What’s Missing From Your Cybersecurity Marketing Campaign? Details.

Every 39 seconds. That’s how often experts estimate there’s a cyberattack. We’d be willing to bet, though, that it’s more frequent now after the size of all of the corporate, government, and educational networks exploded once we were all told we had to do everything remotely.

That exponential addition of end points made all of these networks much more vulnerable and tempting for cybercriminals. That’s presenting an opportunity for marketers selling cybersecurity software.

Once they see how convenient remote work is—no dip in production, happier employees—these businesses that worked quickly to expand their networks so this was possible at all will begin to work just as quickly to make sure this new infrastructure is protected.

These companies are going to move fast, so cybersecurity businesses like yours need to be ready to respond just as quickly. The only way you can do that is if you’re prepared. That’s why your cybersecurity marketing campaign must be on target.

The Problem with Your Cybersecurity Marketing Campaign

You’re an experienced marketer. You’d argue that you have the basics handled. You know your buyer. You have a message. You have goals to measure against. And while that may be true, we’d argue that while you may have all of those elements of a cybersecurity marketing campaign they are too broad. Success is in the details, and we’d argue there are three things that you haven’t nailed down well enough.

1. You don’t have enough details about your buyer

Again, you probably do know some about your buyer. You could build a nice, but vague profile, about where they sit inside of the organization and what their challenges are. All of this built off of conversations with your sales team and based, at least somewhat, on their assumptions about who they should be selling to.

But what if you built those buyer personas based off conversations with your actual buyers? How much more accurate would they be? How much more detailed? The answer to both of those is quite a bit. When you build your buyer personas by having conversations—actually, hiring someone to have those conversations for you can make them even more effective—with them you get details that you won’t get when you build them from assumptions. You learn things like the specific challenge that prompted them to seek out a solution. You learn about the barriers to purchase that you may not even know you need to overcome. You learn where your buyers are going for information. You learn what their buyers journey looks like. And when you know all of those things you can build a cybersecurity marketing campaign that you know will reach them instead of one that you hope will.

2. You don’t have a detailed message

This is a byproduct of not knowing your buyer well enough. When you don’t know in detail why they chose you, what they think you offer that others don’t, you can’t create an effective marketing message. What you create is something that feels good to you but probably sounds a lot like everyone else in your market. You focus on products and features, but you aren’t focused on the problem you solve for your customers.

But combining a detailed buyer persona with research on your competitors and your industry can give you a message that’s unique to you. It’s one that fills gaps in the market and helps you stand out. That’s because you can highlight the things your buyers say they are looking for. You start talking to your potential clients instead of trying to out shout your competitors.

3. You haven’t detailed what you’ll do with a lead once you have one

Inbound marketing is a thing that’s easy to do halfway, and that’s what a lot of organizations do. They set up a few blog posts that connect to a few downloadable assets, and, every once in a while, someone bites. They give you their email address in exchange for your content. But what do you do when you get that email address? Do you have a detailed plan for nurturing that person along? Or do you give that name directly to sales and call it done?

If you’re doing the latter, you’re doing it wrong. Here’s why: B2B tech has a long sales cycle. Even when companies are in a hurry, you’re looking at months, not weeks, before a decision is made. Someone who’s downloaded one asset isn’t ready to talk to sales. That person is barely a lead. But, if you’ve set up nurture paths for these contacts and continue to feed them content and give them actions to take, you can start scoring those leads. You can qualify them. So, eventually you can hand them off and set up your sales team to have a more meaningful conversation from the start.

Marketers love to make plans. Most of us are organized by nature. But we are also driven by results. Times like these require agility, and you can only be agile as a marketer if you have a solid foundation in place, and that means getting detailed.

eBook: How Cybersecurity Providers Can Build Trust

Today, even with everyone investing in some sort of cybersecurity protection, there’s still a near-constant threat of cyberattacks.

As a cybersecurity company, there are a few things you can do to build trust with your customers.

We love helping mid-market B2B tech companies like yours grow with purpose. If you are wanting to turn this moment into momentum, let us tell you how we can help.