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1,500. That’s the approximate number of competitors every cybersecurity lead generation campaign you launch faces. And it’s not like a target audience of CISOs and CSOs is an easy one to impress.
What does it take to create a successful LinkedIn strategy that cuts through the noise and actually converts these prospects into leads and customers? It takes mixing the following ingredients into one tasty marketing campaign. It works every time.
1. Understand your market
Before you do any Lead Generation, gain a deep understanding of your market. Marketing to CISOs and CSOs is completely different than marketing to other managers or consultants. Their KPIs are different, and therefore they have different problems and needs. That’s why Marketing Insider Group recommends you, “know your buyers as well as your old college roommate,” as it will help you “anticipate their needs, recognize their style preferences, and understand the best ways to communicate with them.”
For example, CISOs and CSOs expect higher level, more in depth content, like overviews of security innovations and trends, as well as case studies and whitepapers.
2. Make Your Messaging About Your Ideal Customer, Not About You
One of the best things about startups is how passionate everyone is to make a great product succeed. But as much as you care about increasing your lead generation, so you can show your CEO and investors that you can deliver results – that’s how important your prospect's problems are to them.
When they dedicate part of their busy day to your content, they expect it to help them get results, not read another salesy post about product features. Give them the value they need, every time.
3. Prioritize Educational Content
While you want to sprinkle in content that directly communicates how your product helps CISOs and CSOs, you can do it in a softer, non-salesy way, like offering “Top 10 Reasons for X” and “The Ultimate Guide for Y” resources, that will help prospects make informed decisions.
Likewise, nothing drives your value better than a comparison of how good your product is versus your competitor. After all, as Salesforce’s Pardot reminds us, “70% of the buyer’s journey is complete before a buyer even reaches out to sales.”
Therefore, in both PPC and organic campaigns on LinkedIn, focus your content on stages, start building a relationship with your target audience.
Develop content that provides actual value, and they will come back again and again, which will gradually establish your company as the ecosystem’s thought leader in their minds by the time they’re ready to buy. That’s the way ROI happens on LinkedIn.
4. LinkedIn PPC Campaign
When it comes to targeting your best prospects, the job-specific data in every LinkedIn profile is unmatched anywhere else on the web. You can filter prospects by job title, company size, industry, geography, previous positions and so much more.
Test different types of targeting to see what works best for your audience. For example, you can filter prospects by group, and then drill down to title, or filter by title first, and then drill down by the groups they belong to. There are dozens of LinkedIn groups that cater to CSOs and CISOs, so there’s plenty for you to look for.
We have seen a great deal of success both by targeting titles within specific groups, and by targeting titles within specific companies.
5. Use Visuals that Evoke Emotions
Despite common beliefs, Kapost reports that, “in B2B buying, emotions matter even more than logic and reason.” If you consider the high stakes for any prospect considering converting into your marketing funnel, it actually makes sense. The best way to trigger emotions in your audience? Visuals.
Mammoth Infographics reports that “90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual,” and Content Marketing Institute adds that visuals can quickly evoke a range of emotions, from trust to empathy.
Even images, which are simpler to source than videos, can do that for you, as long as you align them with your messaging and stay away from standard stock photos, which tend to blend as background noise on CISOs and CSOs’ LinkedIn feeds. Instead, choose to work with websites that provide breathtaking stock photography, or even better, with a designer if you have the resources, so you can stand out of the crowd. Remember to adapt your visual strategy on a regular basis based on feedback from your audience.
6. Ask Your Audience to Take Action
Make it a habit to ask your audience to take action every time you release a new content piece. It could be to like or comment on your latest status update or LinkedIn post, but look for opportunities to ask them to download a resource in exchange for their email address, and other information about their companies and needs.
Do this both for PPC campaigns on LinkedIn and when you prioritize organic options.
Yes, a demo or a meeting might be the ultimate goal, but it’ll be easier to ask – and get – these results once you’ve gotten the initial information you need, and have taken the time to nurture your relationship with them via email.
7. Learn from the Mistakes Your Competitors Already Made
Keeping an eye on your competitors is always critical to understanding what’s working for your target audience and what’s missing in the ecosystem.
Here at Marketing Envy, we’ve worked with some of the most impressive cybersecurity and cloud infrastructure companies, so we’ve seen the worst and the best cybersecurity digital marketing lead generation strategies.
To make your life easier, we’ve compiled the ultimate marketer’s go-to guide. The guide gives you 25 tips, tricks and ideas that we’ve tested in countless campaigns, and it’s completely free.
