By Content Visit is a cybersecurity content marketing agency I founded back in 2020.We—two full-timers with support from freelancers—help cybersecurity vendors engage leads at different stages of the buying funnel with best-in-class blogs, whitepapers, solution briefs, social posts, infographics, and other content assets.
Our focus is facilitating content marketing for cyber and information security companies. Content enables B2B sales cycles, yet marketing content is often the last thing marketing teams think about.
If you’ve worked in marketing for any length of time, you will have encountered situations where marketing leaders and their CEOs are often happy to spend money on buying ads, new websites, attending conferences, and other “hard” marketing activities. The same people typically consider content a byproduct and wonder why, x weeks/months into a lead generation campaign, their leads are either not engaging or have sky-high acquisition costs.
As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water (for example, pay for ad placement), but making it drink (having a conversation with your sales team) needs a push. Our experience is that high-quality content is what pushes prospects over this line.
B2B buying teams won’t engage with generic information.
This is especially true in the cybersecurity market. Solution refresh cycles can span years, and there are countless content touchpoints across a company’s website, socials, sales outreach emails, and more. Complex security deals also involve buying teams with varying levels of technical knowledge, including CISOs, CFOs, and security architects. All of them need content that explains why your solution solves their problems.
In a market crowded with superficially similar solutions, buyers require education to grasp the actual use cases for each vendor. This is what cybersecurity marketing content does. We help vendors by working with their internal teams, building content strategies, and producing content assets. I’ve spent the last four years building a cybersecurity content agency.
Here’s what I’ve learned along the way.
Why Security Vendors Work with Content Agencies
At the expense of my entire business model, I have to be honest. In an ideal world, no business should work with a marketing agency. Internal experts would write and distribute all of their marketing content directly. The CEO would write all the blogs, script webinars, and provide content to the social media manager; the CTO would craft every white paper from scratch; the CMO would plan the content strategy, run UGC campaigns, etc.
In reality, most security vendors do not have nearly enough time to do a fraction of this work. Even if technical founders understand the value of content marketing and are keen to engage with it, they almost always lack expertise in content marketing processes and skills.
Skills like:
- Understanding how audiences consume content.
- Repurposing content.
- Creating readable white papers.
- Social media scheduling.
- Designing skimmable infographics.
- Optimizing for distribution channels.
- Content marketing funnels.
The list goes on. Specialized agencies like Content Visit play a role here. We multiply content marketing capabilities by interviewing SMEs and combining original research with years of content marketing experience. We help vendors and service providers understand the content their audience needs, and then we create it with their input.
Focusing on tech content
I’ve been working in content marketing for over a decade. Before focusing solely on security brands in 2020, I spent five years as a generalist freelance writer and worked in an in-house marketing role.
Content Visit came about when I partnered with another writer I met during a previous job.
We understood that there was a need to expand from just writing to a wider offering, including content strategy. Words on their own only have a certain value (especially true now with the rise of AI), but content combined with strategy is worth far more.
After a few false starts, we formed an agency and registered a limited company. Then, we spent time developing, through trial and error, a cybersecurity-focused content marketing process based on our experiences working with security vendors.
After initially cold-emailing hundreds of smaller vendors, a few clients stuck and some turned into long-term work (we’ve worked with some clients for over three years straight) and provided referrals to others. We also developed our own SEO strategy, which generates leads every month, and started marketing ourselves through other channels, including paid ads and social media.
Bonus: Why Visual Content Is The Future Of Marketing?
What I’ve Seen Work Well (For Agencies and Clients)
Here are three ingredients that, in my experience, can boost a cybersecurity company’s chances of content marketing success when working with an agency:
1. Retainer-based pricing.
When work is assured, agencies can invest effort in growing the client’s business, and clients get protection from upselling and unnecessary work. One-off jobs can work, too, but long-term engagements are best for everyone. Ideally, content marketing should be linked to other deliverables like social media content management to ensure consistency between social media messaging, SEO content, and sales enablement content.
2. Agencies that do not outsource critical work
Great agencies invest in long-term relationships with a small number of clients. I believe you cannot scale quality content by outsourcing to an army of freelancers. You need one or two people committed to an account for its duration. We use freelancers for specific tasks (for example, producing a certain volume of SEO content for lower-value keywords). Focused tasks, like lead generation copywriting, we always do in-house.
3. Buy-in from internal SMEs.
Companies need internal experts willing to engage with marketing in a QA and ideation role. This can be an hour or two a month, but some level of SME involvement is fundamental. Access to internal SMEs in a client’s business is always better than having a general cybersecurity “SME” on an agency’s staff. Security is so broad and siloed that you need someone with a deep understanding of whatever solution is being marketed to give feedback versus someone with broad cybersecurity knowledge.
What Does Not Work
On the inverse, I would not recommend the following:
1. Creating content without a distribution strategy.
It sounds obvious, but buying or selling a number of blogs or whitepapers (because you “should”) without a distribution or funnel strategy is often a waste of time. Content needs to a) have some kind of outcome in mind and b) have a distribution channel to achieve that outcome, e.g., SEO, paid search, social media, etc.
2. Outsource everything.
Agencies need to develop long-term talent in-house. We once tried to onboard a large number of freelancers but found that it was not possible to scale with any kind of quality. Finding talented freelancers is extremely hard, and the very good ones will charge almost as much as any client is willing to pay an agency.
3. General agencies that also “do” cybersecurity content.
In my opinion, it takes years and thousands of hours to get to grips with a technical vertical like cybersecurity. A general marketing agency (an agency that works across multiple verticals) is highly unlikely to have anyone on staff or a roster with enough continuous experience to deliver content for a cybersecurity agency. As companies pump out more content with AI and tools that enable free AI image-to-video conversion, there is no point in marketing with “good enough” content. To win attention and leads, you need a focused creative team that understands your market and customers.
Bonus: Empower Creatives and Streamline Content Approval
Surviving content management chaos
Whether you are working in-house as a content marketer or run a small agency like me, you’ll probably agree that content marketing could be easily renamed “project management of content.”
When you are dealing with technical topics that need input from various stakeholders, SEO and conversion feedback you want to bring in and multiple clients, formats, use cases, deadlines, etc., things get messy. Add in the challenges of onboarding new clients and dealing with requests to change deliverables or retainers your inbox can start to look overwhelming.
We survive the chaos and get things done for our clients by leaning on a mixture of Google Sheets, Google Tasks, Google Calendar (you might have spotted that we are firmly a “Google shop”), and Slack.
I basically live on Slack. At ContentVisit, we use client-specific channels to coordinate workflows with my partner and freelancers. We are also plugged into various internal slack channels with clients to get their direct feedback and SME input.
In the long term, I would like us to move to a more coherent project management system, but I am currently exploring building automation using Zapier.
Conclusion
Running a small cybersecurity content marketing agency is hard. Very hard. I would only recommend starting an agency in 2024 if you are a freelancer with a full roster of clients and nowhere left to grow.
You must market yourself, do sales, market your clients, keep up with a fast-moving industry, withstand stinging feedback from SMEs when you make technical mistakes, survive budget cuts and clients changing priorities, and more. The money can be good, sometimes great, but it is never guaranteed. There can be months when you pay freelancers far more than you make and still have to redo their work entirely.
All the same, I recently turned down a good in-house job with a major enterprise. I keep doing this because, after four years, I have a partner with whom I gel, a clear idea of the value we deliver to clients, and the feeling of limitless growth.
My firm belief is that agencies win when their clients win. Churn-and-burn agencies that onboard many businesses, knowing most will not work out, are a waste of everyone’s time. The market is still flooded with agencies like this, but as time goes on, AI content swamps the internet, and changes in market behavior, search engine optimization, and increased demand for quality content, I feel things will work out.
Just a note for anyone considering this. If I were to do this again, I would invest more time in quality leads, never get comfortable with a few “okay” clients, and primarily, forget about imposter syndrome. Stand up for great content.
