Marketing your cybersecurity brand successfully is all about showing your target audience that you’ve got the best protection solutions for the job.
Establishing trust is crucial for marketing your cybersecurity brand, and there are many ways of going about it.
From the individual who wants to keep their PC safe and secure to the corporations that could lose millions from a cyber attack, cybersecurity is a necessary, yet often misunderstood industry.
Therefore, educating your target audience about cybersecurity vulnerabilities and solutions, having a strong social media presence, and providing thought leadership are all great ways to market your cybersecurity brand to earn trust and win loyal customers.
Here we take a deeper look at three cybersecurity marketing techniques that are helping the best brands of cybersecurity earn trust and gain followings.
Education
As a cybersecurity expert you know things that few outside the cyber community understand.
As such, you have a wealth of knowledge that most consumers only comprehend in terms of their online privacy. It follows, therefore, that if people don’t know the extent of their online vulnerability, enlisting cybersecurity services, much less yours specifically, will be at the bottom of their to-do list.
Like a passport to building a better future, education is key to developing your cybersecurity brand.
Individuals and businesses are now savvy to the implications of malware infections from clicking on a toxic link. But what about the dangers the data transfers via cloud computing technology?
Without proper cybersecurity implementation, companies that host their data on the cloud are susceptible to DDoS attacks, which can be devastating to businesses, with infrastructure failure costing them an average $100,000 every hour.
In March alone, the US was hit with almost 180,000 DDoS attacks, and these attacks can bring down websites by flooding them with bots and denying actual users from entering.
Educating your target audience — through owned media like an in-house blog, or earned media from guest articles and online interviews — helps them develop a holistic overview of cybersecurity’s influence in their professional and personal actions. At the same time, educating your stakeholders with high-quality informative content fosters trust in your own cybersecurity brand.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the cybersecurity PR tactics best suited for educating your audience.
Blogs
As a rule of thumb, the best cybersecurity brands keep an updated blog as it can be the perfect vehicle for showing awareness of all the latest cybersecurity trends.
For every cybersecurity company that continues to innovate new solutions every day, there’s another cyber criminal looking to exploit them as soon as they launch.
Keeping an up-to-date blog helps inform your target audience about the latest updates, vulnerabilities, and fixes that could only come from an informed professional.
Over time, people will look to your brand as a trusted source of information in your industry, and the more traffic you receive, the more backlink referrals you’re likely to have.
Just take one look at McAfee’s blog page, and you’ll find how tos, what should I dos, and instructional guides on how to use its products and services.
Engaging Videos
Going beyond the written word and taking full advantage of multimedia tools, your cybersecurity brand can take full advantage of multimedia by crafting short, engaging and informative videos showcasing your knowledge in ways that really hit home with your target audience.
Norton is a prime example of a cybersecurity brand that does marketing right by providing 30 second videos that are informative and easy to understand.
People learn differently. Some people are more visual while others are more analytical and numbers-focused.
With so much content out there on the internet, people’s attention spans are very short.
Providing information in video form helps focus that attention, and when done right, can be very engaging.
Cybersecurity Reports
In the same vein of education, releasing cybersecurity reports periodically will also provide added value, and these reports can be very handy for a cybersecurity PR campaign, but we’ll get into that a little bit later.
Suffice it to say, monthly, quarterly, or annual reports on cybersecurity are a great way to establish trust through smart marketing.
Accenture, for example, recently came out with its annual State of Cybersecurity Report, which is packed with 48 pages of stats, graphs, interviews, and insights that make it an invaluable tool for marketing the company, establishing trust, and attracting new clients.
Needless to say, educating your audience about cybersecurity vulnerabilities and solutions lets them know that you know what you’re talking about and that you can provide the level of safety and security they need.
Social Media
Now that your cybersecurity brand has done its best to educate through informative blogs, reports, or videos, it should take every opportunity to promote them.
Depending on your business needs, Twitter and Facebook may be where you can reach a wider audience just because of the sheer number of users, but LinkedIn may be a better place for B2B networking because the platform was built specifically for business professionals.
Similarly, video sharing platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, and Bitchute are great ways to share your content on social media.
Take a look at Absolute for an example of a company that does social media right.
Absolute was recently named one of Forbes’ Top 10 Cybersecurity Companies to Watch In 2020, and wasted no time in pinning that result to the top of its Twitter profile, which has just under 4,000 followers.
Compare that to the nearly 15,000 followers the company has on LinkedIn and you can get a sense of how each social networking platform works for a cybersecurity brand’s marketing strategy.
And to round it all off, Absolute has been consistently posting videos on YouTube, all the while staying relevant, informative, and up-to-date on all matters of cybersecurity.
As evidenced by the coverage in Forbes, media results are another excellent way of marketing your brand to the world, but cybersecurity PR requires an entirely different approach — one that isn’t overly promotional, but helpful and informative to the reader.
Cybersecurity PR
Not only can media coverage boost company recognition, it can also bring in new clients that are in need of specific services that they didn’t know were already available.
Nowadays, especially with more people working from home than ever before, the need for cybersecurity has never been greater.
Fraudulent actors are on the lookout to catch people unawares with phishing schemes while cyber attackers are attempting to take down companies through DDoS attacks.
Twenty years ago, few knew what a VPN was. Now, over 85% of enterprises store sensitive information in cloud-based technology.
Cybersecurity PR should be all encompassing, meaning it encompasses marketing but also does so much more, including:
- Media Monitoring
- Press Release Services
- Thought Leadership
- Press Coverage
- SEO
- Content Marketing
With a solid PR toolkit, resources are readily available for how to successfully reach out to the right journalists, and to know all the tricks of the trade to get your company’s message to the widest and most relevant audience.
