing video formats, 72% of digital marketers use explainer videos, while 48% say testimonial videos work well.
Create long-form videos for LinkedIn video, IGTV, and Facebook stories. Two-thirds of marketers say that Facebook stories are effective, so use these 24-hour video opportunities to teach and show.
Use short-form videos on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram. These are quickfire 30 second videos, so use these to give tips or show hacks.
See how network security firm, Perimeter81, uses its video marketing strategy.
The network threat company uses video to teach its product values and demonstrate social proof with customer stories.
These videos have a dedicated landing page on the network threat website. This is complimented with a consistent YouTube strategy, and regular video posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
Step 6: Harmonize and Automate Social Media Campaigns
Use your analytics and SEO strategy to guide your social media campaigns.
Your social media marketing should reflect the problems you solve and the value you offer, while delivering engaging content.
Since consistency drives revenue up by a quarter, you need to schedule your campaign to ensure regular social media posts are released.
Use social media scheduling tools like Hootsuite or Sprout Social to automate your social media posting calendar.
You must post on all the social media channels that are relevant to your cybersecurity sector. You can use analytics tools to determine where the most activity is and engage customers here.
Consider using LinkedIn for videos. Since the platform is driving native videos right now, you get a lot of visibility. A third of marketers are using LinkedIn videos and experiencing 20+ more shares than any other platform.
Twitter ads are another growth marketing hack, since Twitter ad campaigns are 11% more effective than TV advertising.
Malware security firm, AwareGo has a killer cross-posting social media campaign.
By cross-posting across prominent industry-specific social media platforms, AwareGo consistently reaches its audience in the places they consume content most often.
Step 7: Think About Audio Marketing
Audio marketing is a new revelation. Consider how podcasts have burst on the scene. Equally, voice search has now entered the scene.
When you consider the fact that podcast listeners listen to an average of one podcast a day and nearly half of regular podcast listeners have home incomes over $70k, you can see the potential profits tucked in audio marketing.
Check out the Social Engineer podcast.
Interviewing thought leaders and experts, this podcast poses information security marketing opportunities for companies to advertise themselves with conversation.
Podcasts also feature commercials— another chance to market your cybersecurity brand.
Use audio marketing to:
- Advertise your brand
- Appear as guest to show industry expertise
- Host a podcast to engage customers
- Enhance your audio SEO strategy so your audio content is visible
Step 8: Send Regular Email Marketing Campaigns
80% of cybersecurity marketers use email marketing to boost revenue as it’s a low-cost way to segment and target marketing content to your buyer personas.
To regulate your email campaign, use email marketing softwares. 72% of businesses use automated email marketing tools to create lead generation landing pages to capture customer data. This customer data is used to send regular personalized promotions that convert sales and engage the audience.
Security access management company, CyberArk, captures and qualifies leads for its email marketing campaigns with a landing page form on the home page.
This form segments audience members by role, department, and interests. This customer data helps to personalize future email marketing campaigns.
Step 9: Use Analytics Tools to Improve Your Marketing
The key to a successful cybersecurity marketing strategy lies in measuring your performance.
By using analytics tools, you can build marketing campaigns, measure their performance, and learn from what works and what doesn’t.
Two-fifths of businesses use analytics tools to improve their allocation of marketing resources. That’s why 69% of B2B organizations will focus efforts on interpreting and leveraging analytics this year.
The best way to harness analytics to improve marketing performance is to set yourself SMART Goals (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound).
Pinpoint the key performance indicators that signify whether those marketing goals are being met.
Measure the performance of these blog KPIs over a set time to work out where you’re winning and where you’re falling flat.
Try using A/B testing to do this.
Imagine, for example, that you wanted to know what kind of offer would up your cybersecurity subscriptions. Trial one promotion for a lower fee if yearly subscriptions are paid in one go. Test a second promotion that offers the first month free.
See which method works with analytics tools, and double down on the most effective strategy that ensures your content is properly promoted.
Conclusion
Now, you’ll have a much clearer understanding of how to propel your cybersecurity marketing strategy forward.
The most important thing to remember is to have a multi-angled marketing approach that pulls together with a strong SEO strategy so customers can find you.
And if you have any questions about your cybersecurity marketing strategy, don’t hesitate to reach out to the experts at Wordable.
