HOW TO REACH PEOPLE WHO DECIDE ON IT SECURITY SPENDING IN SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZED COMPANIES IN CEE COUNTRIES?
The Kościuszko Institute, a non-profit organization whose main goal is education in the field of cybersecurity, asked us for help. The task was not easy – the Institute wanted to creatively promote CYBERSEC HUB – – an initiative that brought together Małopolska ICT companies and reach decision-makers in SMEs. The campaign was to cover not only Poland, but the entire region of Central and Eastern Europe.
We had to:
- Reach out to business owners, potential customers of cybersecurity products and services
- Generate tens of publications in foreign media
- Generate traffic towards the Cybersec Hub website
- Encourage representatives of foreign companies to leave a contact for the presentation of the offer.
Contrary to appearances, representatives of companies interested in cybersecurity are a very heterogeneous group. Depending on the profile or size of the company, IT expenditure can be decided by different people – from the IT expert (CIO), through the Chief Operating Officer (COO), to the owner (CEO). Therefore, one of the most important tasks was to select the right people and create an idea for communication that would involve them all.
Simply talking about threats is not enough to attract the attention of customers and the media. We decided to prepare a substantive CEE CyberThreat 2018 report. As part of the report, we conducted a survey on 600 managers of small and medium-sized companies from 5 countries – the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Belgium and Poland.
Among other things, we asked them whether their companies have been victims of cyber attacks, how they defend against them and how much they spend on cybersecurity. We also proposed the context of communication – digital security in the era of GDPR. After collecting hard data and supplementing them with comments from experts – representatives of startups associated with CYBERSEC HUB – we were able to start the campaign worldwide.
To attract the attention of the audience, we developed a creative visual line and rebranded the CYBERSEC HUB website. The CEE CyberThreat 2018 report also received the same visual line. We put it on a dedicated landing page of the project to increase the conversion of its downloads. We also created a promotional video about the report and the topic of cyber security, which was displayed as a pre-roll in thematically converging footage on YT.
We realized that reaching the target group would not be easy. That’s why we focused on multichannel communication. The basis was the industry media. We sent press releases, profiled for each of the countries covered by the report, and contacted the most important journalists in the IT sector. On social media, we bet on Twitter. Every day we chirped about cybersecurity, promoting the report. We also strongly positioned key phrases in search engines (SEO).
Our media relations and social media activities have yielded very good results. The press release, which we sent to specialized industry media in 5 countries, brought a total of over 30 publications, among others, in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania and Poland, generating a reach of approx. 80.000 individual readers. Furthermore, our tweets have been displayed more than 200 thousand times on Twitter!
As a result of our actions, cyber threats and the CyberSec report were discussed from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The report was downloaded by over 600 people – business owners, specialists in IT and senior managers from Central and Eastern European countries. All of them have left their contact details and consented to their processing for marketing purposes.