Every B2B cybersecurity company understands the importance of generating quality leads. Understanding how to generate qualified leads, however, is a different matter. In this article, we’ll give you a breakdown of the key components of B2B cybersecurity lead generation, including how to define your target audience, the best lead gen strategies, and how to leverage multi-channel marketing. We’ve seen these strategies work time and again for our cybersecurity clients, so read on to learn insider tips to improve your business’s cybersecurity lead generation strategy.
Cybersecurity Lead Generation: The Basics
Let’s start with a definition: cybersecurity lead generation is the process of identifying and attracting potential customers interested in your cybersecurity solution through targeted marketing strategies. This includes identifying your company’s target audience, developing a unique value proposition, capturing information about your leads, analyzing the results, and then optimizing your strategy for better performance. It’s a continuous cycle, which means even if you already have a B2B lead generation strategy in place for your cybersecurity company, this guide can still help you refine it.
Before we dive into the “how” of cybersecurity lead generation, let’s cover the “why” of cybersecurity lead generation. Lead gen accomplishes a few things for your cybersecurity company:
- Drives growth and revenue: Many companies are outsourcing their cybersecurity roles to vendors, whether it’s for financial or strategic reasons, which means they are in the market for cybersecurity solutions like yours. How do you get them on your client list? B2B lead generation.
- Captures new demand: Globally, cybercrime is predicted to rise in cost from $9.22 trillion in 2024 to $13.82 trillion in 2028, resulting in a growing demand for cybersecurity services. Companies with sound lead generation strategies will be strategically positioned to capitalize on this increasing demand.
- Engages with the right audience: Due to the research behind lead generation strategy, a well-planned B2B cybersecurity lead generation strategy will connect decision makers like CISOs and IT directors with your company.
How to Define Your Target Audience/Buyer Persona
Now that we’ve defined the “what” and “why” behind cybersecurity lead generation, we’re ready to dive into the “who”.
Identifying Your Target Audience
The first step in creating a B2B lead generation strategy is identifying who you want to target, i.e. your company’s target audience. Since any company that handles sensitive data needs cybersecurity services, from financial and medical institutions to manufacturing and real estate companies, this is easier said than done. A good place to start is to create an ideal customer profile (ICP). Key factors to include in an ICP are:
- Industry
- Business size
- Job title(s)
- Location
- Annual revenue
We recommend starting your target audience research by analyzing your current customer base. Create a list of current clients that are a great fit for your product or services (criteria for this could be number of contract renewals, account size, successful upsells, etc.), then identify common characteristics of these clients using the list of key ICP factors. Use the list of tried-and-true characteristics you’ve created as a guide when creating your ICP and target audience.
Creating Your Buyer Persona
Once you’ve identified your target audience, you’re ready to create buyer personas. Buyer personas focus less on the quantitative data about a business, and more on how your ideal clients think. As a cybersecurity firm, you will most likely be targeting the CISOs, CIOs, and IT directors of companies within your target audience. These decision-makers share several characteristics to consider when creating buyer personas:
- Pain points: Resource constraints, regulatory compliance, and integration issues
- Needs: Scalable solutions, real-time analytics, and vendor support/collaboration
- Purchasing behavior: Thorough pre-purchase evaluation of products/services, preference for demonstrated proof of concept before full-scale deployment, and evaluation of vendor reputation before purchase
We recommend starting with just a few buyer personas at first, since you can always add more as you continue to refine your target audience. The key is to identify what your clients think they need, and how your product or services can fulfill that need. For example, your clients may think they need a way to train their staff to stop clicking on links in phishing emails, but you know that they need a malware sandbox that will stop the phishing emails from reaching their employees altogether.
The Best Cybersecurity Lead Generation Strategies
Now that we know who we’re targeting, let’s talk about where to find them.
Market Research
If you haven’t already included the below industries in your target audience research, we recommend considering them. These industries are guaranteed to need cybersecurity services, and even if they already have an in-house team or vendor, they likely will still have issues that your solutions could resolve.
- Medical centers
- Startups
- Companies that are going digital
- Educational institutions
Once you have a list of industries you would like to target, it’s time to answer the question of where you can get in contact with businesses within each industry. We suggest:
- Referrals from current clients
- Networking events
- PR and advertising campaigns
- Digital product launches such as webinars or ebooks
All of these will get you intentional, high-quality contact with potential clients.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
ABM is the follow-up step of market research. As a more personalized approach to marketing, it targets the decision-makers of individual accounts. This allows your company to tailor its message to the needs of a specific organization. Because cybersecurity needs can vary so greatly from organization to organization, this personalized approach can be more effective than broad cybersecurity marketing strategies.
Free Auditing
Most businesses audit their cybersecurity measures on a regular schedule. By offering a free audit, your company can not only attract potential leads, but also build rapport, showcase your expertise, and identify issues within their existing cybersecurity measures that your product or services can fix. Plus, it aligns with the purchasing behaviors outlined above, including establishing vendor reputation, allowing for a thorough evaluation of the service pre-purchase, and demonstrating proof of concept.
Educational content marketing
Cybersecurity is an ever-evolving field, which means there is a constant demand for relevant, educational content. By creating free content via blog, ebook, or webinar, you can attract qualified leads, establish your company as a thought leader, and improve brand recognition. This will also help improve your organic search performance, which is why content strategy is a key aspect of Amplifyed’s services.
How to Leverage Multi-Channel Marketing
We’ve covered where we might find potential leads or they might find us, so let’s dive next into the nitty-gritty of how to generate leads. We’ve already touched on many of the channels available for B2B cybersecurity lead generation, but let’s go over the details of how to make these channels work for your company.
Develop an Effective SEO Strategy
Cybersecurity SEO strategy is our specialty here at Amplifyed, and the main goal we have for each of our clients is to attract and convert high-quality leads through improved search engine visibility. Below are some of the key components that we’ve discovered are essential for every SEO strategy:
- Keyword Research: Good keyword research is a combination of good data and SEO experience. A great place to look for keyword ideas is your competitors and the giants of your industry. Once you’ve found keywords that you want to target, we recommend using tools like Google Keyword Planner and Ahrefs to evaluate the difficulty, search volume, and relevance of each keyword.
- For example, the primary keyword of this article is “cybersecurity lead generation”. We chose this term because it is highly relevant to our services, has good search volume, and has low difficulty.
Related: Cybersecurity SEO Expert Tips to Protect Your Rankings
- SEO-Friendly Content: Now that you’ve selected a term, it’s time to write a piece of content that will get found for it. Best practices include making the content highly relevant to your readers (remember the pain points we discussed earlier?), balancing technical information with accessibility, and being strategic with keyword placement.
- Technical SEO: Every piece of content should include technical SEO elements such as title tags, meta descriptions, backlinks, and internal links.
Related: Technical SEO for SaaS
If that sounds like too much for your company to handle in-house, schedule a call with us; we eat, sleep, and breathe this stuff.
Create High-Quality Content
There are many content formats that attract cybersecurity leads, including:
- Blogs
- Whitepapers
- Case Studies
- Webinars
- Infographics
Regardless of the format, all content should be valuable to your target audience and establish your company’s credibility. For content inspiration, consider hot topics in cybersecurity or your target industries, current events, and pain points of your buyer personas. This could range from the latest cyber threats to look out for to high-profile data breaches.
Once you’ve created a piece of quality content, we recommend adapting it to different formats. For example, convert part of a blog post into an infographic and a social media post. Or, create a blog post out of the material covered in a webinar. This will help maximize your reach and engagement with potential leads by offering content in the way they prefer to consume it.
Related: Cybersecurity Content Marketing
Leverage Social Media and Online Communities
Social media is an excellent channel to increase brand awareness and engage with quality leads. For the cybersecurity industry, we recommend starting with LinkedIn, Twitter, and industry-specific forums such as StationX or TechRepublic Forums. Try a mix of posting original content and providing solutions to other users’ questions.
Implement Email Marketing Campaigns
When properly executed, an email marketing campaign can help build relationships with qualified leads and guide them through the sales funnel. Segmenting your email lists based on the recipient’s job role, company size, and previous interactions with your business will ensure you deliver personalized messages for every client. With a 23% open rate, it’s critical to use compelling subject lines and clear call to actions to help guide users.
Utilize Paid Advertising and PPC
Paid advertising is an excellent way of quickly driving potential clients to your website. There are a lot of PPC platforms to choose from, including Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and display advertising. Whichever platform you choose, key strategic components to consider are keyword bidding, ad copywriting, landing page optimization, and A/B testing.
Build Strategic Partnerships and Network
A strategic partnership is a great way to quickly expand your business’s customer base at a relatively low cost. While there are many types of partnerships, you’ll always want to look for a company to partner with that a) isn’t a competitor and b) your services improve the offering of. This could involve integrating your cybersecurity software with their hardware, adding your services to some of their offerings, creating APIs, and more.
Building strategic partnerships requires networking, which can be done both online on platforms such as LinkedIn, and in-person at industry conferences and tech expos. When networking at industry events, it’s important to have your elevator pitch ready, collect the contact information of new connections, and follow up afterwards.
How to Measure and Analyze Lead Generation Efforts
Once you’ve implemented the lead generation strategy for your company, it’s important to measure the results to identify areas of success and areas that need improvement. KPIs for lead generation include:
- Lead volume
- Lead quality
- Cost per lead
- Conversion rate
- Lifetime value
Each metric tells a different part of your company’s lead generation story, so we recommend identifying several priority metrics to monitor prior to strategy implementation. These KPIs can be tracked through your existing CRM system, Google Analytics, and marketing automation tools.
Regardless of the KPIs tracked, overall best practices include:
- Segment the data: this could be by behavior, demographic, and/or source
- Analyze lead sources: use an attribution model such as first-touch, last-touch, linear, etc. as well as compare the performance of different channels
- Assess lead quality: a lead scoring system will help you identify which leads have the most potential
- Monitor and adjust your strategy: we recommend monthly and quarterly reviews to assess what’s working, what’s not, and where to make adjustments
To Recap
We’ve covered a lot in this article, so let’s recap:
- The what: lead generation is a way to identify and attract potential customers; a good lead generation strategy is a continuous cycle of analyzing opportunities, implementing changes, monitoring results, and tweaking strategy as needed
- The why: the demand for cybersecurity services is growing, and lead generation is a strategic way to engage with the right audience and increase your company’s market share
- The who: identifying your company’s target audience and creating buyer personas will narrow down who your lead generation should be targeting, as well as what your prospective clients are looking for in a cybersecurity solution
- The where: there are multiple methods to find your target audience, including market research and account-based marketing (ABM), as well as multiple methods to bring your target audience to you, including free site audits and educational materials
- The how: multi-channel marketing is a must for cybersecurity lead generation. Utilizing a combination of SEO strategy, high-quality content, social media, email marketing, digital marketing, and strategic partnerships will yield the best results. Using KPIs to track results through tools like Google Analytics and your existing CRM will help you identify what’s working and what’s not
The only thing we haven’t covered about cybersecurity lead generation yet is the when, and that’s easy: now. Try implementing a few of the strategies in this article to your company’s lead gen strategy today, or give us a call for a quick chat and expert advice.
Laurel Henning
SEO Specialist
Hello! Thanks for reading this article. I’m Laurel and I’ve worked in digital marketing since 2022, helping businesses just like yours build their brand and get found on Google. I’ve learned that SEO strategy and conversions go hand-in-hand, and you can’t have one without the other! If you want to chat about SEO, branding, Lord of the Rings, or women’s fashion, give me a shout.