How to Position Your Security Brand as a Leader During Cybersecurity Awareness Month
By Peggy Tierney Galvin
The generative AI phenomenon has crashed through the cybersecurity space like a bull in a china shop, leaving a trail of chaos behind it. The SOAR category is one of the earliest casualties, with Gartner calling it obsolete in favor of homegrown generative AI workflows. However, generative AI is just the latest crosscurrent contributing to the choppy waters of cybersecurity marketing.
For more than a decade, the industry has been cycling between the two poles of point solutions and platforms while confused customers try to determine which tools they actually need. Meanwhile, attacks, vulnerabilities and data theft continue, seemingly unabated by the growth of new players and investor interest in the space.
What’s a marketer to do?
Thought leadership is a perfect place to start. Defined as the part of your content that focuses on your team’s experience, recommendations, best practices and lessons learned (instead of directly shilling your product or company), thought leadership shows prospects, investors, customers and partners that you understand market challenges, that you have helpful experience and that you’re the kind of trusted advisor that they would like to get to know more about.
Thought leadership in cybersecurity is especially important since the space is astronomically crowded, and the heavy focus on products and features, speeds and feeds can come across to bemused prospects as distinctions without a difference. What does it really mean to them? Why should they care? That’s where thought leadership can help. It goes straight to the story, to the narrative, to the “so what” of market challenges and real business issues that grabs the reader’s attention, makes them sit up straight, and think “yeah, that’s exactly it, this guy/gal gets it.”
And, of course, this is Cybersecurity Awareness Month. This is an excellent opportunity to get your feet wet on the thought leadership shoreline if you haven’t ventured out yet. Since Cybersecurity Awareness Month is focused on bringing awareness to everyone, not just those in the tech sector, start big. What do you want the average person to know, feel and do around cybersecurity? How does it affect their job? Their family? Their life?
Then you can expand from there. Maybe bring in a partner, a customer or a colleague to have a quick video chat about best practices for protecting information, and then share it on LinkedIn and in a blog on your website. If your solution has good intelligence or telemetry from which you can pull insights, these can also be good sources of thought leadership. What story does the data share? Is there a new spike in a certain kind of ransomware? Are malicious actors targeting a new sector in more significant numbers or with greater frequency than before? And what can your audience learn from these insights? You can put these findings into all kinds of thought leadership for Cybersecurity Awareness Month, from infographics to webinars to one-pagers and more.
The trick is to connect your expertise to the real business pains your customers or partners are experiencing. In the hot froth of excitement to tell the story about your technology or company and what makes them extra-special, you can miss the crucial window where you can connect with your audience and the challenge they are facing. That’s where thought leadership really shines: at the top of the funnel, when your audience is looking for broad information about the problems they’re working on or the business outcomes they want to track against. The vetting of a solution versus its competitor happens further down the buyer’s journey, and that’s a story for another blog.
That’s the great opportunity of Cybersecurity Awareness Month for thought leadership: you can meet customers exactly where they are, speak to the things that really matter to them, and demonstrate your bona fides and good intentions as a helpful partner right off the bat. Let your expertise shine, and show how your work is helping your customers protect their end users with valuable insights and guidance.
Want to learn more? Reach out, and we can share additional tips and fresh ideas.
