The following interview is a conversation we had with Rodrigo Leme, Marketing Director at Right-Hand Cybersecurity, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Standing Out in a Crowded Market – Niche Targeting and Customer-Centric Approach
Brett
This is marketing from the Front Lines, where we speak with B2B marketers who are in the trenches bringing technology to market. Here’s your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Front Lines Media.. Hey, everyone, and thanks for listening to another episode of Category Visionaries Marketing edition. Today we’re speaking with Rodrigo Lemmy, Marketing Director of Right-Hand Cybersecurity, a human risk management platform that’s raised 6 million in funding. Rodrigo, what’s going on today?
Rodrigo Leme
Hey, Brett, how’s it going? Doing good. Thanks for having me.
Brett
Yeah, no problem at all. I’m super excited for our conversation. So you’ve been in marketing for a long time. I understand your passion for marketing really dates back to 1996, when you were considering or you were going to school to be a copywriter. So take us back to 1996. What was going on, and why’d you want to be a copywriter?
Rodrigo Leme
Well, I had a lot of options, but I knew I loved to write, and that love for writing molded me until today. And when I joined college, it was either like journalism or advertising. Right. And I always enjoy the creative aspects of advertising and the way that advertising spoke to people in a way that journalism couldn’t. In my view, again, if there’s any journalists listening to this, in my view, advertising could reach people in a way that journalism couldn’t. Right. So I joined college. I entered college in 1996 with that fixed idea that I was going to be a copywriter. I had, like, David Ogilvy as one of my references, like, other people will connect to that reference, but I had this idea of becoming a copywriter. Things changed during college, as they always do. Right?
Brett
I’m a big fan of David Ogilvy. I can’t remember the exact line, but I remember reading his book a while back, and it had some just awesome line where I think it was Fortune magazine printed a story, and it said, is David Ogilvy a genius with a question mark? And he wanted to see if his lawyers could sue them for using the question mark.
Rodrigo Leme
I heard that one. Yeah. He’s a big reference. Like, for people my generation who were really to advertising. He was, and he should be a reference for everybody doing content today as well. Like, his ideas still hold true.
Brett
Let’s talk about how marketing has evolved then. So, obviously, you’ve worked at a bunch of different companies, both big companies and then small companies or startups, I should say. How have you seen marketing evolve over the last, let’s say, 20 years?
Rodrigo Leme
Oh, I mean, let’s start with social media, right? It’s the low hanging fruit like social media was a game changer for everybody. Back in the day when I started working, when it was like beginning of my career, like the first five years or something, we did have a lot of trouble reaching out to customers because printed media was still fire right, back in the day, but inaccessible in terms of cost because there were only a few spaces you could occupy. So real estate was really expensive for printed media. We used to do direct marketing stuff. So, yes, I’m one of those guys who sent out letters, actual letters, to customers and prospects. And when social media came, things changed drastically.
Rodrigo Leme
I went from building email newsletters by hand, like doing HTML code directly on emails, to having a LinkedIn account, to have a LinkedIn profile, and reaching out, making a list of potential customers that we wanted to access, and talking to these people directly on this new link. Right, I’m talking about 2006, 2005, and that was a big game changer. But the way I saw it, back in the day, my transition was easy during that time, because I was always a content person. So social media was a treasure trove for people like me who like to write, like to communicate with people in a more direct way than sending snail mail. Right.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense now, when it comes to what you’re marketing today, let’s talk a little bit about Right-Hand Cybersecurity. So what is that product and who are you targeting?
Rodrigo Leme
Well, basically, Brett, we are a human risk management company. We do have a platform that’s dedicated to integrate with all your security back stack. So you have your crowdstrikes, you have your splunks, you have your email security tools. We take the human based alerts from these tools. So, like, maybe you visit the wrong website, maybe you click on the wrong link on an email message, you incurred in some risky behavior as an individual, as a person, as an employee. We take this human based alerts, we ingest them, and we deliver training just to users. We deliver insights to the organization, to the cybersecurity teams, so they can understand where they stand on human risk. With the organization, they can do more informed decisions about cybersecurity based on. Again, this is information that it’s not new to anyone.
Rodrigo Leme
But human based risks are the majority of the main cause of data breaches in companies. So we can deliver insights based on that. And we can also like, reduce SoC alerts, the security operations center alerts. If you’re dealing like, with 80% of alerts, which started by humans, if you can reduce these alerts, you have less burnout of the SoC teams you have less workload and these people can work better on their priorities. So that’s what we basically do. We ingest security alerts based on human risk and we deliver insights, training, not just to employees and less heavy workload for security operations.
Brett
And I’ve been to black hat, I’ve been to RSA for the last couple of years. And whenever I walk around I just think, man, everyone sounds the same. Everyone seems to be saying the same stuff. And there’s just a lot of vendors here, which means there’s a lot of noise. What are you doing in cybersecurity to rise above all that noise?
Rodrigo Leme
Well, first of all, we are in a very niche industry, so there’s a lot of players. There’s no industry that doesn’t have a lot of players, but we are very niche, so we cater to a very specific audience. Right where we’re talking to enterprise customers. Of course, back in the beginning, we used to talk to smaller customers. I always like to say that whoever has human risk as a concern in their company is a potential customer for us, because that’s what we start with, looking at your security stance towards human risk, and we deliver these solutions. So marketing for these companies starts with one thing. We have to make our position known. First of all, we foster security culture, and not a culture of punishment or delivering ill intended notes to users saying, hey, you’re putting our company at risk.
Rodrigo Leme
We always start from the learning stance. So we deliver learning. So we always look for customers. Our marketing always starts with education. So a lot of our website’s content is about education. A lot of what we do during trade shows, like RSA is about education. It’s not simply a product demo. It’s about like, hey, do you know the threats that you’re exposed to? Do you know some use cases that you could have in mind where when looking for a solution to mitigate your human risk? So education is the foundation not only of our solution, but also of our marketing. Our content is always driven by. Did you know? So of course, we do plug our solutions to potential customers, but always having that educational conversational tone first. And that worked for us. Super fine.
Rodrigo Leme
Our approach is always when we talk about sales, when we talk about customer success, when we talk about marketing, it’s always talking to customers and feeding on their answers, right? So, oh, I wish we could do this kind of thing. This is something that we take. We take individual responses to that question, what are you missing in security awareness back in the day and now human risk management, what are you missing? Human risk management. We take this insight and we turn that not just in marketing content or marketing speech, but also in solutions, features and iterations of our product. So that’s how we lead with marketing.
Brett
How would we summarize that approach then? Is it a content first approach, an education first approach? How would you summarize your marketing approach and philosophy?
Rodrigo Leme
I would very much like to say it’s an education first approach. The organization from top to bottom has always been very friendly to the idea of educating the market. We do know that for some people, even for some leaders, it’s hard to explain the human risk management concept. So we are strong believers in the idea that educating the market, we may not get all the customers but make the cake bigger. So we’re not working with easy concepts to grasp. So many people still have the idea that security awareness on human risk management is about phishing, simulations, for example. And we do use education first because we believe in education from a solution standpoint, from a vision standpoint, but also because we believe in education as a way to get more informed customers who will seize the solutions, capture the benefits of our solutions better.
Brett
How do you think about measuring the ROI when you’re making these investments in educational content and material that maybe it is just making that pie bigger? How do you think about that ROI?
Rodrigo Leme
Well, ROI for us, first of all is all about engagement, how people are engaging with our content. Last year, some of my most read articles were the educational ones, like people looking for what is dishing for specific advice on human risk management for financial sector. So first of all, we are looking into what people are actually consuming in terms of consent. So that’s the norm. One of the north stars for us. Of course we do measure DroI from mqls and SQLs. This is like par for the course, not just for us, but for everybody. Like marketing has to be accountable for mqls generated by marketing itself, not supporting sales or anything like through native mqls, right? So we’re talking about people who come to our website and fill a form or people who come to our trade shows and engage with our salespeople.
Rodrigo Leme
So that’s also like we use those measurements as well. Like how many of these prospects became qualified leads, right? How many of these scheduled, actually scheduled a meeting to see a demo or anything else? So that’s part for the course. But we’re also looking into like how people are consuming our content. Who’s consuming our content. We do have webinars that pretty much open for everybody. We don’t draw the line on corporate emails or anything. So we do have a lot of students, a lot of people from all walks of life coming to the webinars and that’s always great for us. We do like to create this critical mass of people interested in human risk management. So that for us is the other side of the coin. The basic side of the coin is MQL.
Rodrigo Leme
The other side of the coin is are we engaging with people and what are they consuming from us?
Brett
What role is AI going to play in your content marketing efforts going forward? Or is it playing a role today or do you not see it having a major impact at all?
Rodrigo Leme
It’s playing more and more a role for us today. We’re approaching that carefully because it’s easy to. The way I see it, I’m separating AI into there’s the core stuff that I don’t want AI touch too much and there’s the support stuff. So the core stuff like I don’t want AI to write my articles, right? I do want AI to just support me in writing my articles. So usually like our prompts are driven by research. So we ask questions, we say pick me up three examples of this thing. Like pick me up three cases of data breaches that I should use for this financial sector article, for this healthcare article. Article. We check what we do.
Rodrigo Leme
So that’s the core stuff that I don’t want AI touch too much because we still want to have a voice of our own and we also want to attend to the reader. So that’s something that’s very unique and still very like handcrafted let’s say. But there’s the support thing where AI is having a bigger and bigger role for me. Like we have regular webinars, we do have in October which is cyber awareness month, we do have like a big event which is called the front lines by the way. Yeah, I know, right?
Rodrigo Leme
So after the events there’s always the task of cutting clips to post on social media and this was always very time consuming because you have to re watch the videos, you have to take notes of what sections you want to cut, you have to take it to your video editing tool and cutting those clips. And AI today is doing that for us. Like we dropped the video at the platform, it cuts for us like 32nd clips, 1 minute clips, whatever we want based on the content. So he reads the content for us and delivers very useful clips. I think like 90% of the clips that I get from my AI tools are useful for us. Right on the money with captions, with everything else.
Rodrigo Leme
So I think AI has a big role for us in terms of supporting us so we can be more productive and we can focus on the right things, like making better articles that are more directed to our audience, like speaking to our audience in a more organic voice.
Brett
What are those tools that you’re using for, like the video captions for example.
Rodrigo Leme
I’m using Opus clip, which is a great, like not getting any money from them, but this was a lifesaver for me. Of course, we do use chat TPT again, as I said, like use with caution. Do not use it to write it for you, but use it to make your stuff better. Use as your writing partner, the one that checks your copy and see if it’s working well, if it could be rewritten in some way or to do research. Right. To start your research, it’s going to provide you with resources direct to the question that you’re asking. And then so chat if it is always there as well. We do use meet journey to create some imagery that we need to do, and even tools like canva, today they are incorporating AI. We use HubSpot to create social posts.
Rodrigo Leme
And HubSpot has a great AI interface to help you like change the tone of your social post or something like that. So most of my AI tools are tools that I use to have a conversation with. So how can you make me spend less time doing stuff and how can I improve the stuff that I’m making? But it all starts with me and the team making stuff.
Brett
What’s your view when it comes to gated content? I know some marketers love to gate content. Others believe that it should just be open and you’ll get more long term value. What’s your view there?
Rodrigo Leme
It’s funny because when we started as a company, we had the stance of not having gated content at all anywhere. So the idea was we’re just starting, we want to talk to the market. We don’t want to put any barriers. We want people to come, you know, like you’re starting and you’re happy that people are coming and seeing you. So we don’t create gated content around that. But as we grew as a company, we saw a huge value in keeping content ungated. I’m not saying that we will never do it. We may be driven to do this as we start appearing in reports and overviews of analysts. So this is content that is more like, let’s say it’s an investment, right?
Rodrigo Leme
So being an investment, it has to have very strict KPI’s, including how many people are downloading, which kind of value we’re extracting from that. But first things first, we do not get content. And as I said before, we do value a lot. The idea of educating, I mean, with education first. So if you’re using gated content, you’re not very much educating, you’re just like selling your content. And again, as we grew up as a company, like we’re on Series A and still we don’t use gated content. So that speaks a lot.
Brett
What do you think is the top content marketing challenge that you’re facing or marketing teams in general are facing today?
Rodrigo Leme
Competition. Content marketing came when content marketing became a buzzword. It opened the world for everybody, right? So everybody could rise to have a blog, everybody could have their pre built websites. You could go to wix and have a website ready in 15 minutes or something. So still, I think the greatest challenge in content marketing is the competition. You’re competing with your competitors, but you’re also competing with pretty much any kind of content. Like, instead of reading this Right-Hand Cybersecurity report and maybe I’m going to take a look at YouTube first and then I’ll go back to that and the person never goes back to that, right? So that’s very challenging. That’s why I always feel that content has to have that. Even when you’re talking about your product, you have to have personality, you have to have an approach that’s based on storytelling.
Rodrigo Leme
You have to be interesting, right? Like, one of our most popular types of content is memes. We publish memes on partner channels across social media and we get like crazy engagement. And not only crazy engagement, because of course you’re there for the lows, right? But we also get results from that. We use memes on partners to drive registrations for our webinars. And like, a single meme delivers us a hundred registrations to a webinar, which is crazy, but it works. People like to be entertained first and, okay, now that I’m laughing with you, tell me about you. We try to replicate that approach to our content as well. We do use a more conversational tone in our stuff. We try to be that kind of person.
Rodrigo Leme
So to overcome this challenge, again, it’s very competitive when it comes to content marketing, and you have to be the cool guy in the block so people can pay attention to you.
Brett
And when it comes to your marketing efforts and marketing in general, what’s working today, and most importantly, what’s not working.
Rodrigo Leme
Well, what’s working today, like short content, like short videos and short pieces of content are fire at the moment. Like, we see companies going to TikTok, companies going to shorts on YouTube, on Instagram. And of course, video has been the king for a while now. But shorter and crisp content, direct content, straight to the point, content is working fine for everybody. It’s all the rage. At the same time, you see that there’s a trend in written content that more is better, right? Google is giving more value to longer pieces of content that interact with the audiences and connect with the audiences. LinkedIn has recently changed its algorithm to give favors to more long form educational content. So it’s funny saying that what’s working is long content and short content at the same time. But context is king ever.
Rodrigo Leme
It has always been and always be king. Right? As for what’s not working, I do think that there’s a trend of people rebelling against intrusive marketing, right? So marketing that works on the gray lines of data privacy. So you’re allowed to do that. But should you do that, you rub people wrong the wrong way when you do it. So that kind of intrusive marketing that captures me and who I am without me connecting with you, I think that’s something that people are starting to rebel against.
Rodrigo Leme
Like, I’ve seen lots of social media posts and articles referring to that and speaking as a customer, maybe I wouldn’t be as pleased with that approach as I would be with piece of content that I read that actually touches me, that connects with me with what I’m looking for and my beliefs, and then me reaching out to you and starting a conversation like permission is still king. Just as context, what about thought leadership?
Brett
What does your thought leadership strategy look like?
Rodrigo Leme
We do have, like, our co-founders are very active. That’s a great thing about them. In our case, we’ve been blessed that way. Not because they’re my bosses, but they’re very outgoing people. So thought leadership starts on the top, which is very obvious. But some founders are not as well versed in the ways of communicating as I have the luck to have my co-founders. So it starts from the top. Like these guys have to be active not just with customers, but also connecting with people from the industry, connecting with competitors. Like my CEO has great relationships with our competitors. So I think that thought leadership starts with having your founders take the lead. But it’s not just about the founders. We try to instill in our people a mindset of expressing themselves right.
Rodrigo Leme
They are also part of what we’re building, our developers, our solution architects, our marketing people, our salespeople. We are trying more and more to take these people to the spotlight, not only because they’re the voice of the company, but also they have unique perspectives that help build top leadership that sometimes the founders don’t have. These guys are on the front lines, they are talking to customers, they are building solutions for the customers, they are marketing for the customers.
Rodrigo Leme
So there’s a lot of unique perspectives and unique voices that need to be part of your cause leadership, if it stays only in your founders, even if you’re lucky enough to have founders who speak well, who write well, who are well connected, who are open to make like friends all over, even if you have those guys in your corner, if you don’t have a team that’s willing to express themselves, your task leadership is going to be very limited.
Brett
What about category strategy? How do you think about how you’re positioned in the market and the general approach to category strategy?
Rodrigo Leme
Well, about that, again, as I said in the beginning were very niche. We are inside it, cybersecurity is inside it and we are inside cybersecurity. When we talk about category, we are in a very tight cluster. We are super specialized. Therefore we cater to very specific people. We talk to the CISO, we talk to the security awareness officer. So we’re very laser targeted. So that helps us a lot, like driving the right conversations. We don’t need to. At the beginning we had this thought, oh, maybe we should talk to HR, maybe we should talk to financial people, to CFO’s and whatever, but we have a very clear proposition and a very clear audience. And then this audience will multiply the message with our support, of course, inside the company, but we do not segment that way.
Brett
Now lets imagine that I come to you and I say, Rodrigo, Im starting a new role as a marketing leader at a B2B software company based on everything you know, what would be your top advice for me so that I can succeed in this new role?
Rodrigo Leme
First of all, have an open mind. Even if you’re working for the big guys, the big companies, maybe this is a two in one lesson. The very first lesson is things change really quickly. If you are on big company the other day, you’re not there anymore. And if you’re not on a startup, you may be with the startup for the long run, but things will change almost week by week, right? Priorities change, focus change, and there’s a lot of emotion inside the startup. So first of all, be prepared for change, right? Do not receive change as a harmful agent, but some an opportunity. I don’t want to be stoic here or anything, but change is a way of improving yourself. So that’s number one. Number two is prepare yourself to be well versed, at least in a lot of marketing strategies, channels, tools.
Rodrigo Leme
Do not think I’m going to specialize in that thing. I’m going to specialize in data marketing and going to specialize in social media. The market is not looking for these people anymore. The market is looking for people who can deliver value by having a wider set of skills, right? So a broader set of skills. So that’s the second advice. Learn things that you don’t know. Go out of your comfort zone, you don’t like data, you don’t like social media, it doesn’t matter. You have to be at least able to hold a conversation with your agency if you’re going to go with an agency or if you’re going to do yourself, which may be like worst case scenario for someone that doesn’t like certain things.
Rodrigo Leme
I think that number three is it’s a cliche for marketers that we are very talkative and easy to make connections and conversations, but it’s not easy. It’s something that you practice over time and you improve over time, but it’s very much useful. Connect with your peers, connect with your colleagues, connect with your partners, connect with your competitors. I’ve been finding value, a lot of value connecting to my peers. We do have the cybersecurity marketing society, which you guys can google and look for, but this is a place where I connect with lots of my peers and they make incredible conversations. Keep the conversation going because that will attend to your learning objectives, but that will also create for you a support group.
Rodrigo Leme
Like if you’re doing a lot of things at once, if you’re working for a startup and doing lots of things at once, it’s nice to have people on your corner who support you. So that’s number three, make great relationships. And of course, the relationships inside the company are primo, right? Like most of my ideas for articles, content, social media posts come from talking to the people inside the company. So I learn for everybody. I keep my virtual doors open all the time so people can come to me and talk. I run surveys to understand, like, how these people use social media, how can I support them, what they want to learn about social media that I can help them with. So keep this conversation going, and you’re going to extract a lot of value.
Brett
And final question here, if we’re wrapping up and there’s any founders that are listening in or any marketers that are listening in that want to follow along with you, where should they go?
Rodrigo Leme
Okay, first of all, right, dash hand AI, which is right hand, one stop shop for everything. For everything. Right hand. And if you’re going to look for me, it’s easy. You just look for Rodrigo Leme. You can look for me on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, whatever. I’m, as I said before, always open for a good conversation, always looking to connect with like minded people and people who can teach me stuff and people who I can teach stuff as well.
Brett
Amazing. Rodrigo, thanks so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it.
Rodrigo Leme
Thank you, Brett. Thanks for having me once again, and have a good one.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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