Helping Privatise build links through market research

The background

Appstractor Corporation is a developer of innovative, fully automated online privacy and security technologies. Its solutions enable small and medium-sized businesses to keep their activities private and data secure. Appstractor consists of three brands: Privatise, Trusted Proxies and Appstractor.

The challenge

Privatise was preparing to announce the official beta launch of its small business VPN – Privatise Online Encryption. This VPN would be the first (in the world) to be designed specifically for small and medium-sized businesses.

To ensure a successful launch and increase sign ups to the beta programme, Privatise needed help promoting its solution in target media and key online publications. This would enable it to increase brand awareness and visibility online, as well as generate new business opportunities.

Plus, as its new website was being built and optimised, Privatise needed a strong SEO foundation from which it could plan and achieve future business growth – and content played a key role in that process.

So, Privatise engaged The B2B Marketing Lab and B2BML’s sister agency ITPR – a B2B technology PR consultancy – and asked for help.

The campaign

Having carefully considered Privatise’s requirements, the Huble team devised a content-driven, thought leadership campaign. The campaign was based on the topic (and problem) of cyber security in small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and included a comprehensive market research report.

The market research report would be the centerpiece of the campaign – but for it to be created, it needed two things: questions and data.

First, B2BML worked closely with Privatise to come up with a series of questions in relation to SMB cyber security. These questions were to be presented to senior IT decision makers in UK SMBs to gain an understanding of the key issues they faced when it came to cyber security.

Once the questions were agreed and approved, B2BML sent these questions to Sapio Research – a leading professional business and consumer market research company – to get the data. Sapio Research then interviewed 500 senior IT decision makers in UK SMBs to get the data Privatise was looking for.

(It’s also important to note that the B2B industry standard for an accurate, representative sample size is 100 people.)

Creating the market research report

With the data in hand, the B2BML team created a comprehensive report – exploring the specific cyber security issues plaguing UK SMBs. The report was hosted on a landing page and advertised across several social media channels to drive awareness and downloads. In addition to advertising the research report, the B2BML team used the most prominent statistics to create several news articles for placement in the media and a series of blogs for the website.

These news articles were placed in Privatise’s key target media outlets along with links back to the website for Privatise Online Encryption. This helped to increase traffic to the Privatise website and improved its domain authority. The blogs, on the other hand, helped to boost the website’s SEO – due to the fact they were optimised for long-tail keyword terms relevant to the cyber security industry and linked to other key pages.

From just one market research report, the B2BML team was able to create a tremendous amount of content to support Privatise’s beta launch and its website. Furthermore, several inbound links were generated in the process, including links from:

TechRadar Pro (Domain authority: 91)
ITPro (Domain authority: 71)
ITProPortal (Domain authority: 71)
InfoSecurity (Domain authority: 67)
SC Media (Domain authority: 63)

In addition to these articles being placed on high domain authority websites, they were supplemented with bespoke features placed in technology publications.