Breaking Through in Cybersecurity Marketing

CyberMarketingCon2023 has wrapped, and we are so grateful for the support we received from our speakers, sponsors, volunteers, and attendees. The week was jam-packed with networking and education, from demand gen and AI to CISO perspectives and vendor solutions. Stay tuned for more conference content from our podcast, website, and social media channels.  In this episode replay, we are joined by the Founder and CEO of Audience 1st, Dani Woolf, who was also a speaker at CyberMarketingCon this year.  In this episode, Dani discusses her core marketing values:  Empathy  Trust  Loyalty  Creating meaningful, customer-centric experiences and identifying customer challenges and buying motivations while also being able to ask the right questions can transform your marketing efforts. Dani also shares the story behind the uncomfortable encounter that sparked a great friendship with a cybersecurity practitioner.     More on our guest, Dani:  Dani Woolf is a swimmer turned marketer. She has been applying lessons learned as a distance freestyler to B2B organizational success for the past 10 years. Dani's core specialty is in digital marketing, focusing on net new customer acquisition via digital channels - website optimization, SEO, SEM, social media, conversion rate optimization, and marketing automation. Dani currently serves as the Founder and CEO of Audience 1st. Get the book Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into Your Customer's Expectations, Align Your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business by Adele Revella at Amazon or the bookstore of your choice! Stay in touch with Dani Woolf on LinkedIn and Twitter   Keep up with our hosts on their social media channels: Connect with Gianna on LinkedIn  Chat with Maria on LinkedIn  Follow the Cybersecurity Marketing Society on Twitter or LinkedIn, and learn more at the Cybersecurity Marketing Society website. 

Layoffs are always stressful. You can never truly be ready for it, but you have to pick up the pieces after it happens. During our podcast hiatus for CyberMarketingCon2023, we are replaying the “Life After Layoff With Amy Fair”  episode. Our hosts Gianna and Maria sit down with guest Amy Fair, Content Marketing Manager to discuss being laid off and how to navigate it in stride.  Gianna and Maria ask Amy about her own experiences being laid off as they approach the rarely-discussed but important topic. Amy dives into what it means to be laid off in the cybersecurity content marketing industry and how she has turned layoffs into new opportunities within weeks. In their conversation, Maria, Gianna, and Amy highlight the importance of networking and community, and how crucial it is to maintain lasting relationships in the content marketing industry. Amy shares how these connections can lead to amazing opportunities.  Timecoded Guide: [8:50] The value of building a network and maintaining a community [17:29] Using Slack in job hunting and making connections [23:21] The value of mentors and keeping people in your corner [25:48] Advice for those anticipating a layoff  Links: Spend some time with our guest Amy Fair on LinkedIn and Twitter. Follow Gianna on LinkedIn. Catch up with Maria on LinkedIn. Join the Cybersecurity Marketing Society on our website, and keep up with us on Twitter.  

Social media gives us different ways to market, from influencers to gifs, or videos. You can use whatever is at your disposal to boost your company’s social media marketing strategies.  In this replay session from CyberMarketingCon2022 speaker Cait Hassett, Channel Manager at Blackpoint Cyber, will give you all that and more. She discusses various aspects of social media, influencer marketing, and cybersecurity. Cait also shares her journey transitioning from consumer-focused marketing to B2B strategies at Keeper Security. Video is also incredibly significant,  the power of video in marketing and the challenges of brand awareness versus category awareness in promoting a password manager within the broader cybersecurity industry. Benchmarks are important, especially in creating regular content, like as memes, employee recognition, partnerships, and cyber news updates. These benchmarks help establish consistent content themes, making the brand recognizable and reliable. Another big part of the session focuses on the creation of a "Cyber News Update," a video series covering cybersecurity-related topics beyond passwords. Cait shares insights into scripting, utilizing company ambassadors, and maintaining a standardized format to produce these updates efficiently. She also highlights the launch of "Keeper Live" on LinkedIn Live, which aims to bring Keeper Security into broader cybersecurity conversations. From the planning process, and the selection of influential guests, to the efforts made to template scripts for comfort and consistency. By the end of the session, Cait emphasizes finding ambassadors within the organization, creating templates for content creation, and leveraging influential figures to engage audiences effectively. The emphasis is on using different platforms, video formats, and influencer marketing to broaden Keeper Security's reach within the cybersecurity space. CyberMarketingcon2023 countdown is officially starting and we are so excited to see everyone virtually or in person so make sure you get that ticket. More on #CyberMarketingCon2023 here, see you in Texas! 🤠    More about Cait: Cait Hassett is a brand marketing professional with nearly a decade of experience in social media and influencer marketing. She got her start as a radio DJ after winning her job in an “American Idol” type contest and creating her on-air and social media persona to grow a community of engaged listeners in the South Georgia/North Florida Market. Soon, she was running the social media accounts for every major station in the area and consulting with other DJs on social media personal branding. Since then, she has worked on social media and influencer marketing campaigns in-house and in agency settings, most recently creating these programs from the ground up at Keeper Security, a cybersecurity and password management platform with headquarters in Chicago, Illinois. Cait avidly believes that video is the most powerful marketing tool an organization or person can use. Follow Cait Hassett on LinkedIn. Be sure to follow our hosts on LinkedIn: Say hi to Gianna on LinkedIn. Catch up with Maria on LinkedIn. If you are looking for a community of support within cybersecurity, join our private Slack group,  the Cybersecurity Marketing Society on our website, and keep up with us on Twitter as well!

In this episode, Charles Gold, Chief Marketing Officer at ThreatConnect, joins Maria and Gianna to discuss why CMOs fail or succeed.  To begin, Charles shares his background in running global marketing organizations. He even started a technology company during the dot-com boom time period.  Then the group discusses a ton of CMO topics, including how CMOs fail and succeed at the role, and how Charles conducted 30 interviews (!!!) to land the company a superstar employee.  Charles' best advice for marketers in security? "If you can understand what the product does and how people use it, that will help you communicate with engineers and have credibility with customers. If you don't have this understanding, it’s really limiting."   Links:   Learn more about Charles Gold.  More on Gold's Rules Check out the Washington Post that Charles mentions here.   Follow Gianna on LinkedIn. Catch up with Maria on LinkedIn. Join the Cybersecurity Marketing Society on our website, and keep up with us on Twitter.  

When you think humor, comedy, LOL, or even LMFAO if you are fancy, cybersecurity isn't typically the first thing that comes to mind. But who says talking about ROI, demand gen, and marketing has to be boring? Humor exists in everything, and with so much access to ridiculousness (memes, reaction videos, reviews, or TikTok hot takes), anything can be made funny.    Which is why we are replaying: It's Okay to Be Funny - Even in Marketing, from CyberMarketingCon2021. A session by comedic wizard Tricia Howard, a.k.a. Tricia Kicks SaaS, Senior Technical Writer at Akamai Technologies. The session focuses on how to infuse humor into cybersecurity marketing. Tricia uses her background as a theater major and stand-up comedian turned marketer, diving into various joke formats, and emphasizing the importance of understanding the cybersecurity community.   Key points that Trisha discusses:   ➡️ "Pun-liners" – a fusion of puns and one-liners. ➡️ Anatomy of a Joke, and Rule of Three – breaks the joke down into subject, setup, and punchline. ➡️ The popularity of memes in social media marketing and the need for quick turnaround due to meme time sensitivity. ➡️ Creativity and Adaptation – creativity in content creation and the adaptive repurposing of content across different platforms. ➡️ Legal Considerations – the importance of giving credit for borrowed content and being mindful of copyright issues. ➡️ ROI Measurement – Social media metrics, like impressions and engagement rates, are important for measuring the success of humorous content in marketing.   More great sessions at #CyberMarketingCon2023 here, see you in Texas! 🤠 Follow Tricia Kicks SaaS on LinkedIn. Follow Gianna on LinkedIn. Catch up with Maria on LinkedIn. Join the Cybersecurity Marketing Society on our website, and keep up with us on Twitter.

Welcome to Breaking Through in Cybersecurity Marketing, where we explore the hottest topics in cyber marketing, interview experts and help you become a better cybersecurity marketer! In this episode, Amy Stokes Waters, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Esc, joins Maria and Gianna to discuss cybersecurity escape rooms and marketing. Amy starts off today’s episode by explaining how marketing teams use Esc for team building activities and they are given different scenarios with clues where they have to get the data back. They also have some phishing exercises where participants can have a video call with an AI bot. This is not only fun, but also teaches you more about the dangers of cybersecurity mistakes! Right now, Esc is only available for hire in the United Kingdom since this company has been rebranding, but they are discussing the idea of expanding. Amy started in sales and has been in the industry for a long time. She remembers going to a Reframe women’s technology conference in England and in one session, the speaker said, “Don't just do cool stuff, but actually tell people you are doing cool stuff.” This discussion changed her whole outlook and trajected her into the marketing realm. They talk about the importance of investing in yourself to grow professionally. Next, Amy discusses the challenges in marketing including branding. If the branding looks nice, it is so much easier to sell the product, and the company looks more professional and established. The other challenge is how to be different and to not have the same cookie cutter messaging. Amy says if people don't know what service you are selling, then how will they ever buy it? You need to make it as easy as humanly possible to buy from you. Personality is also a critical aspect for being successful, and there needs to be faces associated with the brand as well. Marketing makes the brand, but the sales team has to be the people vocalizing that. Both marketing and sales have to work as one and need to align with each other. They also discuss their favorite words in marketing and how to push the envelope in the field. Finally, our guest and hosts engage in a fun guessing game to reveal what career Amy would pursue outside of the cybersecurity marketing field.   Links: Learn more about Amy Stokes Waters. Keep up with Hacker Valley on our website, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter. Follow Gianna on LinkedIn. Catch up with Maria on LinkedIn. Join the Cybersecurity Marketing Society on our website, and keep up with us on Twitter.

Competitive intelligence programs can be reactionary and one-dimensional due to squeaky-wheel syndrome and we-just-lost-a-deal-to-so-and-so-itis.    Learn from Alex Babar, Vice President of Solutions at Brinqa about 3 categories of competitive intel every marketer in cybersecurity should know about: Marketing, Business, and Technical. Additionally, learn which categories marketers are particularly well-suited to leading and which ones make better sense to collaborate on with other teams like product, customer success, or sales engineers.   In this session:   Cut through the competitive noise in cyber security! Learn the right teams for the proper competitive responsibilities! 3 simple but powerful competitive analysis frameworks!   We have approximately 33 days until #CyberMarketingCon2023, held December 10-13! We can’t help but reminisce and replay some of the amazing sessions from previous conferences. This week’s episode is from CyberMarketingCon2022, with a session by Alex Babar, Vice President of Solutions at Brinqa. If you enjoy this session, you will enjoy this year’s lineup filled with education, the best speakers, hands-on workshops, and networking, networking, AND MORE networking!   More on #CyberMarketingCon2023 here, see you in Texas! 🤠   Be sure to watch a video version of this session here.  Follow Gianna on LinkedIn. Catch up with Maria on LinkedIn. Join the Cybersecurity Marketing Society on our website, and keep up with us on Twitter.  

Since #CyberMarketingCon2023 is coming on December 10th through 13th. We can’t help but replay some of our sessions from previous conferences. This week’s episode is from CyberMarketingCon2022. If you enjoy this session, you will enjoy this year’s lineup filled with education, the best speakers, hands-on workshops, networking, networking, AND MORE networking! We cannot wait to see you. Enjoy this episode and be sure to get your ticket by clicking ➡️➡️➡️here! The From the Horse's Mouth: CISO Q&A session is an in-depth conversation about reaching the unreachable buyer. Join us to hear security executives share their insights on why they buy, how they buy, and where they buy.    The speakers are: Michele Perry, Operating Partner at Elsewhere Partners  Rick Howard, Chief Security Officer, Chief Analyst, and Senior Fellow at N2K Networks   Jaclyn Miller,  Co-Founder and Chief Operations Officer(COO) at Stealth Startup Ted Wagner, VP and CISO at SAP National Security Services   In this session you will find:  1️⃣ What works and doesn’t work in getting a security executive’s attention?  2️⃣ Message trust, message fatigue, and what you can do about it.  3️⃣ Trusted information sources and how security executives use them.  4️⃣ Positioning and messaging that is meaningful to decision-makers.  5️⃣ The security executive’s purchasing behavior and why skepticism is the driving force.    The speakers will talk more in-depth about the day in the life of a CISO, and how you can balance innovation and platform suites when considering products/services. From how do you develop trust with your vendors or potential vendors, the boundaries around when to how to contact a vendor and what is the acceptable amount of time for a call back from a potential vendor. The panelists also dive into who are the evangelists that people listen to and how a company can create their own evangelists.    By the end, the host opened the floor for audience questions:     How big is it a disadvantage to require an email/gate to download content?  Any advice you have for vendor websites? How involved would you be in a customer advisory board or executive retreat? Why do you not give survey data much merit (to Rick)?  Do you have a preference for virtual or live events?   More on #CyberMarketingCon2023 here, see you in Texas! 🤠 Be sure to watch a video version of this session here. Follow Gianna on LinkedIn. Catch up with Maria on LinkedIn. Join the Cybersecurity Marketing Society on our website, and keep up with us on Twitter.  

In this episode, Joseph Barringhaus, Director of Demand Generation at Sonrai Security, joins Maria and Gianna to discuss all things demand gen. Sonrai Security is a cloud security startup that focuses on identity, access, and permission in the cloud. To begin, Joseph shares that he has been in the world of cybersecurity and cloud for some time. The ability to build things from the ground up is what he has loved most about working at startups. Then, he explains his current role as Director of Demand Gen at Sonrai. He is responsible for creating awareness for the company’s products first and foremost, while also making sure that awareness is brought into the pipeline. Thanks to Sonrai’s close relationship with their sales team, Joseph is able to work closely with the entire funnel all the way through the customer journey. His strategy focuses on content syndication and later-stage funnel indicators. He clarifies that he is not in favor of un-gating everything. On the flip side, when things do come out that promote the company, like an e-book, Sonrai will typically un-gate the content to encourage more people to read it. More often than not, Joseph is an advocate for un-gating the things that he and his team put lots of time and effort into. Then, Joseph unpacks MQL and demand gen. Sharing his perspective on brand awareness, Joseph stresses the importance of finding your market audience and the appropriate balance for your specific company. There is real value in knowing where someone remembers you from, which of your marketing strategies did and didn’t work, and how many touches it took for a customer to recognize the brand. Before wrapping up, Joseph shares his best advice for making time in the week for product knowledge and learning. In addition to keeping a detailed calendar, Joseph maintains a close relationship with the sales team to hear about what the market is saying through the team. Finally, our guest and hosts engage in a fun guessing game to reveal what career Joseph would pursue outside of the cybersecurity marketing field.   Links: Learn more about Joseph Barringhaus. Follow Gianna on LinkedIn. Catch up with Maria on LinkedIn. Join the Cybersecurity Marketing Society on our website, and keep up with us on Twitter.  

The time for #CyberMarketingCon2023 is fast approaching and we hope to see you in Austin in December. So mark those calendars and get your tickets, the conference will be from December 10th through 13th. It's filled with education, the best speakers, hands-on workshops, networking, networking, AND MORE networking.  Maria and Gianna cannot wait to see you. Enjoy this episode and be sure to get your ticket by clicking ➡️➡️➡️here! In this session, the focus was on understanding the dynamics of channel partner relationships in the cybersecurity industry. The two speakers, Amanda McLaughlin, Director of Mid-Atlantic Marketing at GuidePoint Security (Former Marketing Manager for GuidePoint Security), and David Brown, Head of Global Alliance and Partner Marketing at ReversingLabs (Former Director, Global Partner Marketing at ZEROFOX) are on a mission to educate and dispel misconceptions about VAR (Value-Added Reseller) and vendor relationships while also providing valuable tips and tricks on how to establish and maintain healthy VAR and vendor relationships.    Here are the key points covered: Promoting a better understanding of VAR and vendor relationships. Also highlighting their significance in the context of the cybersecurity industry. An in-depth explanation of what a VAR is: “entities that offer not only products but also their expertise and services in conjunction with solutions provided by solution providers.” The speakers used GuidePoint Security as an example as it is a cybersecurity VAR offering its services and expertise to clients. Addressing Misunderstandings: Amanda and David acknowledged that VAR and reseller relationships can be misunderstood, which is something similar to the classic sales and marketing relationship. But they also highlight how important it is to clear misunderstandings to establish effective partnerships. To close the session the speakers also went into what a successful vendor looks like to a VAR. The key metrics for success and some tips if you feel like your reseller relationship is not working? They also opened the floor for some questions!   More on #CyberMarketingCon2023 here, see you in Texas! 🤠 Be sure to watch a video version of this session here Follow Amanda on LinkedIn. Check out David on LinkedIn.  Follow Gianna on LinkedIn. Catch up with Maria on LinkedIn. Join the Cybersecurity Marketing Society on our website, and keep up with us on Twitter.