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At Altitude, we’ve reviewed over 1,200 pieces of marketing content created by 12 cybersecurity leaders. Where possible, we’ve categorized each piece of content, based on its age, readability, and type.

In two previous articles we provided you with insights on content age and content readability.

• Content age: In a constantly evolving industry like cybersecurity, content can quickly become out-of-date, as solutions improve and new challenges arise.
  
  

• Content readability: Cybersecurity is complex enough. Content that is hard to read will either be quickly ignored, or fail to convey key messaging.

In this article, we consider the importance of having the right mix of content type for each cybersecurity solution you are marketing.

The Buyer’s Journey: Content Type Value by Journey Stage

With multiple stakeholders typically involved in the B2B buying process, having easily shareable content at each of these stages is highly valuable. Different content types have been found to be better suited for the early (awareness), middle (consideration) and late (decision) stages of the buying journey.

In the 2023 Content Preferences Survey Report from DemandGen, the most valuable content at each buying stage includes:

• Early Stage: Webinars, research reports, blog posts, whitepapers, e-books and infographics

• Middle Stage: Case studies, analyst reports, webinars and rich content media like video

• Late Stage: Demos, user reviews, ROI calculators and caste studies

What We Found

We chose the following 13 leaders in the cybersecurity space:

1. AT&T Cybersecurity

2. Akamai Technologies

3. Broadcom Inc.

4. Check Point

5. CrowdStrike

6. DXC Technology

7. F5 Networks

8. IBM

9. Palo Alto Networks

10. Secureworks

11. Sentinel One

12. Trend Micro

13. Zscaler

Then we reviewed their cybersecurity-focused product and solution webpages to discover what contents types they were leveraging in their marketing efforts.

The findings below reflect the overall averages and the actual data we gathered from three of the companies reviewed.

If we take a quick look at these three sample companies, compared to the overall average of all companies reviewed:

• Company A: Leans into whitepapers, analyst reports, eBooks and infographics

• Company B: Skews towards a higher percentage of solution briefs and webinars

• Company C: Has a higher percentage of videos, analyst reports and webinars

Without the context of knowing the individual strategies of these companies, we can only speculate as to whether they have the optimal mix, and whether these choices were deliberate. One thing we have noticed in our work with clients, is that personnel changes due to departures, re-organizations, etc. can often result in individual marketers not being aware of their full inventory of content.

If you put yourself in the position of one of these companies, it might be worth asking what potential value could:

• Additional explainer videos deliver for company A, in the middle stage of the buyer’s journey?

• Investment in analyst reports deliver for company B, in the early and middle stages?

• A few infographics deliver for company C, in the early stages?

Your answers would surely vary but we found sharing this data with marketing leaders can generate a lively discussion and a wealth of ideas. I’d highly recommend taking the time to do a quick survey of your content and see what your mix looks like. While this data is at a company level, we also found reviewing it at an individual solution or portfolio level also generates some interesting insights. Often, it becomes clear that some valuable product or solution has been underserved from a marketing perspective.

If you’d like to learn more about the findings of our research, please reach out to Jennifer Throop.

At Altitude, we’re focused on creating content that delivers the ‘most relevant information’, in the shortest amount of time.

Have you ever started reading a news article…and stopped because it was simply too much effort? I know I have, and then I turned to some other news article or distraction.

Do you think your prospects have ever quit reading a piece of cybersecurity marketing content because it was too much effort?

According to Ben Sawyer, an assistant professor in the University of Central Florida's Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems and director of the Readability Consortium, a group working on readability research:

“Marketers need to think about their content as teaching tools. A failure to teach a prospective customer about their products or services is a failure to demonstrate the opportunity that whatever they’re selling can benefit the customer’s work or personal life.”

What is the impact on your marketing, if as many as 67% of the people who started reading it, quit?

The importance of readability

Having a powerful value proposition and set of key messages is clearly important when marketing a cybersecurity solution. We all know that and invest time in that effort. But how much time do we invest in how we communicate those messages, and in particular, in the words we choose?

At Altitude we recently used Readable.com, a service that scores content using standard readability metrics, to scan over 1,000+ pieces of cybersecurity content from 10 leading providers. The results were revealing. We’ll share more about them in a future article.

While the readability scoring likely isn’t perfect (e.g. it may not recognize more common cybersecurity-specific terms, it can’t evaluate the value of supporting graphics), it gives a reasonable indication of how easy it is to read cybersecurity marketing content.

Losing your audience. The impact of poor readability

To help you understand the potential impact of poor readability, here’s a paragraph from a piece of content we scored, with the company’s name replaced.

“When combined with CYBERCO’s Security Monitoring, Vulnerability Scanning automatically correlates security events with scan data. The enriched data reduces false positives and provides further context to CYBERCO security operations center (SOC) analysts for improved incident handling and response. You gain an integrated view of your risk posture and insight for thwarting future attacks.”

And here’s the score. On a readability grading scale from A to E, this one scored an E. More importantly, readable estimates that it is only ‘easily readable’ for 33% of the potential audience.

Theoretically, that means 67% of people will be somewhat challenged to read the above paragraph. Many will simply choose not to and move on to something else.

I would bet that if any one of us ran a café, and we saw 2 out of 3 potential customers line up and then walk away without buying, we would immediately make a change to our business model. Just because we may not be able to see that people aren’t finishing our content, doesn’t mean that it’s not happening to us as well.

As Sawyer points out: Simplifying content might be the way to reach larger audiences. Between the amount of digital noise Americans must endure and the differing abilities of individual readers, too-complex content tends to get lost.

Ensuring your content is more readable makes great business sense because you will engage more potential customers!

In Josh Bernoff’s book about writing clarity, Writing Without Bullshit, a book I highly recommend, he coined the Iron Imperative: Do not waste the reader’s time, and the Golden Corollary: Treat the reader’s time as more valuable than your own.

Very wise words. If we all did that, how much more readable would our cybersecurity content be?

You might be wondering…how did this article score? Not perfectly, but a bit better than the cybersecurity example!

At Altitude, we’re focused on creating content that delivers the ‘most relevant information’, in the shortest amount of time.