B2B buying teams searching for solutions to their cyber risks have a problem – there is too much choice!
Buying everything from the latest XDR solutions to managed security services means choosing between multiple solutions, most of which are superficially similar and even have closely matching pricing tiers.
The market for cybersecurity solutions is crowded. At last count, there were almost 4,000 different B2B security vendors in the market. All pitching to a customer pool that, frankly, isn’t much larger than the number of vendors itself.
To decide what solution to purchase, buying teams and prospective buyers want to educate themselves about whether your solution fits their challenge rather than be told about how it works by a salesperson. Research by Gartner says that as many as 75% of B2B buyers want a “self-service experience.”
Instead of, or at least long before, talking to a salesperson, prospective buyers want to get all the information themselves. They want and expect content.
The brands that stand out in the crowded cybersecurity marketing space offer great solutions and great content that carries their message.
Where Content Fits
A simple way to think about cybersecurity marketing content is as the layer of customer-focused information between product marketing (i.e., fact sheets, presentations, and analyst reports) and whatever a brand does for public relations.
Cybersecurity content marketing campaigns are typically focused around a particular message or talking point that customers are interested in and might include webinars, podcasts, blog posts, eBooks, guides, and research reports.
This also includes campaign-specific copywriting required for banner ads, retargeting ads, video ads, and website landing pages.
How to Create Great Content
As a cybersecurity marketing agency, we’ve worked with brands over multi-year periods that have used content-led campaigns to drive multi-million dollar sales campaigns, create web traffic moats worth £100K+ monthly, and scale through multiple funding rounds.
Based on this experience, we have three key tips for any cybersecurity vendor considering developing a content marketing process inside its organisation.
Get internal SME buy-in
Subject matter experts (SMEs) are the individuals inside your organisation who are experts in your solution and often your customers’ issues.
They are typically senior-level technical or product leaders who will almost always have deep experience adjacent to the market your company sells to. These people are essential for content marketing.
Insights from SMEs feed the best content marketing campaigns. They can help generate content ideas, perform QA on technical campaigns, and even inspire entire campaigns.
However, SMEs’ time is typically extremely limited, and they are rarely “marketing people.”
Our key tip is to wall off a small amount of regular time with a selection of internal SMEs as early in your content marketing efforts as possible. Start (very) small, look for an hour a month for content sanity checks, and build from there.
We find that SMEs eventually enjoy getting involved in content marketing when they start to see positive results. At this point, contributions begin to flow organically.
Create a simple content ROI tracker
Tracking content marketing return on investment (ROI) can be as straightforward or as complex as you want it to be.
Eventually, when you scale your content function, you may be able to work backwards from MQL and SQL values and calculate the exact value of content within your marketing process.
For most brands, it is much better to start with some easy-to-track metrics, such as “engaged users.” The Gartner research mentioned earlier points to a company’s website as the most popular place for buyers to engage with content. Tracking content performance here will give a good snapshot of how well your message is coming across to potential buyers.
We also recommend tracking user paths from your content assets within a session. Good content should result in users sticking around and inspire them to explore other content assets and parts of your website.
You can and should also use content to fuel your cybersecurity SEO campaigns and see the traffic value achieved as a content benefit.
Create content “assets,” not just deliverables
Whether you hire a cybersecurity content writer, work with a content marketing agency, or manage content production in-house, producing a really high-quality blog post, whitepaper, report, or video will not be cheap.
It will cost either a large amount of time (possibly yours) or an equivalent amount of money (if outsourced to a specialist marketing agency).
A low-quality content deliverable costs almost nothing and can be generated with AI in a few minutes. However, it has almost no business value.
One great content asset that is read, shared, and ranks well on a search engine will cost between £300 and £1,000, but because it engages your audience with your solution, it is worth more than 1,000 poor-quality generic blog posts, whether made with AI or purchased on a platform like Fiverr.
Quality content – typically easy to spot because it speaks directly to someone’s situation and is packed full of relevant examples – builds a brand’s authority in the space they’re competing in.
Low-quality content (often starting with some variation of “In today’s digital realm…”) does nothing for your business and can even harm your brand through factual errors.
When you invest in a lower volume of higher quality content pieces, you get real business assets that can be recycled into social campaigns, solution briefs, and email streams and create a “bat signal” to the talent that you are a brand that cares about what you do.
Working with a Specialist Cybersecurity Content Marketing Agency
The best shortcut to building a cybersecurity content marketing function inside your brand is to get support from a specialist cybersecurity marketing agency that knows the market space, understands technical nuances, and has years of content marketing experience.
A cybersecurity marketing agency like Content Visit can help brands as either a managed service provider or an expert consultant to build a content marketing engine.
