Working with Marketing Leaders in B2B, I've seen numerous challenges and how they achieve ROI in today's shifting and uncertain marketing landscape. The successful way to partner with clients now taps into digital channels, social media platforms, building ecosystems, and supporting thought leaders across the world. Marketing and sales closely work in concert with all other business operations to show true ROI to the C suite. As you can see, the landscape is getting a little complicated.
During more than 20 years in this market, I've witnessed many changes in the cybersecurity industry, from the technology available to protect businesses to evolving marketing strategies targeting and narrowing down to individual buyers of security solutions. And even to how decision-making and buying teams themselves are continuously adapting and responding to changes.
So as we enter another phase of change, I wanted to share some of what we've learned so that business and marketing leaders can ensure that they yield maximum impact on their organization's marketing investments.
Bringing marketing expertise to the cybersecurity space, we've been exposed to all facets of the cybersecurity marketing and sales process. There are some fundamental marketing tactics to look into, and there are some emerging trends in cybersecurity marketing and sales.
How expensive is marketing for cybersecurity?
In cybersecurity, you can get quite a broad spectrum of e-marketing strategies that are inexpensive and effective all the way up to some expensive and ineffective ones. With today's pressures on how the marketing dollars get spent, cybersecurity companies cannot pay $150,000 to be at one trade show. As time changes, you cannot invest in the new digital reality, focusing on one single marketing channel or strategy. You need to place several smaller bets and be agile and test many small marketing bets to understand what works in this new buying behavior.
How to stand out in the crowd?
Cybersecurity is a huge topic right now, and there's a lot of clutter in the industry. It is a challenge for companies, especially earlier stage companies, to stand out in such a noisy industry. Integrated marketing and sales efforts can help you break through some of the crowd. It is helpful to have a marketing partner who understands the cybersecurity space and its nuances so that they can help really understand and support you through some of the challenges you're facing.
PR, of all the ways to reach out and build the company's credibility and reach customers that were very effective a while ago, is now one of the least effective unless you do digital PR, which is a brand awareness building strategy that adapts the power of PR to the digital environment.
I've always been a big digital PR fan and what that means is featuring your relevant content to relevant information sources for your target audience.
Business leaders, especially major corporations, understand risk mitigation and language around risk and managing risk and need the marketing to be oriented to their sophisticated understanding of security threats.
Thought leadership is still one of the most important marks in the cybersecurity industry, educating your clientele and adding value by educating your target audience to your specific solutions or services. And education may be as simple as giving customers the information they don't have now to make qualified decisions or prioritize cybersecurity decisions.
A mix of strategies will get you to marketing and sales success
From thought leadership to spreading your message out there to get the right audience, disseminating it into social content accelerates your awareness goals, and lead generation objectives. This year, I would argue that cybersecurity marketing was 100% digital marketing, with the majority of the marketing activities performed through digital channels.
Here are some of the best channels that you may want to consider in your digital marketing mix for cybersecurity companies:
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO);
Paid Advertisement (PPC, LinkedIn paid campaigns like lead gen forms video display advertising with Youtube);
Channel Networking and Advertising;
Webinars, conferences, digital networking events, and others;
Social Media Marketing and Sales via LinkedIn networking;
Content Marketing (especially videos, blogging, and podcasts);
Affiliate Marketing;
Influencer marketing;
E-mail marketing (newsletters, drip e-mail campaigns);
Viral Marketing;
Marketing automation;
Mobile marketing.
How to overcome some of the leading marketing challenges in the cybersecurity industry?
Here are some challenges faced by cybersecurity companies and solutions you could quickly implement even if you are starting from ground 0 with your marketing efforts.
Generating traffic and leads
1. Create good content;
2. Get more eyeballs on your content by promoting it through targeted LinkedIn or Google Ads;
3. Link any marketing effort or campaign to a central location like linking back to your website (ex: implementing landing pages, microsites with effective forms to capture visitor data);
4. Optimize your content for search through SEO; run a free SEO audit with one of our consultants.
Generating engaging content
How can you generate interesting ideas for the blogpost and other types of content?
Monitor your competition and benchmark to the top of industry content;
Watch out for trends with tools like google alerts set up to specific topics, companies, industries, etc.;
Curate relevant cybersecurity news and content;
Hire an agency to help you write and optimize the content for search.
Setup relevant KPIs
How will you know if you are successful? Well, first, your phone should ring, or you should have plenty of contacts to fill up your pipeline. Since sales cycles may be longer based on your solution, having the right KPIs is critical to understand if you are on the right path.
Here are some suggestions:
Set up marketing tracking with tools (some even free marketing automation tools are quite good at tracking and helping you nurture conversations);
Setup the right measurables (number of leads, criteria to qualify leads);
Measure effectiveness on each channel (how many visits to the landing page, how many forms filled in, how much traffic and engagement from social media, the e-mail open, click and reply rates, etc.);
Understand your buyer persona and target only the right prospects.
How are you able to help customers?
Too many cybersecurity solutions and services focus on the technical side of cybersecurity. At the same time, you may gain more ground by sharing your success in mitigating any of these risks and proving in the prospect's understanding you know what you are talking about.
Cybersecurity and risk management tops the list of trending technologies
IT and business leadership, your prospects, intend to allocate the greatest amount of additional budget in 2020 to cybersecurity according to Tech target data. This is enabled by:
The Digital transformation and its associated impact on staffing and departmental collaboration. With 70% of businesses actively engaged in activities to support digital transformation, things like automating processes, adopting more AI or machine learning, and improving an organization's overall risk and security posture increase demand for cybersecurity solutions and services;
Macro job trends, coupled with the tech skills gap, which impacts the security market, are more acute than any other. According to ISC(2), 4 million jobs will go unfilled within cybersecurity. Nearly 70% of companies cite a shortage of security staff and even fewer organizations team for a C suite's role;
The impact of COVID-19. Cybersecurity is critical in the era of COVID-19. As work from home became the new normal, security professionals who may have previously sat physically in a security operation center are now being displaced, making it harder for companies to implement and track healthy cybersecurity practices and solutions.
Better understand your cybersecurity buyer with ABM practices
Accurate pre-purchase for cybersecurity research at enterprise-size companies includes more than 24 individuals. Each of them represents different facets of the enterprise hub. However, marketers willingly exclude some of the most active stakeholders. When we look at individual content pieces, particularly by stage content essential to the lead nurturing, we need to adopt account-based marketing practices to adapt your sales process to today's buying teams.
Tech Target confirms that only about a quarter of cybersecurity business leads originates from people with explicit security titles on a closer look across all confirmed projects tied to cybersecurity. And that makes a lot of sense when you think about how important security is across all facets of IT in business, coupled with the scarcity of cybersecurity professionals. Tapping even into nonsecurity roles or personas could be an excellent way to increase the opportunity generation by up to threefold by eliminating title driven restrictions in the outbound or data-driven activities.
And particularly, in today's noisy vendor landscape, focusing only on senior or security-specific titles is limiting at a time of unprecedented demand for effective cybersecurity technology and results. Embracing researching for your market solutions, regardless of title or role, can give your organization real business results, including more paths into deals and better conversions.
How can you secure your marketing success in 2021?
Do you have a solid marketing plan for 2021 to ensure your success for the coming year, even in uncertain times? Reach out to NNC Services certified digital marketing advisors to understand more about what marketing strategies and effective tactics for cybersecurity companies you need.
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