Cybersecurity may be the most crowded and fragmented market in the technology landscape, partly due to its lack of product differentiation and historical resilience to budgetary cuts. Last year, the market’s revenue totaled $173.5 billion, with projections estimating cybersecurity spending will reach $219 billion by 2024 (IDC), giving the industry a feverish “boom or bust” atmosphere akin to the California Gold Rush. Due to our experiences with cybersecurity clients, we’re familiar with having an innovative product that gets lost in the sluice box amid hundreds of other companies vying for the same market share. Considering the market’s sheer size, enhancing visibility and shaping your go-to-market strategy can feel like banging your head against a server cabinet. So, where can you turn when your efforts yield little more than fool’s gold?
Like a 49er with a pickaxe and a pan in the Sierra Nevada, you can imbue your PR efforts with credibility by mining annual reports like the Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report (DBIR) for relevant statistics. These statistics can crystallize your product-market fit and align your product’s go-to-market strategy with industry trends. For example, can you leverage data from a commonly exploited vertical market and describe how your product alleviates the pain points of that vertical’s users by protecting their specialized systems? Remember, innovative technology is merely a prerequisite these days, with some experts claiming that a go-to-market strategy based on the right customer is essential for standing out in the crowded cybersecurity market and creating product differentiation.
Balancing selling with storytelling to stake your claim
We know startups and midsized companies often feel time-constrained as they focus on selling rather than storytelling. Even worse, they can feel invisible, struggling to stack their claim. With this in mind, Engage PR perused the annual Verizon DBIR report for relevant data that can substantiate the story behind your go-to-market strategy. Data has endless utility in PR and communications strategy because it provides a credible foundation for your product’s story by highlighting the severity of your customers’ problems. This credibility empowers your messaging with an emotional resonance that sounds realistic and informed instead of alarmist for the sake of sales.
Once your go-to-market strategy is defined, you can repurpose these data points through contributed articles, blogs, Point-of-View abstracts or speaking and awards submissions to lend credibility to your multi-channel storytelling. When we draft content for clients, we often start with a broad statement, validating our thesis with statistics before drilling deeper (like we did in this blog – did you notice?). Furthermore, third-party validation is helpful for startups and midsized companies working against a lean budget, scant customer base and limited access to analyst briefings. Let’s look at some key data from the Verizon DBIR and learn to mine this information so your company shines like a gold nugget among the mottled rocks of a riverbed.
All that glitters isn't gold – but numbers don’t lie
As usual, the human element and external actors are the biggest causes of cyber breaches, with human error accounting for 74 percent of all breaches and 83 percent of breaches caused by external actors. Meanwhile, the three primary attack vectors are phishing, credential theft and exploitation of vulnerabilities. So, can you pitch a contributed article from a company thought leader comparing the strengths and weaknesses of various zero-trust approaches for reducing these three primary attack methods? Can you describe how a certain security control obscures assets, keeping external actors from seeing them in the first place? Considering that 50 percent of all social engineering attacks are pretext attacks, can you make a case for how multi-cloud and on-prem asset visibility in an increasingly distributed business world can help cybersecurity administrators detect and remediate social engineering pretext attacks?
On the other hand, maybe your thought leader thinks phishing may only be the tip of the iceberg – can you offer a contrarian take that raises eyebrows, creates buzz and engages readers? The report also finds that ransomware remains a common problem, accounting for 24 percent of breaches and 91 percent of industries’ top three attack vectors, with email being the most common ransomware method at over 35 percent. So, can your company thought leader write a blog describing the top three mechanisms of microsegmentation that prevent lateral movement even after a successful ransomware email breach?
How a PR team helps you hit that sweet paydirt
Amid the financial fever of the crowded cybersecurity market, a knowledgeable PR team is worth its weight in gold because it can help your company understand and navigate industry trends through an awareness of concrete statistics. This awareness helps you build your emerging product’s credibility and go-to-market strategy while resonating with your ideal customers. A good PR team should not only push content out of the door. It should also keep tabs on the latest major market reports from industry bellwethers to craft that content. Heightened awareness of market reports can strengthen your PR efforts by aligning your company’s story to the prevailing problems affecting your customers, helping you hit paydirt like a victorious prospector.
.png)
.png)
.png)
