In the wake of the recent cyberattack on Twitter, and Garmin reportedly paying millions to resolve its recent ransomware attack, many business owners and executives are seeking solutions and advice on strengthening their cybersecurity.
As a cybersecurity company looking to satisfactorily meet your customers’ needs for information, you need to provide them with valuable content. In this article, we at BIGINTRO have carefully curated 5 cybersecurity content strategies to best educate your customers and prospects towards taking action.
- Educate About the Need for Cybersecurity
A major challenge cybersecurity firms face in developing their marketing strategies is educating prospects that cyber risk is a business problem, not just an IT problem anymore. Therefore, you need to guide them. Provide statistics that illustrate how much of a menace cyber risk is for their business.
For instance, a recent study report shows that 59% of Asian organizations experience a business-disrupting breach in cybersecurity at least once a month. Most recently, security breaches have impacted over 200,000 computers in 150 countries around the world and have cost millions. These examples help to show how real the threat of cyber risk is and how business-focused these attacks are becoming. Therefore, they must change their mindset and view cyber risk as it is – a business risk. You may also need to reassure them that this change in mindset is quite easy to implement within their businesses. They simply need to integrate the right cyber protection into all aspects of their organization.
- Understand Your Customers to Tailor Your Approach
Once your audience accepts that cybersecurity is a pressing concern, they will look to you for solutions as someone who has educated them on the issues. Keep in mind that they’re not only looking for solutions that work; they’re looking for solutions that work specifically for them. Therefore, you need to prepare your marketing content such that it fills the voids in your customers’ businesses. Hence, the need to understand their unique needs and challenges.
Today, cyber-attacks can come from a multitude of places and in a variety of malicious forms. Some types of threats are more invasive than others, but they can all be equally jarring for a business if caught unprepared. A few of today’s most typical attackers and sources of cybersecurity threats include:
- Organized crime groups
- Competitors of your business
- Hackers
- Terrorists
- Foreign governments
The way to go about understanding your prospect’s potential cyber threats is to acquire as much information as you can about your customers’ businesses. You might need to do a little bit of stalking on their LinkedIn and social profiles to acquire such information. Armed with the necessary intelligence, you can proceed to create buyer personas or representations of your customers based on demographics and other information gathered during your research such as their company’s specific challenges.
- Tailor Content Per Audience Persona
Sequel to your painstaking persona analysis and segmentation, you can decide which solutions and content will be best suited to the challenges of your target persona. This way, you build your brand’s credibility. Consistently provide each persona with well-researched, tailored content and they just might move down to the next step in your sales funnel.
Even if they never convert, remember that valuable content gets shared. Other people who pick up your content from reliable referees might just become your customers someday.
- Address Current Issues in Cybersecurity
To maintain credibility, you need to proffer up-to-date information and content to your target audience. Outdated information can quickly ruin a reputation you have spent some time building, equating your hard work to nothing. Therefore, make sure your content addresses trending issues and solutions in cybersecurity. Besides, the world of security, cyber or not, is constantly changing. Hence, as their needs and goals change, you must keep up and adapt your content accordingly. It helps to keep your foundational content loose enough that you can shape or tailor it to new business scenarios. You need to be their first-stop for reliable, up-to-date advice in the emergence of new issues with cybersecurity.
- Teach, Don’t Pitch
As a company looking to boost its customer base, you may feel the urge to pitch your business in your content to drive more people to purchase your solutions or services. My advice? Don’t.
According to GlobeNewswire, 51% of IT decision-makers abandon vendors’ content because they contain “promotional/self-serving content”. That alone should give you enough reason to not include sales pitches within your content. Note that credibility is everything in this marketing channel. So, focus on giving free value to your target audience. Make your blog a prominent part of your website while loading it with credible content. Consistently provide well-researched newsletters. Offer premium ebooks and other resources containing more in-depth insights to your audience as rewards, perhaps after someone leaves their details on your site. That way you can build and maintain credibility without repelling about half your prospects.
Placing great focus on providing reliable and valuable content for your audience without pitching your business may seem like a long shot, but it actually benefits your sales funnel. GlobeNewswire states that when content is considered valuable, IT decision-makers go on to research on technology sites, visit the vendor’s website, and participate in a product demo. So, you’ll be benefiting both your audience and yourself.
