How do you make B2B cybersecurity marketing interesting? This episode brings Travis Hawley, the Director of Media at BlueVoyant, to the Breaking Through in Cybersecurity Marketing podcast to find out. He talks about the background that led him to cybersecurity marketing, his current role at BlueVoyant, how companies can use emerging media to promote products or services, and indeed how to make B2B cybersecurity marketing more interesting. Plus, Travis shares the Facebook groups he created and introverts in cybersecurity.

Timecoded Guide: [05:20] What BlueVoyant does and the stage of the company

[08:40] How companies with limited resources can use emerging media

[11:17] How to make B2B marketing engaging, educational, and sticky

[23:14] How to get your employees engaging and sharing content

[27:26] How to get founders or CEOs engaged and what to do if you can’t

[42:21] Travis’ Facebook groups and meme culture  

What is emerging media and how can companies with limited resources use it?

Traditional media is your white papers, blogs, reports, email marketing, etc. Those have their place and are useful but emerging media is two-fold. But Travis believes it’s video but it’s also what new platforms arise (like TikTok). In terms of limited resources, work with what you do have. For example, if you have a two-hour long webinar already recorded, you can take that and break it up into shorter 30-second video clips. Now you have content already done you can simply post in your marketing campaign.

“If you have limited resources, you have to be creative. And you may not be able to do it at the scale you want. But you can still get video out there, even if it isn't the most ideal video experience that you want. Start small, start with what you have, and just start creating that account of the data of any kind of video and you'll most likely start seeing the results of that.”

How do you make B2B marketing engaging?

Travis says you need two big things: faces and voices. People want to engage with content featuring someone who looks like them and talks like them. Graphics and the like aren’t engaging enough. You need to feature the faces and voices of your target audience and/or your employees because people don’t buy from companies; they buy from people. You can even do an animated video of the text of someone's quote and their headshot.

“So to me, in most cases, all content will fall under two buckets: it's either educational, or I would say utilitarian, useful. Or it's entertaining. And then hopefully, the best of both worlds is if you can have overlap there. And if they are educational and entertaining, and there's overlap to some degree, then the content is sticky, you're gonna have retention. How do you get employees engaged with marketing?

Again, faces and voices. In Travis’ experience, employees generally like to celebrate their co-worker's achievements. So if you post a video of someone in one department and tell the rest of the company, it’s much more impactful than a paid actor. Because the employees know this person, they work with this person, they want to support this person. Employees don’t necessarily have a relationship with other employees, but they have a relationship with their co-workers.

“Employee advocacy starts from the ground up, any employee needs to be empowered to create content, to co-develop content, to ideate content, and to star in the content. And that's how you get people to want to engage more to support their own colleagues.

What about founders, how do you get founders or CEOs engaged with marketing strategy?

Founders and C-suite executives are very busy people. So start with trying to figure out the value that marketing is adding to your company, and go to the data. Show the founder the value and see if you can get buy-in from them but if you can’t, that’s okay. You can find other influencers and subject matter experts in the company who want to advocate for the services and the company itself. Employees are just as effective evangelizers.

“They're the leaders of the company. And they have the most knowledge and on the vision and on the services and things like that. But you don't need them, let's just be honest, you don't.”

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