In order to build winning cyber security marketing operation you have to master the jargon, understand the audience and have specific experience with the bits and bytes of this industry.
Cyber security startups choose to work with us as we speak the cyber-language and are highly experienced in marketing to the industry’s target audiences and personas.
The cybersecurity startup landscape is huge – be it a shift left security venture, an IoT one, Appsec, API security, storage security, cloud security, or alike. The ocean is beyond red, closer to black.
That means that your Cyber-Marketing partner has to be extremely experienced in this competitive landscape.
In a world where CISOs or CIOs are nearly impossible to reach with traditional marketing tactics, things must be done differently.
Cyber-focused marketers must be highly experienced in:
The different stakeholders you should be targeting and the relationships between them
The media outlets of this industry, which ones are more appealing, what sponsorships are available and what’s feasible, in terms of pricing and value
Knowing what to expect from different lead-gen channels: prices, conversion rates, MQL ratios, MQL to SQL ratios, and more
Being able to produce optimal, cyber-focused content for each step in the customer journey, to accommodate for different KPIs such as branding, awareness, lead-gen, sales enablement, and more.
The cybersecurity startup marketing landscape
- Crowded and hyper-competitive- Differentiated positioning is a challenge
- Multiple target personas, from different units in the organizations, and complex relationships between them with inherent conflicts of interest (CISO, CIO, sec leaders, CFO, the engineering organization)
- Unique communities, events, magazines, thought leaders, and standards for trustworthy content types
- Audiences that are highly educated and are impatient to mediocre marketing
- New brands must win trust by embracing specific startup marketing tactics, rather than trying to imitate the big guys.
- Crowded and hyper-competitive- Differentiated positioning is a challenge
- Multiple target personas, from different units in the organizations, and complex relationships between them with inherent conflicts of interest (CISO, CIO, sec leaders, CFO, the engineering organization)
- Unique communities, events, magazines, thought leaders, and standards for trustworthy content types
- Audiences that are highly educated and are impatient to mediocre marketing
- New brands must win trust by embracing specific startup marketing tactics, rather than trying to imitate the big guys.
The cybersecurity startup marketing landscape
You need a trustworthy marketing partner. One that has been around and has a proven track record of successfully supporting multiple cybersecurity startups. That’s us.
In the past years, we’ve mastered multiple areas of cybersec marketing through our work with multiple startups, from endpoint security, to cloud security, to storage security, API security, shift-left security and others. So, consider yourself fully covered with almost every marketing aspect, task, or challenge that you have in mind.
How do we measure the success of our activities? Our efforts are data-driven and KPI- oriented. We measure KPIs along the entire customer journey funnel, to make sure that traffic streams in coherence with our predefined goals, converting according to or even beyond expectations. We focus on sales enablement goals, driving MQLs and converting them to SQLs.
Our versatile, dynamic, multi-skilled, and senior team of professionals is highly experienced in planning, researching, and executing customized plans that fit today’s aggressive KPIs.
An all-in-one umbrella of services to choose from
Strategy, planning, and orchestration
We get young startups, that’s what we do. We accompany our startups with strategy, planning, and marketing orchestration to deliver agile marketing that wins.
Messaging and storytelling that helps you create differentiation
We developed a unique methodology to craft a compelling story and derive out of it simple yet sharp marketing messages, to help you create differentiation. Our messages are then customized to match different marketing channels.
Strategy, planning, and orchestration
We get young startups, that’s what we do. We accompany our startups with strategy, planning, and marketing orchestration to deliver agile marketing that wins.
Website management, analytics, and conversion optimization
Our website and CRO work includes finetuning the website messages, working on its look & feel, checking on Google analytics and Google tag manager, to ensure that the funnel is properly tracked. We also keep the website updated, we hunt for UX issues and we optimize the website call to action events. That includes optimizing landing pages and related CTA components (links, promo boxes, lead gen forms, and alike).
Digital funnel design (top-middle-bottom of the funnel)
Whether you focus your efforts on organic traffic or paid, creating the right funnel, the optimal customer digital journey, is a must. Prospects vary by their level of awareness with your brand, the content that they have already seen, the specific activity which landed them on your website (blog post, social activity, paid campaign, etc.) and more. The trick is to design an online journey that maximizes the potential, and segments visitors according to the steps they have already taken.
Paid lead-gen display campaigns / PPC / ABM and sponsored content
Running campaigns and spending money is easy. Running successful campaigns and smartly using media budget to cut through the noise is a whole different story. We run performance on LinkedIn, Google Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Outbrain, Taboola, Influ2, and professional outlets such as TechTarget, IDG, and more. We define top of the funnel and mid-funnel campaign hooks and most importantly – we know how to prove the contribution of each $ we spend.
Social media management
Using social media channels to generate business impact isn’t trivial, it demands personal branding of a key internal stakeholder. Creating a solid social presence is critical for branding, trust building, user engagement, and yes, for conversions too. When your social media channels are well managed, it is easier for you to spread the word, retarget relevant audiences, engage in conversations and capture the attention of CISO whales. Our social media work can include maintaining the company pages, personal profiles, increasing followers, running “free” campaigns and outreaching specific people at scale.
Lead nurturing and marketing automation
Turning MQLs to SQLs is a mandatory process in enterprise sales, especially in the ultra-crowded cybersecurity arena. When it comes to enterprise sales, multiple touchpoints across multiple marketing channels, involving multiple stakeholders that work in the target account must occur before a deal is signed. Marketing automation plays a key role in this. Our related activities include setting up HubSpot marketing automation (or similar solutions), building automation roles, and using the system for multiple lead-nurture activities
Industry events management and Marcom activities
Industry events can be gold for sales. But they can also be a huge load on the marketing force. We offer extensive support in managing physical or virtual events, from logistics, through the content, preparing communication materials, preparing the teams, and running activities throughout the event.
Special projects
Be it a co-marketing initiative, special sponsorship, a PR collaboration, a gated industry report, or alike, we support our startups with all of the above.
How do we work?
Kicking off
When we start our digital marketing activities, we engage in a thorough, well-focused, kick-off meeting where we define both the process and the challenges; the process is designed to be as comprehensive as possible. During this process we learn everything there’s to know about the product and offering: Competitive landscape, challenges, what was done so far, target audience, KPIs and more. We call this stage ‘onboarding on steroids’. This step is meant to ensure we have everything we need to build the optimal digital marketing plan for our client.
Competitive analysis and tactical planning
We never start our hands-on activity without completing this step, in which we build a week-by-week action plan – looking at a quarter ahead. We also run a comprehensive digital marketing competitive analysis to back up our plan and to uncover important insights related to the marketing activities done by the client’s competitors.
Building the customer online journey (the funnel) top to bottom
Once we have the tactical plan in place, we usually create a high-level design of the online funnel, with the main steps that we want a visitor to take with the aim of turning it to a lead, a valid lead and then a sales opportunity. In the B2C world the funnel is usually much simpler compared to the B2B world of tech products and services.
Building the infrastructure
Usually there’s a lot of infrastructure work that needs to be done, before growth activities can begin. We create or fine tune messages, website flows and analytics configurations. We create landing pages, setup automation systems and build project reporting templates. We run a lot of research during this stage.
Growth activities
Once we are happy with the infrastructure (we wouldn’t want to spend budgets or efforts beforehand) we move on to distribute content and direct traffic to the site (or app) through both organic and paid media channels. During this stage, we many times launch PR activities to support our digital marketing KPIs. We measure every step of the way, of course, optimize and fine-tune according to what the numbers project.
Data driven Optimization and lesson learned
throughout our entire digital marketing operation we make sure to track everything that can be tracked. Posting on Quora? We track the traffic referred to our website from Quora. Content promotion? We examine the qualitative parameters of the content as well as its’ contribution to SEO goals. After a while, when there’s enough data, we generate ongoing reports to adjust activities: Optimize performance media campaigns, write additional blog posts like the ones that performed best, increase focus on growth channels that prove to be (cost?) effective and more.
