Attention! October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month. This is not a drill. For the past 16 years, the government and businesses have collaborated to support cybersecurity awareness for enterprises and consumers. As an IT company, this month fits you about as well as Wine Wednesday fits any worn-down parent trying to do it all.  The only question is: what are you doing to capitalize on it?  We shared a few suggestions and our planned ARRC campaign in our recent webinar. Here are a few highlights.

Social Media

This is your perfect opportunity to dust off that Facebook page and begin posting regularly. If you’re already posting regularly (that means at least three times a week), take this as a small gift of content packaged up neatly for you. You can include:

  • Tips about how to be more secure online. Make sure you focus on tips that are relevant to businesses, not just home users. This includes things like password tips, but also not using consumer-grade hardware as a screen door into your business.
  • Links to articles about the latest breaches. It’s best to bring people back to your site, but it’s not the end of the world if you point them out to read an educated article on a recent breach.
  • Harrowing statistics about what it’s like to be a small business in this cybersecurity environment i.e. over 60% of small businesses close their doors after they’ve been attacked or over 50% of small businesses report being breached last year.
  • Relevant hashtags that tie to Cybersecurity Awareness Month will bring greater awareness to your posts. The official hashtags for 2019 are #BeCyberSmart and #CyberAware

At the bare minimum, change your cover image to reflect Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Acting in touch with current events is critical in the fast-moving social space.

Blogs

Your blog is a fantastic opportunity to educate your audience on important topics, if you do it correctly. Make sure that you’re focusing on things that your prospects are inclined to read, not necessarily those that you love to research. For cybersecurity month, we’re posting three informational blogs – one per week for the first three weeks of the month. (In the fourth week, we’re pushing out an infographic resource, rather than a blog.)

We’re choosing to cover broad cybersecurity topics like ransomware, as well as topics for more targeted verticals, like why healthcare and small businesses are the primary targets for hackers. You can utilize the cybersecurity content provided on CORE for your blogs, or you can write content on breaches, phishing, or any current major breaches.

Writing the blogs is one thing. getting people to read them is the second, more important step. We recommend posting links to your blogs in at least three locations: Facebook, LinkedIn, and utilizing email campaigns.

Email Campaign

We highly recommend emailing prospects on a weekly basis. You’re not hounding them with sales tactics. Instead, you’re educating them, providing them opportunities to link to your website to learn more, and scoring their engagement using a tool like Act-On to know when it’s a good time to follow-up with next steps. You know all those business cards that have been collecting dust on your desk or that email database that has been aging in ConnectWise, MailChimp, or Constant Contact? This is the perfect time to warm up that list.

We keep our emails short and sweet. They are a very brief summary of the blog, why we think it’s important to them, and an invitation to read more. Our goal is to get them to click so that we can track their activity on the website and know when and why we should follow up.

Cybersecurity Awareness Month is also an excellent time to engage with your customers. The tips and tricks you share are really valuable for everyone. Whether they simply read or go on to request a managed security add-on, you’ve provided additional value to your current customers. Consider sending the weekly campaigns to your clients, or roll all of the blogs into one newsletter for this audience.

Cybersecurity Awareness Month Event

Getting people in a room, breaking bread, and teaching them will do wonders for your business. Cybersecurity Awareness Month is the perfect opportunity to publicize an event happening at the beginning of November (you don’t want to go much later than that because people will hit holiday mode, and you don’t have enough time to still make an event successful in October). We recommend a 1-2 hour event covering the basics of Hacking. We call it Hacking the Hacker. The goal is to give an overview of phishing, the dark web, social engineering, ransomware, current attacks; and provide tips for how to help business owners keep their employees and businesses secure.

You can host this as a standalone event, but we’ve seen greater success when it’s in conjunction with lunch or another fun event (like TopGolf, wine/beer tasting, Go-Karting). Host on-site, at a partner’s site, or at a completely neutral location. You can expect about 3% of the people you invite to attend your event, so make sure you’re gauging expectations appropriately and have a large enough lead list. Also, take this as an opportunity to reach out to your current clients to help fill the room. They’ll benefit from education, as well.

The most important thing about these events is that you’re not there to close a managed services deal, so NO PITCHING!!!! Gauge attendees interest and follow-up appropriately, but don’t try to close a full managed services contract from the stage. It will never work.

Take Action

We’d love for you to take all of these ideas and knock Cybersecurity Awareness month out of the park. Even if you can only handle implementing one or two items – do something! Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough. Get out there and capitalize on Cybersecurity Awareness Month. You can be sure your competitors are.