How to Segment Your Cybersecurity Audience and Cater Content to Multiple Buyers

More importantly, I wanted to be able to apply the insights I got to my strategies and tactics.

And to show you how you can take what’s being shared on the podcast to your next campaign, project or plan.

So, today, I’m digging into one insight that stood out to me from my recent conversation with Ryan Cloutier, President of Security Studio:

🔥 “Your messaging needs to cater to multiple segments in your target account.”

You’ll be able to take the insights Ryan shared in his episode and immediately apply them to your work with the recommendations I’ve provided you below.

With this advice, you’ll be able to:

• More accurately identify your most engaged audience.

• Test and improve your messaging.

• Refine personalized experiences for your audience.

• Build real brand loyalty with security practitioners.

“You need to get double buy-in these days,” says Ryan.

In most experiences, the person that's going to use a security tool doesn't even want the tool in the first place.

So, how do you create messaging that delivers on product and brand promises to them while establishing consistency for the buyer with the wallet?

Each of these groups involved in the buying journey has specific expectations, needs, motivations, pains, and questions that need to be answered as they consider a solution.

You've got to get double buy-in.

That comes through in different messages.

So, how do you begin segmenting audiences to apply different messages?

1. Begin by defining your goals for segmenting your audience

Before you begin selecting and building your customer segments, you should define what you are trying to achieve that ties back to your business goals.

In my case, I segment my audiences to:

• Increase visibility and engagement to my campaigns and landing destinations - Increase relevant traffic to my website and create more personalized digital experiences

• Convert high consideration buyers - Increase the quality conversions by story driver and contextual offerings on my website

• Retain my audiences - Keep audiences coming back to new content, stories, and tools I create on my website

2. Then, select and build your customer segments.

Audience segmentation helps you:

• Organize, understand, and manage the different relationships you have with your audience.

• Learn more deeply what the motivations, needs, and challenges are

• Identify which segment is most valuable to generating business

• Pinpoint the channels you should be investing in for specific groups of customers

There are multiple ways to segment your customers.

What has and still is working for me is identifying which segments will help me reach my goal.

I am using these segmentation models:

1. Firmographic Segmentation - Company attributes

2. Needs-Based Segmentation - Solution or product must-haves; needs of specific groups

3. Behavioral Segmentation - Frequent actions and habits; product or website use

Bonus Model I’m Experimenting With It Now:

1. Psychographic Segmentation - Personality, values, interests

Firmographic Segmentation:

Questions to Answer:

• What industry do they work in?

• What are the company size, title, and annual revenue of their organization?

• Where is their company located?

Where can you find that information?

• Tools like LinkedIn or ZoomInfo

Needs-Based Segmentation:

Questions to Answer:

• What are their pain points, problems, motivations, and needs that drive their behavior?

Where can you find that information?

• Customer interviews

• Interviews with sales or customer success

• Listening online via social media channels (LinkedIn is great!)

• Listening to Audience 1st Podcast (shameless plug)

Behavioral Segmentation:

[Some But Not All] Questions to Answer:

• Which people regularly opened emails and which topics did they double click into?

• Which product pages did they visit?

• What was dwell time and scrolling behavior like?

• Which users requested a demo on my website? Which visited the demo page and left?

• Which pillar pages of content, ebooks, whitepapers or case studies did people consume?

• What videos did viewers consume most?

• What podcast episodes did listeners listen to most?

Where can you find that information?

Tools like Google Analytics, YouTube analytics, Podcast analytics, your email automation system or HotJar

Psychographic Segmentation

[More on this in another post when I have some more concrete data from my experiments on segmenting audiences based on psychographic data.]

But, what am I trying to achieve here? I want to see if I can group audiences based on values, interests, and following.

Why am I doing this?

When I launched Dr. Dark Web with Chris Roberts, I realized that several people that are my ideal customer profile were highly interested in the podcast AND specifically interested in the Dungeons and Dragons segment we are still building out.

They showed massive interest in LinkedIn comments when we broke down the show into...SEGMENTS! (Geek Week, C-Suite Community, Doctor’s Hours/AMA, Dungeons and Dragons for Business)

So, I thought to myself, what if we segmented our audience by firmographic profiles (company profiles), behavioral data (consumption of media type) and psychographic data (interest in tabletop games)?

That segment in and of itself would allow me to further research the profiles of these people and more granularly micro-segment them in order to begin building a community with them largely based on interests.

Pretty cool, right?

Read More on Psychographic Segmentation

Big Caveat:

• Segmentation will not be reliable if you do not have quantitative and qualitative insights behind you.

• You should have minimal tools and tactics in place.

Once you’ve developed your audience segments, you can start creating dynamic lists in your marketing automation system or CRM, like HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot or Salesforce.

If you need help, I’m here. Feel free to reach out if you need some guidance beyond this email.

Talk to Me If You Need Guidance

Now, how can you apply this to engage with your audience and grow your business?

3. Engage Your Audience Segments with Unique Experiences and Messages

Get rid of your content gate.

Buyers are already stressed out and need as much reduction in friction as possible to do their job well.

So, open the door for more business and ungate your content.

“This will help improve the way you are viewed by the community,” says Ryan.

Create a media lab or hub by topic on your website:

Take your top of funnel content, like e-books, whitepapers, research reports and create media hubs by topic and context in your website instead of a general resources center.

Because, who cares if the content type is an blog, e-book, guide, or whitepaper?

Buyers are looking for answers to their questions and are looking for points of view that educate them not.

If you hooked them with a polarizing point of view in different content formats based on what they care about and under one umbrella, you can then funnel them to a more technical offer or solution to their problem when they are ready.

The barrier to accessing that more technical offer or solution is lower.

Who is doing this well?

Orca Security - Cloud Risk Encyclopedia

Why?

• Simple filtering by Risk Category, Compliance Framework, Base Score for prioritization, and Platform.

• No need to overthink and sift through all the risks they provided in their encyclopedia.

• Provided a search functionality to find risks that may be relevant to the visitor.

Take your gated content and chop it up for native social consumption and testing:

How long is your average e-book or whitepaper?

In my experience, they’re as long as 17 pages, dense with copy.

Imagine how much content could be used to distribute stories and practical advice natively on social media by segment.

What a shame it is to bury rich content in a PDF that likely will never be read in the first place.

This will give you an opportunity to test more messages and story drivers in the market.

You’ll more efficiently and quickly be able to identify which segment is engaging with your messaging and content on specific channels.

Who is doing this well?

Transmit Security - LinkedIn

Why?

• Full use of LinkedIn real estate

• Simple, concise message and design - I know who it is for

• Unique messages by use case and industry, which can then be boosted through LinkedIn paid advertising to specific segments and account lists.

• Good use of tagging of industry accounts

• Practical advice in one simple post

Develop a mega menu (or expandable menu) to organize your website’s navigation by topic and segment and help buyers quickly spot a solution to their problem 

Your website is valuable real estate. Use it!

Mega menus are a great alternative to drop-down menus.

Drop-down menus do not support grouping well because it requires users to scroll.

When you group information in a mega menu, it helps users:

• Quickly spot a solution to a problem

• More easily understand and recognize their choices

Read More on How Chunking Helps Content Processing Here

Who is doing this well?

Segment

(The irony.)

Why?

• Concise copy

• Clear and contextual icons

• The subtext is provided to support segments and identify what can be achieved for specific audiences.

• Features grouped by use cases.

TL;DR

• Segmenting audiences is critical in cybersecurity because there are multiple stakeholders in the buyer process.

• You need to define your objectives before you select and build your customer segments.

• You can use different segmentation models. I use firmographic, needs-based, behavioral, and psychographic segmentation models.

• Segmentation requires you to pursue quantitative and qualitative research.

• You do not need a research agency to do this - simple and almost-free tools will help you do the job well.

• Experiment and test your message and campaigns to your segments with personalized, contextual experiences in different formats.

• Bonus and critical: validate and stress test your message with your segment through quick interviews.

My hope is that this information will help you be more strategic in how you create audiences for your audience-building strategies.

As always, if you need help in defining your goals for audience segmentation, creating or building segments, or applying tactics to test messages or design, don’t hesitate to reach out to me.

I’m here to help.

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