As more of our purchases, communication, and banking move online, cybersecurity becomes essential to our everyday activities. How do you market your company to potential customers? How do you build a large digital footprint? Welcome to our cybersecurity marketing guide!
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Step 1: Find your audience
Run persona exercises
The only way your product and services are going to sell is if you target the right audience. Are you going to work in a single niche? Or do you want to broaden your client potential?
Running persona exercises should be the first step you take. A persona is a fictional representation of the clients you want to service. You’ll sketch out the general details of your ideal customers, which will help you build strategic marketing plans to attract those customers.
Some of the information you should create for your personas includes:
- Name
- Demographic details
- Professional background
- Education
- At work, [Persona]’s pressures include
- [Persona] is looking for
- Points of resistance
- Personal goals and ambitions
To get you started, we’ve created a worksheet that you can use to build your personas.
If you already have your personas mapped out, you should take your existing data and see if your current customers match the personas you created. If they do, you’re good to go until your next persona audit. If not, it’s time to run through the exercise again and find out why you’re getting customers you didn’t target.
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Step 2: Educate your audience
None of us are cybersecurity experts…well, you are, but we out here in the cheap seats don’t know what we don’t know. Educating your audience will give them the information they need to make smarter decisions, and they most likely work with you because you’ve built trust through your knowledge.
Blog posts
This should already be on your content roadmap. Share the latest cybersecurity news, product how-tos, company announcements, and behind the scenes work. Talk about the different cybersecurity threats, types of attacks, and modes of repelling those attacks.
Video
Take those how-to blog posts and narrate them. Work with an outside company to help produce animated videos about how cybersecurity attacks work. Interview internal employees to create human faces for your company. Ask current customers to record testimonials about your products and services.
Case studies
Customer testimonials are good, but case studies are even better. Some clients may not want to share too much data about how your products and services helped them, but you can anonymize sensitive information and share highlights on what you provided and how it helped. Check out our case studies for examples.
Ebooks/White papers
We’re very big on offering as much help as we can, even when someone isn’t a client. We have multiple beginner’s guides to help people who are just starting out in marketing, or who are building a startup and cannot afford a marketing agency. We’re also going to offer downloadable You can put together ebooks and white papers that share data, information, and stats that are useful for your audience. The more you offer for free, the more you can entice them to purchase your products and services.
Webinars
Instead of producing a podcast, hold once a month webinars to educate your current and potential customers. Bring on outside cybersecurity professionals and internal experts and talk about both current and evergreen topics.
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Step 3: Expand your reach
Enhance your local SEO
Do you know if your local information is consistent across Google My Business, Bing, and other directory websites? Do you own your profiles on these directories?
Local directories are great ways to validate your essential information, known as UNAP. UNAP stands for
- URL
- Name
- Address
- Phone Number
When people search for you, you want them to find your correct information. A lot of users search for phone numbers, contact email addresses, hours of operation, and expect to see it without clicking through to your website. Search engines also reward you for syncing your information across all the data sources.
Here’s a tool from Moz to check basic data aggregators to make sure you’re good to go. Just remember that Moz shows some, but not all, the data sources. There are over 50 different data sources you need to track and sync your information. So you’ll need to do a little manual checking of your own to keep track of your UNAP.
Let’s walk through an example of Local SEO optimization using Google My Business (GMB). You’ll want to make sure the below is taken care of:
- Claim your account: Pretty straight forward
- UNAP: Update your UNAP information
- Categories: List your services
- Description: Add your unique value proposition to entice people to click through to your website
- Hours: If you have a brick-and-mortar location, add the address here
- Images: You can share product images, infographic images, and other pictures that tell your story
Content marketing
Market your content
What is content marketing? This right here is content marketing. We wrote a piece about marketing your cybersecurity company. We published it on our website, promoted it on social media, and now you’re reading it.
Become quality content
Share your industry expertise through interviews with newspapers, bloggers, vloggers, and other outlets. You’ll potentially increase your site’s authority, and increase your own visibility, leading to additional interviews and links.
Email marketing
If you’ve been collecting emails through free trials, whitepaper downloads, or other means, you should retarget those interested people. Send them offers and rates that can only be redeemed through a special code, supplied in the email. You can also send monthly newsletters with your latest content.
The above ideas we’ve shared should get you started on the way to building up your digital footprint. If you’re thinking, “holy $*!T, how am I going to get all of this done,” you may need to hire an SEO specialist, or outsource the work to an agency. Before you do, make sure to check out our guide on how to figure out if you need an internal SEO specialist or an agency.