Cybersecurity Marketing, Part 4: Implement Your Cybersecurity Lead Nurture Strategy
This is part 4 of our 5-part series about cybersecurity advertising and marketing. Part 1 covers how to define your target audience. Part 2 explains the process for creating good content. That is followed by part 3, which discusses which platforms are best for campaign deployment. Finally, we round out the series with this part, which explains how to implement your cybersecurity lead nurture strategy and end with part 5, which is about measuring, optimizing, and replicating results.
While the glory may come from new leads, the dollars come from converting them into sales opportunities.
Marketing to this audience requires a consistent and thoughtful cybersecurity lead nurture strategy to nudge leads through the funnel. Unfortunately, one of the main problems we find is organizations struggle to tread the line between obnoxious and ineffective.
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How to Build Your Cybersecurity Lead Nurture Strategy
Many marketers immediately start building their cybersecurity lead nurture strategy be writing streams in Word as a series of emails in a set order. We don’t recommend this. It creates a false sense of a narrative that only exists in your team members’ minds. Your team will show how each email lays the foundation for a neatly branched storyline that results in the prospect’s inevitable decision to ask for a demo. Unfortunately, we know that real life never works out this way. No prospect will attentively read all of your emails. You’ll be lucky if they read any of them.
It’s all about building around desired actions–not a set narrative.
Instead, we recommend thinking about an array of actions you’d like the prospects to take and pieces of content that would be valuable to them. Present these in an order that makes sense, but without assuming they’ve seen anything else you’ve sent them.
Prospects rarely follow the customer journey we have laid out for them.
So, make sure that each of your emails can make sense standing alone.
Just like with the very top of the funnel, direct-sell CTAs that boil down to “talk to a salesperson” are unlikely to garner much response unless you’re speaking to a segment is signaling very high intent. So, for example, if the initial action taken by the prospect was to download a piece of content, then you should follow up with more high-level content and more middle-of-funnel content.
Quick Tip: If the ultimate goal is for prospects to engage with a salesperson, don’t make that the focus of every email, but do make sure to include it as a secondary call to action. Providing prospects with an easy way to communicate with sales as they interact with your content ensures you are ready when they make the leap from evaluation to purchase.
Cybersecurity Lead Nurture Strategy FAQs
How many tracks should I have?
We recommend starting with a few fairly generic “I don’t know anything about this prospect other than where they converted” nurture tracks and an initial set of four or five CTAs. After that, you should use a combination of soft CTAs, like “check out this blog post,” and direct CTAs, like “talk to an expert.” You can iterate from there, but you may need fewer tracks than you think.
What are the best times to email our prospects and how often?
We’ve seen all kinds of wild and conflicting claims regarding when and how often to email prospects. Our agency view is that people overthink this. There is no perfect time or frequency for reaching everyone on your list.
We recommend that you set up your emails to arrive at different times, so you’re more likely to hit everyone’s sweet spot at least once. As for how often? It depends on the audience and the type of CTA they responded to. Content CTAs should get a slower burn than CTAs like pricing inquiries that indicate high intent. We like to go with 13 days for content-focused emails and every 3 days for more direct-sell-focused email streams
We have some old leads in our database from a trade show we attended / that we bought from an ‘opt-in’ list…should we send them nurture emails?
You really only need to ask yourself one question. Did these prospects knowingly (and fairly recently) indicate that they want to hear from your company? If the answer is “no” then our advice is to NOT email them.
We’ve heard people get tied up in whether or not these gray areas are spam from a legal perspective, but we think that’s missing the point. Spam is spam if the recipient thinks it’s spam. And if it’s spam, they aren’t going to engage with it. What’s worse, a large percentage of folks will mark your email as spam and kill your sender reputation and future deliverability.
The cybersecurity sector is even more likely than others to mark unwanted email as spam. Don’t risk killing your future chances to connect—and not just with that contact, but with the organization going forward. It’s not worth it.
Don’t Dilly-Dally–Get Your Cybersecurity Lead Nurture In Market ASAP
Remember what we said about getting campaigns in market as quickly as possible? That applies to lead nurture too.
Nurture may be the stage where we see teams fall into paralysis the most . . . and it’s also the deadliest. Nurture takes a relatively long time to come to fruition, and the difference between a perfectly calibrated, heavily segmented nurture campaign and a one-size-fits-all “good enough” stream can be subtle in the short term. So, it’s best to put something in place so your leads don’t go stale as you work on the Sistine Chapel of lead nurture. We’re not saying that the creative execution doesn’t matter, but it’s not nearly as important as being in your prospect’s inbox with something of value. The number one goal of any nurture campaign is to remind the prospect that you exist and try to nudge them away from the true enemies of any enterprise sale—inertia and apathy. Don’t forget, it’s digital. You can always improve it later.
In most cases, enterprise cybersecurity solutions = long sales cycles.
So, the sooner you start bringing in leads and nurturing them, the sooner they turn into sales.
The Machine Is Running – How Do I Know It’s Working?
Ok, we’re making good headway! You’ve figured out who your target audience is and created custom content for them. You got that content in market and have now set up a robust cybersecurity lead nurture strategy to ensure you stay top of mind as prospects move through their buying journey. The next question is–how do you know if its work?
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