Article's Content
Article's Content
We hear it all the time — cyber attacks and major IT breaches are on the rise. Unfortunately, the number of IT professionals employed by large organizations to prevent and manage these events seems to be trending in the opposite direction.
That’s why managed security services, which essentially outsource this aspect of enterprise IT teams, are increasingly popular. The global market size for this industry was valued at $31 billion in 2023 and is projected to double that valuation by 2026.
Arctic Wolf is the pack leader in this space.
Founded in 2012 in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, the company has since:
- Raised $900 million in debt and equity
- Eclipsed $4 billion in their most recent valuation
- Boosted their offering by acquiring five companies
The Arctic Wolf platform processes trillions of security events every week for over 4,600 customers while their Security Teams respond to threats and improve security posture. It’s a winning recipe on the product side.
The question is: How do they support growth in a space that’s becoming more and more competitive? And how can they protect their own position in that space?
Today, we’ll look at how Arctic Wolf built one of the biggest brands in cybersecurity and how they can support it with increased investment in content.
Arctic Wolf’s Brand-Heavy Approach to Security Operations
Before we dive into all the brand-building work the Arctic Wolf team does, it’s important to understand why brand is so vital for this company.
Arctic Wolf is a security operations company that delivers services through a SaaS model — they provide access to tools and, more importantly, IT expertise. The Concierge Security Team that monitors and manages customer environments is the central value proposition. Businesses don’t need to spend time and money seeking out and attracting highly coveted IT pros. They can just partner with Arctic Wolf instead. Pack mentality.
But this strategy only works if the brand is widely recognized and regarded as experienced and trustworthy by the public. Brand is a superpower — just ask Ross:
Well, looking at the Arctic Wolf marketing channel overview, they appear to be successful. Direct traffic brings in nearly 70%, with organic search being the only other channel to bring in a double-digit percentage (18%).
According to SimilarWeb, Arctic Wolf’s 69% direct search share puts them well ahead of competing cybersecurity companies like CrowdStrike (57%), Rapid7 (50%), SentinelOne (34%), and Red Canary (29%).
Now, let’s take a look at some of the brand-building tactics that Arctic Wolf applies to make sure everyone knows they’re top dog in the security operations space.
Building the Arctic Wolf Brand With Sponsorships, Partnerships, and Paid Search
A few weeks ago, I covered how another cybersecurity giant, Wiz, skyrocketed brand recognition with sponsorships, partnerships, and a sprinkle of paid advertising.
Arctic Wolf uses a similar formula, setting up shop at industry events across the globe to promote their security operations services. These events are a major part of growth in the cybersecurity space, and Arctic Wolf is doing it right. Even during the pandemic, the company reportedly increased their pipeline by 305% hosting virtual events.
Partnerships and Sponsorships
One of the biggest brand drivers for Arctic Wolf comes via partnership and sponsorship arrangements with major sports teams across the globe, particularly their relationships with Oracle Red Bull Racing (ORBR) and the Wolverhampton Wanderers.
ORBR is one of, if not the, most popular teams in Formula 1 — a sport that’s experiencing quite the resurgence. As the official cybersecurity partner of this team, Arctic Wolf gains massive global exposure as ORBR vehicles tear up tracks across North America, Europe, and Asia.
Even more important is the boost in reputation that they get from partnering with such a prestigious sports brand. They even created a dedicated landing page for the partnership that links to case studies and relevant articles.
Arctic Wolf also uses sports to gain recognition in one of their growing European markets. Since 2021, they have been the official cybersecurity partner of the English Premier League team Wolverhampton. I think the rationale behind that relationship is pretty clear.
Compared to ORBR, Wolverhampton is far from being a top team. That said, it’s still part of one of the most widely watched leagues in the world’s most popular sport. Plus the Arctic Wolf team also gets some help on the SEO side with the Wolverhampton arrangement in the form of nearly 3,100 do-follow backlinks.
Arctic Wolf has a number of similar partnerships with franchises across professional sports leagues – from their hometown teams in the NFL and NHL to the Meyer Shank Racing Indy 500 Team and Australian Rugby team the Parramatta Eels.
True to their name, Arctic Wolf also uses a pack mentality to win the brand game within the cybersecurity space.
Arctic Wolf’s 100% channel go-to-market strategy and robust Partner Program have been key drivers of the brand’s rapid growth. By focusing exclusively on selling through channel partners like MSPs and solution providers, they efficiently expand market reach and scale without having to build a large direct sales force.
The tiered Partner Program provides compelling benefits and enablement resources to help partners succeed, including deal registration, training, co-branded content, demand generation support, and access to Arctic Wolf’s security operations expertise.
Arctic Wolf’s extensive partnership network is similar to the one built up by another brand-heavy B2B company: Klaviyo.
Paid Search
As great as it is bringing in new leads directly through brand recognition and word of mouth, it’s also important to win in key online battlefields. This is why Arctic Wolf opts to jump the queue for a number of cybersecurity-specific keywords with paid search ads.
For example, type “cybersecurity compliance” into Google, and you’ll likely see this ad promoting Arctic Wolf’s compliance guide.
They use this tactic to target over 750 high-value search terms in the US alone, including ones with a very high cost per click:
- Gartner MQ MDR — $77.56
- Gartner MDR Services — $56.89
- How to get SOC 2 compliance — $52.91
- Who can perform a SOC 2 audit — $51.05
- Managed detection and response service — $43.33
And Arctic Wolf aren’t the only ones using digital advertising to boost brand recognition and conversion rates. According to WARC Media, companies spent more than ever on advertising last year, passing the $1 trillion mark.
But there’s reason to be concerned about the sustainability of this approach, particularly the climbing cost per click that drives this figure.
One of the best ways to mitigate this reliance on paid search is ranking organically. With this in mind, let’s take a look at how Arctic Wolf brings in organic traffic through the SERPs.
The Current State of Organic Marketing at Arctic Wolf
Outside of direct traffic, organic search is the largest growth driver for Arctic Wolf. This key marketing channel brings in about 18% of their total site visits every month, which translates to just under 26,000 visits across 1,850 indexed pages.
That’s still a healthy amount of traffic, but it’s considerably lower than the volume and web footprint of some of Arctic Wolf’s content competitors:
- Crowdstrike: 4.4k pages, 228k monthly visits
- Checkpoint: 25k pages, 167k visits
- Sentinel One: 2.9k pages, 57k visits
- Rapid7: 10k pages, 55k visits
- Proofpoint: 4.8k pages, 95k visits
And this is just a handful of the companies Arctic Wolf has to compete against in the SERPs. It’s important that Arctic Wolf continues to build out their organic presence for a few reasons:
- The CPC of paid search is increasing as companies turn back to search engine marketing
- Cybersecurity keywords have a higher baseline cost than those in many other industries
Remember those key search terms that I showed you in the branding section? They’re about to get even more expensive.
Just look at cost per click for some of the low-volume keywords that Arctic Wolf ranks for:
Boosting organic performance will be a lot easier for Arctic Wolf than it is for startups and smaller sites. They already have a strong brand and domain ranking. They just need to direct more resources toward their enterprise content marketing engine.
Resources Subfolder: Educating and Empower Readers
The Arctic Wolf Resource subfolder is responsible for a substantial chunk of their total organic traffic — bringing in around 11,600 of the nearly 25,000 monthly visitors (45%).
There are about 850 pages in this subfolder, 525 of which are blog posts covering top-of-funnel and mid-funnel topics. Then, there’s a mix of glossary pages, press releases, and author pages.
Of the top 10 pages on the Arctic Wolf website by organic traffic share, five of them are from the blog. Here’s a look at some of the key SEO metrics for the top blog pieces:
After reading through these top pieces — like the blog posts on different types of malware or the differences between SIEM, MSSP and MDR — it’s clear that the Arctic Wolf team is embracing a number of best practices.
Here are a few of the SEO copywriting tactics that stand out to me:
- Educational Value: Arctic Wolf’s blogs provide in-depth, expert-level insights on cybersecurity topics and offer actionable insights that readers can use to improve their security posture.
- External Sources: Posts cite authoritative external sources to support claims and boost EEAT, like cybercrime stats from Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report or vulnerability details from Mitel security advisories.
- UX Copywriting: The content is easy for readers to read or skim thanks to well-organized headings, logical formatting, to-the-point writing, and bulleted and bolded lists.
- Internal Links: Resource pages are full of strategically placed internal links that make it easy for readers to learn more about topics that matter to them while staying engaged with the site’s content.
But if you know anything about Foundation’s approach to content marketing, you know these practices are just the tip of the iceberg (more on that shortly).
YouTube Content
It’s an easy thing to forget, but YouTube isn’t just for advertising. The video search engine is also an incredibly important platform for organic marketing. There are lots of visual learners out there.
Arctic Wolf has a fairly sizeable presence on the platform through their YouTube channel, Arctic Wolf Networks. Since setting up the account in 2015, they’ve uploaded 117 videos, earned nearly 1,700 subscribers, and received over 1.6 million total views. According to SimilarWeb, this channel also drives over half of all the “social referral” traffic that their website receives.
What’s even more interesting is that a single video has earned more than half of the all-time views for this channel. Unsurprisingly, it focuses on Arctic Wolf’s partnership with the Oracle Red Bull Racing team.
But there’s a lot more than high-production value brand promotion and advertising on the Arctic Wolf YouTube channel. Among their latest videos, you’ll also find:
- The Howler Podcast: long-form video interviews featuring company executives
- Meet the Experts: short-form clips with different Arctic Wolf Cybersecurity experts
- Artic Wolf Pack Unity: culture-building videos highlighting the company’s diversity
- Ticker News: 6–7 minute videos discussing the latest developments in cybersecurity
- Arctic Wolf Platform: whiteboard-style walkthroughs of specific Arctic Wolf use cases
The channel also includes feature overviews, webinar uploads, sports team profiles, and other one-off videos — some of which earn tens of thousands of views.
Taking Arctic Wolf Content to the Next Level
Despite sitting well behind other cybersecurity companies in terms of organic traffic, Arctic Wolf is actually in a decent position. They have the strong domain, brand recognition, internal experts, and, of course, capital to level up their content marketing efforts in short order.
It’s something we see quite often at Foundation: An enterprise company embraces the investment mindset for content, and their marketing efforts take off.
Now the question is this: What can Arctic Wolf do to catch up to competitors like Crowdstrike, Sentinel One, and Rapid7 on the organic front?
With that in mind, here are a few strategies the Arctic Wolf team can apply to increase the number of leads they bring in on the organic side.
1. Remix and Repurpose: Optimize Content with Existing Visual Assets
One of the big things that stands out (or doesn’t) when looking through Arctic Wolf’s resource content is a lack of visual assets.
The information on these pages is valuable, the writing is clear, and the preliminary SEO steps — optimized headers, internal links, and user-friendly formatting — are complete. But this doesn’t make it any easier for audiences that increasingly prefer visual content.
Here’s what the Arctic Wolf team can do to address this issue with content they already have:
Embed YouTube Videos
That big bank of videos on the Arctic Wolf Networks channel is a gold mine of rich content that can help bump up organic traffic numbers. All they need to do is sort through the existing videos to find ones that align with their existing blog pieces (or other content they want to optimize).
For example, they could add the video below to their top traffic magnet discussing different types of malware. It’s an immediate value add for the reader and might just be enough to bump the piece up to a top-three SERP position.
The Arctic Wolf team could also break down some of their longer interview, podcast, or webinar videos to isolate specific sections that fit with their existing blog content.
Plenty of videos to go around!
Include Custom Graphics
Video embeds are an easy start, especially when you already have all that content sitting around, but there are other assets Arctic Wolf can repurpose to optimize their blog content. They certainly have access to quality designers. I mean, just look at their landing page:
There are also a number of existing Arctic Wolf assets with visual sections that would easily fit into their blog content (with a modification or two).
Their report — The State of Cybersecurity: 2024 Trends — is an obvious candidate. The report is full of custom graphs, charts, and quotes that explain the top concerns organizations face as cyberattacks continue to rise.
This snippet would fit perfectly into a blog post on ransomware:
And this could add value and break up text in a blog about endpoint security:
Remixing and repurposing this type of visual content is something more brands need to embrace. It custs down on design costs and helps spread the reach of important research.
2. Create Content Clusters
The Arctic Wolf security operations platform covers a number of overlapping but distinct cybersecurity concepts and niches. Think MDR, MSSP, SIEM, and all sorts of other abbreviated terms.
To help further organize the site and make things easier for readers and search engines, they could update the site structure (or just the resources subfolder) to create clusters of semantically related content.
NerdWallet’s content cluster approach worked wonders, and a similar approach could work well for Arctic Wolf. Here’s how they could do it:
- Identify the core cybersecurity topics that are relevant to their target audience and align with the Arctic Wolf service offering.
- Create a long-form pillar page that broadly covers all aspects of the topic and is optimized for relevant primary and secondary keywords.
- Develop cluster pages that zero in on each of the subtopics in more detail and then link them back to the pillar.
- Map out the cluster pages so they align with each stage of Arctic Wolf’s marketing funnel — top, middle, and bottom.
- Strategically interlink between the pillar and cluster content using optimized anchor text.
The beauty of content marketing is that these key assets – your home page, product pages, and blogs — are living assets. The work is only just getting started when you press publish, and there’s always room to improve.
Learn How to Build a Winning B2B Content Engine
Arctic Wolf has built a strong brand in the cybersecurity space through sponsorships, partnerships, and paid search. While they have a solid foundation for organic growth, there is room for improvement to catch up with competitors.
By remixing and repurposing existing content, such as embedding YouTube videos and including custom graphics, as well as creating content clusters around core cybersecurity topics, Arctic Wolf can level up their content marketing efforts and drive more organic leads.
For more insights into how top B2B companies are optimizing their marketing strategies, check out these breakdowns:
