Making the messaging is a new article series exploring how Radix turns complex B2B technology into compelling, readable copy that engages audiences of all levels and gets results. We’re lifting the veil on some of the key practices and thought processes that help us demystify tech and build content that helps business decision-makers get their heads around even the most arcane services and solutions.
Before I begin in earnest, I want to address why cybersecurity and governance solutions have been bundled together in this article. Because the answer is the first – and possibly biggest – clue to how we make content about them engaging.
Cybersecurity, governance, and compliance solutions help businesses avoid disaster, rather than achieve anything particularly aspirational. In terms of how we talk about them in marketing content, they’re very similar.
These are solutions that help a business meet a basic operational need. Without them, chaos can ensue. With them, it’s business as usual. Naturally, that leads many marketers to lean into the one obvious lever available to build interest in these solutions – great and looming FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt).
Fear is cheap. It takes real skill to build excitement.
If a solution primarily helps a business avoid disaster, you’d expect the marketing messaging around to focus on the scale and severity of those disasters, building a ‘What if it happened to you?’”-type fear. There’s logic to that, but the approach has one major flaw: it doesn’t respect how much your audience already understands the cost of inaction.
Cybersecurity, governance, and compliance decision-makers fully understand the risks their organisations are exposed to. That’s why they’re researching solutions like these. Mitigating those risks and helping them uphold their compliance responsibilities are table stakes. It’s a basic expectation for people whose entire working lives revolve around managing and minimising risk. So if that’s all your messaging focuses on, it will be tough to convince them yours is the right solution for their organisation.
Instead, think carefully about the mindset your audience is in when they’re searching for these kinds of solutions. They’re solving a problem, taking care of something that might not be the most exciting tech investment ever, but absolutely can’t be ignored. Lean into that, and show them just how many of their problems you can make go away.
Don’t stop once you’ve told them how you’re going to safeguard their business or streamline governance and compliance. Emphasize ease of deployment, ease of use, breadth of support, and any other USPs that will make their lives easier. Do it right, and you might just get them excited about investing in disaster avoidance.
In fields like these, trust is everything
When a buyer chooses your organisation as their cybersecurity or governance solution provider, they aren’t just buying technology – they’re placing a great deal of trust in you. The stakes of a security or compliance breach are very high, so the faster you can begin building that trust, the better.
As writers and content creators we can help achieve that in a few ways. First, when the stakes surrounding a solution choice are high, prospects tend to favour certainty, and proof that you can deliver what you promise. That makes key proof points from customer case studies invaluable. Every point we make needs to be supported by some kind of evidence backing up our claims. If you’ve helped clients recover from DDoS attacks in minutes, or achieve >99.9% uptime, show that off and explain exactly how you did it.
Second, we need to make information transparent and easy to discover. Prospects will need to scrutinise your solution in detail before they choose it, so bottom-of-funnel product marketing content needs to be just as transparent as your eye-catching top-of-funnel content.
If you can substantiate your claims, demonstrate that this isn’t your first rodeo, and proactively anticipate and answer as many common prospect questions as possible, you’re well on your way to showing that yours is a solution they can trust.
Don’t spare the technical details
With some technology solutions, it’s more important to focus on covering the outcomes they enable. That’s where the real magic and the ‘art of the possible’ often exist. That’s still important here, but once you’ve covered how you’ll positively impact key security and resilience metrics like Mean Time to Restore (MTTR) and average downtime following a breach, there isn’t too much more to say.
Because the desired outcomes are so straightforward – robust security, low downtime, and continuous compliance – it’s worth spending a bit more time on the how to make it clear exactly what your solutions offer from a technical perspective.
Talk your audience through the structure of your Zero Trust architecture, explore the intricacies of your approach to endpoint detection and response (EDR), or lift the veil on exactly how you use AI and machine learning to automate threat response. These are the things CISOs really want to know.
The outcomes enabled by these solutions will likely be strikingly similar to the outcomes your competitors claim to deliver. These are solution markets where a small difference in capability and underlying technology can be your biggest competitive differentiator. If you’ve managed to develop unique tools or functionality, put that front and centre in your messaging, and show your audience exactly how it all works.
That’s where your SMEs become so critical. A lot of this insight often exist only in their heads. You can find some helpful tips to help you extract and amplify their expertise here.
Empathy, trust, and detail
Cybersecurity and governance tools can be tricky solutions to write about. But it becomes quite simple when you do three key things:
- Understand your audience’s mindset and needs, and how these buying journeys differ from most other enterprise technology investments
- Build trust by backing up your claims and showcasing your expertise and track record in the field
- Focus on the how and don’t shy away from the underlying technical details that separate your solutions from your competitors’
Keep an eye out for the next article in this series soon. And if you’d like to discuss the best ways to create great content that makes your tech understandable and appealing to as many people as possible, talk to us today.