The Challenge
A cybersecurity awareness training platform with genuine customer satisfaction with 72 NPS and 94% renewal rate, completely unknown to the potential buyers. The brand was competing against KnowBe4 and Proofpoint who dominate with massive marketing budgets.
The problem was the wrong audience; CISOs and IT directors don’t Google “best security training platform” and click the top results. They ask peers, check and analyst reports, read industry forums, and trust comparison content from sources they already respect. Content marketing can’t reach them.
They were invisible in the trust channels; the client was not showing up in the right places; their buyers actually made decisions; no analyst mentions; no peer recommendation forums; no trusted comparison sites.
Guest posting and content marketing improved their library, but didn’t move the discovery. They were producing content no one was searching for because no one knew the brand existed.
The Strategy We Used
We designed a brand mention campaign targeting the cybersecurity community, infosec blogs, CISO-focused media, cybersecurity comparison sites, MSP/MSSP community platforms, compliance industry publications, and IT management forums.
- Securing brand mentions in existing “best cybersecurity training platforms” and “KnowBe4 alternatives” articles on infosec publications and SaaS review platforms with DR 35–70.
- Earning inclusion in MSP/MSSP recommendation content where managed service providers discuss which security awareness tools they deploy for clients.
- Contributing expert commentary on cybersecurity training trends, phishing simulation best practices, and compliance framework updates to industry roundup articles.
- Placement within compliance-focused content covering SOC 2, HIPAA, NIST, and CMMC training requirements, where the client’s platform was directly relevant.
- Prioritizing mentions in content consumed by CISOs and IT directors: analyst-adjacent publications, security conference community sites, and CISO peer network platforms.
The team mapped 180 high-value articles ranking for cybersecurity training discovery keywords. Each article was categorized by buyer persona relevance: CISO-facing, IT director-facing, MSP-facing, and compliance officer-facing. Outreach was tailored to each persona’s trusted content sources.
The Results
The branded search growth from 410 to 4,100 monthly searches was the standout metric. This represented a 900% increase and was the strongest evidence that the brand mention strategy was driving genuine awareness among cybersecurity decision-makers.
The MSP/MSSP channel impact was an unexpected bonus. Mentions in managed service provider community content led to 28 new partner applications from MSPs wanting to resell the client’s training platform to their client base. This opened an entirely new revenue channel that the client had not actively pursued.
The “KnowBe4 alternatives” strategy mirrored the success of the email marketing case study. The client earned mentions in 11 articles ranking for various “KnowBe4 alternative” queries, collectively driving 800+ monthly referral visits with higher conversion rates than any other traffic source. CISOs arriving from these comparison articles were already in evaluation mode and converted to demos at 4x the rate of general organic traffic.
By month 9, the client’s brand appeared in 78% of the top-ranking cybersecurity training comparison articles, up from 0% at the start of the campaign. Their sales team reported that cold outreach response rates also improved, as prospects were increasingly familiar with the brand before being contacted.
AI visibility followed the same pattern as the other brand mention case studies, but with a cybersecurity-specific twist. CISOs and IT directors increasingly use AI assistants for vendor research during procurement cycles. Perplexity delivered 20 source citations in security awareness queries, and ChatGPT cited the client in 17 responses. The “KnowBe4 alternatives” articles were especially impactful for AI visibility, when CISOs asked AI assistants “what are the best alternatives to KnowBe4” or “cybersecurity awareness training platforms compared,” the client appeared because they were now embedded in the comparison content that those AI systems referenced. Copilot delivered 15 citations, reflecting Microsoft’s enterprise user base, where IT directors commonly used Copilot for vendor research. The MSP/MSSP partner channel also benefited from AI visibility; several partner applicants mentioned discovering the platform through AI-assisted research when evaluating security tools for their managed services portfolio.
