From 0 to the Online Cybersecurity Academy.

The market research helped us to better understand the cybersecurity education market’s needs and how to make the course appeal to the target persona. Armed with this information, we decided to create a series of educational videos in the form of free weekly online hacking tutorials for IT enthusiasts and specialists.

Creating a free learning resource containing valuable knowledge imparted by world-class cybersecurity specialists helped our client to build brand awareness, demonstrate the high quality of their teaching material, and establish themselves not only as a provider of high-quality paid for training, but also as a benefactor to the cybersecurity community.

Live webinars provided a way to engage with potential customers while also showing off the expertise of our client in real-time. Webinars, which always ended with a sales pitch, were conducted in an informal atmosphere. Hacking challenges were included to boost engagement and, to make sure viewers didn’t switch off before the sales pitch, the winner of the challenge was always announced at the end of the webinar. The high show-up rate for webinars was the critical part of the campaign for the final conversion from signups to applications and then sales.

Social media played a big part in our strategy, being used for multiple purposes to attract, engage and delight the customers. LinkedIn was used to boost the client’s reputation and to create more opportunities for the distribution of content and promotional material. Facebook was used for both promotion and community management since we connected the client with the customers through private Facebook groups.

Course applicants were required to submit their applications during a designated period which we dubbed an application round. Restricting the period in which applications were accepted gave us the opportunity to play with scarcity, discounts, time and seat limits while marketing a course. This helped the performance team, giving them more freedom over the creative and technical aspects of ad management. As a result, we were able to reduce the CAC, which is key in any online education project.

Right from the beginning of the project, we put a huge amount of effort into building a valuable email list. To aid engagement, emails were written in geeky language tailored to the persona  and featured content of a much higher quality than the market average. The end result was a fantastic list which played a crucial part in our success. And of course, engaging the cybersecurity community over email helped us on our way to reaching the sales KPIs.

Holidays and internationally recognized special days such as Cyber Monday were a great opportunity for us to further boost the effectiveness and reach of our existing campaigns. Time-sensitive offers that were related to these days were promoted through owned and earned media to our email list and to audiences that had been warmed with previous content  via social media.

The CEO of the company is a world-renowned cybersecurity professional who travels the globe helping companies and government organizations to detect vulnerabilities in their cybersecurity and delivering keynotes at the industry’s leading conferences. We capitalized on the CEO’s strong personal branding, creating promotional materials featuring their image to bring more recognition and credibility to the courses. This helped us to bring in more applications for  courses which later translated into sales.

To broaden the audience our client’s content reached, we invited cybersecurity specialists from outside the company to contribute tips and content, give interviews, and participate in webinars as co-hosts.