Breaking Through in Cybersecurity Marketing Hacker Valley Media

In this episode, Tom Kish, Director of Growth Marketing at CardinalOps, joins Maria and Gianna to discuss demand generation and why it’s the most misunderstood marketing role.

In this episode, Samara Williams, Senior Manager of Security Engineering at New Relic, joins Maria and Gianna to share her insights on building relationships and making strategic partnerships in the cybersecurity industry. She talks about the importance of trust and transparency in building successful partnerships, and how working with vendors and other industry players can help organizations make informed decisions and stay ahead of emerging threats.
Samara also shares her perspective on the role of VARs and how they can serve as an extension of a security team, providing valuable feedback on tools and partnerships. She emphasizes the need for VARs to understand an organization's goals and pain points in order to provide the best possible solutions, and stresses the importance of transparency in the VAR-buyer relationship.
This episode provides valuable insights and practical advice on building successful partnerships and collaborations in the cybersecurity industry. Whether you're a security practitioner, vendor, or partner, Samara's experiences and perspectives can help guide you towards more effective and mutually beneficial relationships




 
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In this episode, Gianna and Maria interview Michelle Radlowski, Sr. Director, AMS & EMEA Regional Marketing and ABM at DigiCert, Inc. (former Director of Regional Marketing at Zscaler). Michelle shares her experience of working in the IT tech space for over 15 years, starting in a small startup that got acquired twice and ultimately became part of Dell Software Group, before joining Zscaler as employee 240, and now the company has almost 6,000 employees globally. She explains that field marketing, which she started doing at Zscaler, is not just about planning events but driving campaign execution in-region, focusing on account engagement, and landing campaigns from corporate marketing. Michelle discusses the misconception about field marketing being solely administrative and event planning, and how her role has evolved to encompass much more. 
 
Michelle talks about the importance of aligning with the sales team and building relationships with them to drive business value. She explains that it is essential to understand the sales team's objectives, pain points, accounts, and personas to align marketing plans with them. She also emphasizes the significance of tracking data to measure the success of field marketing programs. Michelle shares her journey of transitioning from being a marketer who focused on lead generation to a marketer who aligned with the sales team's goals of revenue and pipeline creation. Michelle also highlights the significance of partner ecosystems, and she talks about how Zscaler has a large partner ecosystem, including strategic alliance partners, service providers, and system integrators. She emphasizes the need for a strategic approach to partner marketing that involves sales leadership alignment, account mapping, messaging, and training. Michelle concludes that a better-together story with partners that focuses on bettering the customer experience is a powerful message.

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The Concert in the Clouds
Michelle’s Non-profit Experience
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This week, Kelsey LaBelle joins hosts Gianna and Maria to talk about marketing soft skills and returning to empathy in the workplace. Kelsey, who is the VP of Marketing at DomainTools, also shares how she works soft skills in her role at the company. Along with the emotional skills, Kelsey goes into creative ways to generate lead pipelines, why you should build trust with an audience, and shares the nuts and bolts of podcast production. Listen in for some deep talk on marketing—and lots of puns!
 
Timecoded Guide:
[07:28] Wrapping uniqueness and empathy into marketing
[15:26] Building lead pipelines with domain blooms 
[32:00] Podcast workflow and process of production 
[34:45] Can you be happy at work?  
[36:04] Closing with the guessing game  
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Definitions: 
DDoS: DDoS or DDoS’ing stands for ‘denial of service attack.” This is a cyberattack in which the perpetrator attempts to render a network resource unavailable to its users by disrupting the services of a host connected to the network. 
SANS: SANS stands for SysAdmin, Audit, Network, and Security and is the world’s largest cybersecurity research and training organization.
DNS: DNS stands for Domain Name System which makes the internet accessible by allowing the use of domain names.
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Links:
Spend some time with Kelsey on Mastodon and Twitter @punsandrosess
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Visit DomainTools on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Check out the DomainTools website.
Tune into the Breaking Badness podcast.
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This week, Claire Mckenna and Michelle Rawlings join us from BARR Advisory to talk about their roles and how they work with numerous people in the field to bolster their company’s goals. Claire is the senior writer and researcher at BARR while Michelle is the media coordinator. Together, they discuss communicating with SMEs, connecting experts in the field, and how they get everyone in their company involved with outreach through a curated media program. 
 
Timecoded Guide:
[06:09] Incentivizing SMEs and finding content
[10:46] The Media BARR Program
[14:12] Choosing content for the program
[18:43] Challenges met with the BARR program
[23:45] ROI on the Media BARR Program 
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Links:
Follow Claire on LinkedIn.
Spend some time with Michelle on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Visit BARR Advisory on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Check out the BARR Advisory website
Go back and listen to our previous episode on recycling brand content.
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Joining us this week is Chris Spellman, Senior Demand Generation Manager at SCYTHE. Chris has been in cybersecurity marketing for over six years and has also worked in marketing operations and analytics. Gianna and Maria ask Chris about his marketing expertise as they cover gated vs ungated content, demand gen, analytics, and much more. Also, listen in to hear about Chris’s fantasy novel trilogy that he authors with his wife!
 
Timecoded Guide:
[06:49] Creative ways to generate demand
[09:58] Gated or ungated content?
[11:51] Big failure or success in cyber marketing
[16:26] Where Chris does analytics
[18:32] How Chris does attribution
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Links:
Follow Chris on LinkedIn.
Check out the Spellman Books website, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
Keep up with SCYTHE on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Visit the SCYTHE website.
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Catch up with Maria on LinkedIn.
Join the Cybersecurity Marketing Society on our website, and keep up with us on Twitter.