The Good, the Bad, and the Wildly Dangerous: 2024 Cybersecurity Content Marketing Report
*A note from the content marketing team: We compiled this report based on an unofficial combination of peer and competitor conversations, client feedback, industry data, and personal experience, combined with proprietary client campaign data. We interviewed experts at the intersection of the cybersecurity and content marketing fields and conducted sentiment analysis to compare our own experiences. While we are confident in our findings and our ability to repeat most of these results in the real world, they should not be taken as literal or prescriptive.
The beginning of this year had most of us in the cybersecurity and content marketing spaces feeling squirrelly. And we had reason to feel that way. Most of us have felt battered around by big tech for years.
In 2020, Apple phased out cookies, totally shaking up the way most of us were used to finding our audiences (and prompting other platforms to follow suit).
ChatGPT is released in 2022, prompting our friends and families to ask us if we are worried about being replaced by an unfeeling word processor. Last year, we saw the advances in AI, rounds of marketing and tech layoffs, and heard rumblings about AI search and the next GPT release.
Last year was so bizarre that it made us think weird was the new normal, so we went into 2024 with a sense of dread.
- AI is going to take our jobs.
- Google is going to take our traffic.
- And everyone is taking our cookies.
Maybe you had a rosier outlook in January. We were pessimistic, and that sense of creeping dread overshadowed most of our conversations with clients, colleagues and peers.
And 2024 started out with a tolling bell of confirmation. Google introduced AI search in the Spring, causing another panic. How will people find my website if Google is scanning it and spitting out the answers? There’s no incentive to click away.
This summer, Rand Fishken released a report that put some data to a bit of a widely held suspicion: Most people never leave the Google search results page anyway 1. None of this matters after all.
Here is the starkest takeaway from the 2024 report: “For every 1,000 searches on Google in the United States, 360 clicks make it to a non-Google-owned, non-Google-ad-paying property. Nearly two-thirds of all searches stay inside the Google ecosystem after making a query.”
In 2021, Fishken reported that 64% of searches ended without a click (or at least not a click to an external source). Now, we’re seeing 41% of searches end in a click. But that’s not an improvement. Meanwhile, a large portion of the external traffic flows to other Google sources (YouTube, maps, news, etc.).
Still, according to a Search Engine Journal poll 2, nearly half of marketers report organic search is the highest-ROI channel. It feels like an uneven relationship because it is.
Despite everything, Content Workshop President David J. Ebner and I were on a recent video call with some peers and competitors when we all realized, “Hey, things are actually going kind of great.”
Tumult be damned, content is still a reliable workhorse for most marketing departments in 2024, making up 16% of B2B (and 19% of B2C) advertising spend, barely taking second place to paid advertising according to Salesforce. 3
Common Successes | Everything Old Is New Again
So, what do reduced organic Google search referrals have to do with “common successes?”
For all of the cybersecurity marketing experts and SEO specialists we spoke to, these new adjustments to search engines and audience tracking didn’t have a negative impact.
In fact, a few of our interview subjects said the changes cleared away some of the lower-quality competitors for themselves and their clients.
Why? Much like a basketball team that practices fundamental skills every day, the best marketers relied on tried-and-true practices while searching for new solutions.
For most, the articles and pages that performed the best followed best practices.
A return to the fundamentals
Remember all those SEO checklists we used when we first got started? There was the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress that reminded us to make things more accessible and easier to read. The HubSpot best practices are downloadable, and managers tape them to all the new hires’ cubicles.
SEO basics still work:
- Why use a phrase 8-10 times in your blog, including the H1 and at least one H2? So search engines can find you, publishers can preview your links, and readers know what to expect.
- Why check your readability score? So more people can understand you.
- Why are backlinks and time on page important metrics? They indicate whether your content is useful.
As search gets smarter, content marketers who cover the basics and keep an eye on the details are rewarded a little more each time the algorithm changes.
Accessibility and readability have been the bedrock of successful publishing strategies since the second storyteller (The first storyteller had no stories to compete with.).
Marketing copy written for humans and optimized for indexing wins every time—at least until a new paradigm emerges. Heck, it’s even how large language models find the information they’re trying to synthesize (or rip off).
Building well-lit footpaths
We talk about accessibility a lot in terms of catering to a diverse set of physical and mental abilities. But accessibility is really about making it easier for anyone to engage with your content in their preferred language and modality.
David Moulton is the Director of Content and Thought Leadership for Palo Alto Networks. He said he thinks of publishing content like giving an assignment. .
“I think that anytime you sit down and you’re like, ‘Oh god, I have homework,’ you just want to run to ChatGPT to get a summary. What did you really do there? You gave somebody a problem to solve rather than an answer.”
Moultain said his strategy is to keep the narrative contained into a predetermined path. Don’t throw your whole blog at someone, figure out what they want to know and then guide them through your perspective.
“We want you to be able to understand our point of view, even if that means changing your modality, before your coffee gets cold,” is how David Moulton put it.
A defined path removes the overwhelming barrier of a never ending to-read list. We content creators seldom consider how inaccessible infinity can feel.
Are you more likely to complete a task that involves reading seven articles or 15? Putting an end to the perpetual scroll gives your readers a sense of satisfaction–they found an end. Now they can go outside.
Restraining your marketing content also makes it more digestible. It follows the number-two rule of storytelling, which is that everything should have a beginning, middle, and end. Content marketers tend to skip the denouement and roll right into “just keep talking” (And here I am writing a multi-thousand-word article.).
Rule number one, in case you were wondering, is that all stories have conflict.
But we’re getting off track. Let’s revisit Moulton’s quote about modalities. One of the most common successes we heard about this year was the reusing and reformatting of content—atomization.
Atomization
Atomization is the pinnacle of content marketing. When a marketing team can successfully execute a content atomization project, they have essentially put their operation on autopilot.
Those who haven’t used the term yet are likely still familiar with the concept. Atomization is the practice of creating a series of different content marketing pieces across platforms, media, and modalities, all based around one cornerstone piece of content. In 2024, everyone has referred to that cornerstone content as a “big meaty report,” which is a little weird, but at this point a technical term for data-filled whitepapers.
Sure, there is still work to do, but if you’re working backward from a large piece of content, the process is on autopilot, and you and your team is focusing on the narrative instead of fretting about publishing calendars.
Marketers love the shiny new object, but we get bored fast. Combine that with the fact that most of our audiences don’t see anything until we’ve already spent six months with it and you get a marketing strategy that moves too fast and breaks.
If we’re being honest, most of your audience hasn’t seen the last two weeks worth of content you’ve published. And even fewer have read, watched, or listened to all of it.
That doesn’t mean they won’t; it just means they aren’t getting paid to have an opinion about it like you are.
So spend your time making something helpful, useful, and interesting. Make it big. Make it comprehensive. Make it entertaining.
We love to write large reports or organization-spanning buyers’ guides as a way to set a tone for a long-term publishing strategy.
With that foundational piece published, you can begin to break it apart.
- Contextualize one data point each week with infographics.
- Write a topline summary as a blog post, and follow it up with interesting overviews of the different sections of the larger piece.
- Take the content for a spin on the podcast interview circuit.
- Base editorials in industry publications on the larger piece.
- Share clips of the subject-matter-expert interviews you conducted in creating the piece.
- Write summaries of the different sources for your company blog and share the links with the original publishers.
Once you have a foundational piece of content, you can do almost anything with it. Organizations with quality foundational marketing pieces come to the table confident and on message.
It doesn’t have to be written content; that’s just how we think. If written content is a nail, we are a framing hammer.
The inverse of atomization is either random acts of marketing or stressful editorial calendar management. Would you rather scramble to cobble together disparate pieces of marketing or focus your team’s intention on a single, holistic effort?
Put another way: Do you want to spend your time writing LinkedIn posts? Or do you want to spend your time creating something good and helpful that someone else can clip and schedule on LinkedIn?
Not to say you shouldn’t be on LinkedIn. The conversations you have in the comment section of LinkedIn are also content marketing. Don’t spend all your time thinking up something witty to post on LinkedIn.
Any single marketing publication should be the exhaust of a larger strategy, not the goal.
Delightful Surprises
As we mentioned above, the stress coming into 2024 was palpable in the marketing world, especially those of us who rely so heavily on digital, content, DemandGen, and B2B marketing tactics. And the reason the back half of 2024 feels better is because we ran into some nice little surprises along the way.
A few that we heard repeatedly are:
- The retraction of organic search has led to a more beneficial (and fun) focus on lower-funnel interactions.
- Publishing targets, get-SEO-quick schemes, and over-optimization don’t perform well in the quickly changing climate, and that’s ok with all of us.
- Good stories did the best.
- Audiences like the stuff that’s fun to make.
A lower-funnel focus
Content still converts. Even with a reduction in top-of-funnel content and a rise in no-click searches, 61% of tech marketers said content marketing helped generate revenue. 4
It turns out that most of those Google searches that didn’t end in clicks weren’t good audience members anyway. They were people searching for something simple, like a definition or a quick answer.
Not everyone who searches for “What is a Pentest” needs to read a 1,500-word explanation. Some percentage of people were simply in a meeting where they heard that word for the first time and did a quick Google search so they wouldn’t feel left out.
Not everyone who searches for “Mortgage Rates in Georgia” is going to buy a house today. Some people are just having an argument about how far they’ve fallen since the rate cut.
It’s the content marketers writing to deeper-funnel audiences who are seeing success. That’s what longer-form information has always been for. Instead of devolving stories to the least common denominator, it’s moved toward becoming the most helpful to your best audience.
The best part of this lower-funnel approach is that these pieces are fun to make. No one wants to spend their day writing copy that’s nothing more than a search engine play. Well, some people do. But most of us got into the game to make something cool, beautiful, helpful, funny, or, at the very least, good.
Quality still counts
Good writing beats bad writing. And after a decade of SEO over-optimization and a year or two of gen-AI proliferation, we’re overwhelmed with completely average, jargon-filled, know-nothing writing.
The folks over at Siege Media found a correlation between quality and ROI in their 2024 survey on content marketers. 5 Businesses that spend more than $4,000 per piece of content marketing were more than 2.5 times as likely to report a “very successful” strategy than businesses that spend $500 or less per piece.
The same study found content marketing produces three times as many leads at 62% less cost.
Quality and human touch are the reasons we still listen to Johann Sebastian Bach, Nina Simone, and Kate Bush in between mumblecore and EDM. If you’re a halfway decent creator and communicator, it’s not too hard to make something “better” these days. If you’re good, the world is your oyster.
Every content creator and cybersecurity marketer we spoke to talked about their overwhelming conviction that quality can outlast trends and algorithm changes. Each expert measured this success differently, but we heard the theme in every interview we conducted for this report.
A newsletter people actually want to read
Keyfactor is known as a thought leader in the cybersecurity space, but publishing robust reports doesn’t guarantee the information gets out.
We launched a monthly newsletter that — after some tweaking — topped 60,000 email subscribers and 2,000 LinkedIn followers this year.
How did they do it? They refocused on the content and, more importantly, the audience reading it.
Here’s what Lori Steuart said about the strategy, “We chose themes that resonated with our audience, stuff that was topical and relevant to them, and then sliced and diced them from different points of view. Instead of the regular roundups and other sh*t that you put in a newsletter, we have different perspectives on the problems that matter.”
The newsletter wasn’t the only property that received a lift. Guess which blogs far-and-away outperformed the rest of the website content. That’s right, the ones that were featured in the newsletter. That’s real, trackable inbound traffic.
- Story-first content outperforms metrics-first content.
Audience-focused content wins every time
Write about what your audience is interested in.
This sounds so obvious, but we spend so much time researching keywords, content gaps, and SEO opportunities that we often forget to just ask, “What do y’all want to talk about?”
Like with quality, we found that story-first, audience-sourced topics are the ones that performed best. This wasn’t necessarily the case for everyone, because not everyone has access to extensive user and subject-matter expert feedback.
However, for marketers and content creators who maintain two-way communication with their audiences, content sources from their feedback almost always outperform content written for a more algorithmic purpose.
“I would say at any given time, about 20% of our top content is focused on the interests of our SMEs and audience,” said Jacob Fox of his SME-led ideation process. “I honestly don’t have a direct faucet of influence on those keywords.” Fox is the Inbound Website Manager at Cobalt.
Focusing on the interests and curiosities of your potential and existing customers works. And, the subjects your audience is interested in are deeper-funnel topics, so it’s way more fun to write. Plus, creating from a place of joy, passion, and confidence has a tendency to result in better work (At least that’s our experience at Content Workshop.).
Awkward Silences
This year certainly had its share of downsides. But the surprising failures were actually a bit of a relief in 2024. For one thing, we saw a decline in the post-count mandate.
Good failures? That’s right. Most of the stuff that fell flat were things we didn’t necessarily want to do in the first place. Our experts reported hearing crickets when we:
- Pursued publishing targets over narrative beats
- Overwhelmed their audiences with posts
- Wrote to everyone instead of someone
- Optimized the life out of their content
Publishing targets may not be healthy
You can’t force a dance party, and you can’t mandate a good time. The same goes for content.
While consistent publication of quality content is still the best strategy, our clients and our peers saw that pursuing a certain number of posts or topics per day actually hurts a content marketing strategy.
It seems a little counterintuitive, but here is how we saw it play out.
Back to the proliferation of over-optimized SEO content, clickbait, and genAI (aren’t they the problem with everything?). When infinite content seemed like an impossibility, it’s all our society wanted. But now that infinity is a reality, we’re pretty exhausted.
Audiences didn’t see a wealth of knowledge when they looked at infinite scroll resource pages or a constant bombardment of disjointed social posts.
This finding goes hand in hand with the renewed hunger for quality and well-lit footpath narratives. Setting a template for publishing and content atomization is very helpful, but striving to produce content based on a set of standards instead of the individual piece's narrative truth feels stilted. It doesn’t ring true.
We found that our clients who stuck to consistency and avoided forcing stories into hard-earned silences saw as much, if not more, success than when the goal was a post count.
You want 20 pieces of content per day? Your audience probably doesn’t. Audiences reward you for a beginning, middle, and end, and they’ll appreciate the advertising break.
Make sure your content rings true before shooting for crazy targets.
Generalized content kind of sucks (and your audience agrees)
When you’re writing for everyone, you’re writing for no one. The same goes for TOFU content marketing.
Longer-form content marketing is certainly targeted at lower-funnel audiences (especially since the release of AI search). But even the more generalized, top-of-funnel content should be focused.
When producing top-of-funnel content for a wider audience, be sure it is wider than your bottom-of-funnel audience while maintaining a clear picture of who you’re speaking to.
Speaking of a return to fundamentals, we found refreshing and refocusing on target personas a tediously and embarrassingly simple solution for some of these problems this year. We say embarrassing because our interview subjects often blushed when they admitted finding success in something so basic.
Drill down a little. Take a risk and make a decision about who you’re talking to.
Optimization is literally make or break
It turns out performance may have less to do with efficiency and optimization than we thought. It’s related, just not 1:1.
Optimization is still good. Make your content intelligible, accessible, and easy to find. The only way to do those things is through some amount of optimization.
But, when you find yourself doing gymnastics for the sake of a two-point lift in page authority, consider what other approaches might achieve a similar goal.
Your audience doesn’t care if keywords are in your article, and at some point, optimization can feel patronizing. Nobody wants to feel talked down to.
A downloadable reference sheet, linked calculator, or any number of similarly helpful tools can achieve the same end without making your audience wonder if you think they’re idiots.
Stick with your SEO tools. We use MOZ, Yoast, Google’s ever-changing suite search suite, and a couple of others to achieve results for our clients.
When the question is between a human perspective and robotic optimization, we always opt for human. When we take this approach, we see a converse relationship between the amount of stilted content on the internet and our success.
The more bullshit competitors publish, the more our content succeeds. It’s like Obi-Wan Kenobi’s warning to Darth Vader in the first Star Wars, “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”
Keep writing terrible content, and my content will become unstoppable.
Insights for 2025
We can’t predict the future, but we’re naturally curious and pretty good at business. So take this for what it’s worth, and don’t use these insights as a betting guide in Vegas.
The biggest thing our respondents were looking at going into 2025 is the redefining of social communities.
Community as Content
Content marketing and B2B storytelling became their own cottage industries during the age of the internet, which means most of the solutions we’ve had for our clients are mass media and internet-based.
That may not be the case going forward. Folks are moving away from mass media and into smaller tribes. A 2023 survey from the Content Marketing Institute revealed that 56% of respondents use in-person events and webinars as a form of content marketing.
The founder of MessageSpecs and author of Nerd that Talks Good, Joel Benge, said he sees this trend on the rise in the form of interest-area groups, webinars, meetups, message groups, and other more personal interactions.
In his forthcoming book, Joel applies Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to an audience's messaging needs, turning the model on its side to align with their journey. This helps connect a point David often makes: fear, uncertainty, and doubt are ineffective narratives for the cybersecurity marketplace.
Messaging along the lines of fear plays into lower-level human needs. Similarly, the cybersecurity industry has matured beyond base-level needs, and its practitioners are now in search of love and belonging (community), as a way to achieve higher-level goals.
Joel’s graphic explains it better than words can (and is reprinted with permission of the author). See more at Joel’s website. 6
“People are joining smaller communities in areas of interest,” Joel said. “I mean, look at a company like Black Hills Infosec with an incredible Discord community, meetups, and events. They’re always doing a webinar or meeting—and that is all content.”
Some of the most successful content marketers are creating spaces for their audience to gather, engage, and even further the conversation. Brands who are able to find ways to write about the intersection of their expertise and their audiences’ interests do the best here.
Speaking of “Everything Old Is New Again,” we’ve seen a return to message board and forum culture.
As elder millennials and their forebears grew weary of social media, bought blue-light lenses, and continued hacking through the overgrown content weeds on the trail that is the internet, younger generations took one look at the algorithm and said, “No thanks.”
That’s not to say GenZ has it all figured out. The last time we checked, they still had a pretty intense TikTok and Snapchat problem. But where they have moved the needle is in creating niche community organizations through services like Discord, Patreon, Reddit, and GroupMe.
Instead of letting Meta decide which one of their relatives' crazy posts they’d see next, lots of social media users instead sought out their own like-minded communities based on their favorite video games, musicians, podcasts, cultural issues, and sports teams.
Micro-content as an entry point
Since the dawn of desktop publishing, we’ve heard that “people don’t read.” And yet, nearly every piece of marketing content that’s been published in the meantime has words on it.
People don’t read massive documents handed to them by strangers on the internet. Just like we don’t eat candy handed to us by strangers in weird vans.
So how do you get someone interested in the larger piece? Start with quality, but from there pique their interests. Serving a trail of helpful micro-content doesn’t devalue the larger piece you invested in, it puts your investment to work. One potential customer may enjoy the podcast or print out the infographic without ever reading your industry benchmark report. But another customer is going to follow your micro-content like a trail of breadcrumbs to the meaty piece.
But, micro-content can be a means in and of itself.
Think for a moment about the friend or group chat whose messages you’re most excited to read. Not the one that’s popping off all day, but the one that you can’t wait to get out of this meeting to respond to but dare not answer now for fear of laughing too hard or being sucked into a meaningful conversation.
Micro-content can be the memes your friend sends you between meaningful conversations as much as it can be the lead-up to those conversations.
Here are some great micro-content ideas to balance your publishing schedule:
- Share a helpful teaser to your big meaty report.
- Share a meme that comments on an industry trend (if that’s on brand).
- Comment and add meaningful context to follower and peer posts.
- Answer Reddit and forum questions pertaining to one of your cornerstone pieces.
- Start some fun shenanigans on a forum where your audience hangs out.
- Curate some of the most interesting takes around a topic you have expertise in.
- Clip podcast episodes of your experts sharing data from your report.
- Reach out to your most specific audience with a personal message.
Micro-content as an entry point
Over optimization is bad, but this is yet another case of moderation being the solution.
People spend more time with helpful, entertaining, or otherwise notable content. Over-optimized content gets in the way. Spotting a repetitive keyword is like seeing the boom mic in a movie scene. It pulls viewers out of the story. It’s distracting and unprofessional.
While 100% optimized copy can perform better in search results, so does content with high session duration.
Session duration has had a distinct relationship to page SEO page rank for a long time. And while we can’t directly attribute it to SEO performance, we strive for high session duration because we know it works.
A good headline beats a Yoast-optimized headline 100% unless you can naturally blend the two. Find balance.
The Rise of the Tiny Language Model
More than 75% of technology marketers reported using generative AI for content tasks in 2023, with half saying they used it to assist in creating first drafts 7. The use only became more widespread this year.
If 2024 was the year of LLMs, 2025 will be the year of TLMs. We believe that brands and content marketers will begin implementing their own AI models restricted to internal brand documents. This will be enabled by the increased accessibility to generative AI tools and the integration of those tools into other enterprise platforms that we are seeing in the back half of 2024.
Content creators will maintain a database of all relevant brand and campaign content. When needs arise, they can prompt their localized AI to check new content against brand standards, search for gaps in topics, find optimization opportunities, and even refine content plans.
Why do we think this? We did something similar in the production of this report. After writing the report based on our research, feedback, and experience, we loaded the transcripts, report outline, data, and all other relevant notes into a localized AI.
What About You?
This is entirely prescriptive; it’s what we heard in our interviews for this report with a bit of color and context. If you saw some success from the awkward silences, we’d love to know what you’re doing differently. And just because you aren’t seeing success where your peers are doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong (necessarily). Maybe your brand has different needs, or your audience prefers different content.
Either way, we want to hear from you.
Shoot an email to jclark@contentwriterworkshop.com with your thoughts on the year.
1 2024 Zero-Click Search Study
2 2024 Search Engine Journal Poll
3 Salesforce State of Marketing 9th Edition
4 Content Marketing Institutes: Technology Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Treds: Outlook for 2024.
5 Siege Media 2024 Content Marketing Trends Report
6 Nerd That Talks Good, Joel Benge (messagespecs.com)
7 Content Marketing Institutes: Technology Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Treds: Outlook for 2024.