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Some SaaS Unicorns are over a decade in the making. They take years of consistent work to reach that billion-dollar valuation.
Others, like cybersecurity company Wiz, have a much faster ascent.
The cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) — which was founded in 2020, by the way — is fresh off a $1-billion Series E led by a16z, Lightspeed Ventures, and Thrive Capital. In just four years, the company has raised a staggering $1.9 billion in venture capital, earning an eleven-figure valuation. Not to mention they are already used by more than 40% of the Fortune 100.
This level of success points to excellence across the board — product, sales, and marketing.
Today we’ll look at how Wiz is putting this money to good use on the marketing side, using brand, paid, organic, and social marketing to drive growth.
Riding the Rising Tide in Cybersecurity
The increasing frequency of cyber attacks has led to a surge in funding for industries like CNAPP, especially considering that cloud usage itself is projected to reach over $1 trillion in global spending by 2027.
According to Statista, the overall cybersecurity market, covering tools and services, is expected to reach $273 billion. Over half of that money is allocated for software like Wiz. The generative AI boom also places emphasis on the importance of cloud-based security solutions as companies add vast amounts of data to the cloud to fine-tune models provided by OpenAI and their competitors.
All of this adds up to a massive opportunity for Wiz.
Their “agentless” approach — automated scans of cloud environments to flag risks — has helped them build a sizable enterprise customer base. Wiz currently protects over 5 million cloud workloads, including major names like Colgate-Palmolive, BMW, and LVMH.
Wiz is riding the rising tide in cybersecurity to some historic milestones, including being the fastest company to reach $100M in ARR and, recently, earning a $12 billion valuation.
Now let’s look at how Wiz sets up their channels to sustain this impressive growth.
The Marketing Channels Driving Traffic for Wiz
Wiz’s historic ascent in cybersecurity means they have a substantial war chest.
Their resources allow for a “hyper-aggressive” growth strategy to compete against established companies like Palo Alto Networks and startups like Orca and Lacework. CEO Assaf Rappaport and COO Dali Rajic are reportedly prioritizing channel efforts for 2024.
Even just the sheer size and specialization of the Wiz marketing department tells you that this is the case. Taking a look at the company’s LinkedIn page, you’ll see the following specializations:
- Field marketing
- Channel marketing
- Product marketing
- Partner marketing
- Customer marketing
- Growth marketing
- Digital marketing
- Brand marketing
- Revenue marketing
Not to mention other key roles like analyst relations and community managers. This varied approach plays out when looking at the Wiz web marketing channel distribution:
Direct (50%) and organic search (26%) lead the way, but Wiz also supplements these main channels with tens of thousands of site visits every month through referral (9%), paid search (7%), and social (7%).
This marketing mix has helped Wiz increase their site traffic from 226,000 in November 2023 to just under 390,000 as of April 2024 — a 72% increase over just 6 months.
Today, we’ll focus on three pillars of Wiz’s diversified marketing portfolio: Brand building, organic marketing, and social selling.
Brand Building
Wiz’s brand is self-described as “magical” and “optimistic”. This approach is intentional: The company wants to set themselves apart from the field of cybersecurity companies that rely on fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD).
Wiz supports this positive ethos with strong visual branding that includes cartoonish imagery, with bright blues and pinks and gives off a cartoons-and-cereal vibe.
The company’s Head of Brand, Roy Katz, gave readers a peak behind the brand curtain in a 2023 blog post titled “The Magic of Branding”, saying:
In the world of security, the dominant approach to branding is often based on fear and intimidation. But at Wiz, we’re taking a different approach. We believe in the power of optimism and positivity, and we’re building a brand that reflects those values.
— Roy Katz,
Head of Brand, Wiz
It certainly appears that this approach is working. But that still leaves the question: How do they get the Wiz name, story, and visual branding in front of their audience?
The answer: Field marketing and paid search.
Field marketing initiatives include sponsoring and attending industry events, something the Wiz team knows a lot about. In May 2024 alone, they are attending over 12 events, from an AWS Summit in Milano to the RSA 2024 in San Francisco.
To make sure everyone at these events notices the brand, Wiz takes their field marketing to the next level.
Instead of the typical promotional stall, they recently unveiled “WizMart” at the RSA 2024 conference. It’s a fictitious grocery store with tangible products labelled to match the Wiz suite.
(They’ve taken it even further, creating a WizMart.io site where people can actually purchase the products.)
It’s unorthodox, for sure, but this type of visual branding is crucial. Remember: it takes roughly 5-7 exposures for people to remember a brand name. I’m willing to bet that number is much lower for Wiz.
Field marketing is great for building brand awareness IRL, but there’s still the question of boosting awareness to their audience online.
Wiz uses paid search advertising to help increase brand awareness by targeting relevant high-volume keywords that Wiz doesn’t rank highly for in the SERPs, like “cloud infrastructure security”, “CSPM”, “cloud network security”, and “vulnerability management tools”.
It’s more costly than organic search, but it’s effective. People continuously see the Wiz name and icon when they search for cybersecurity terms. This strategy is used effectively by companies in other cybersecurity niches, like Mimecast and Barracuda.
And remember, paid search drives 7% of Wiz’s total web traffic, so these ads effectively help shorten the sales funnel for thousands of potential customers.
Organic Marketing
Wiz balances out the brand index of their marketing portfolio by investing in high-quality, high-production value content.
Organic search accounts for 26% of Wiz’s web traffic, bringing in over 25,000 monthly visits that are valued at more than $100,000. In other words, this content saves them over one million dollars in paid traffic every year.
That may seem like a small number, especially compared to the hundreds of thousands of monthly visits that CrowdStrike or Palo Alto Networks bring in. But, remember, content marketing is a mid-to-long-term game in many cases. It’s an investment.
The Wiz Academy subfolder is the top asset class in their content portfolio as far as organic traffic. The 152 pages in this subfolder drive 43% of the visits to Wiz’s site — about 16,000 each month.
To see how this SaaS centaur invests in content, let’s take a look at their top piece explaining the concept of cloud security posture management (CSPM).
This top-of-funnel asset currently brings in 1,700 monthly visits at a value of $12,000. Here’s what makes it so effective:
- Technical expertise: It’s written by someone with a high level of understanding in the domain — in this case, Wiz Technical Product Marketing Manager Shaked Rotlevi.
- Keyword optimization: The page ranks for over 90 keywords and currently sits in the top three position for 14 of them.
- Value-add visuals: Well-placed screenshots and mock-ups of the Wiz dashboard to support key concepts.
- Internal links: Over 56 internal links pointing toward other relevant pages on the Wiz website.
- Calls to action: Attention-grabbing CTA modules that direct visitors to relevant content and lead-capture assets.
- High EEAT References: Multiple references to credible third-party sources like Gartner, Tech Crunch, and the Guardian.
The same strategy is used across other top-ranking academy posts targeting high-value acronyms like CNAPP, SBOM, and CIEM.
Wiz also has an extensive backlink network consisting of over 1 million URLs from 4,400 domains. Over 750 of these are high-authority sites with a domain rating above 70. There are two domains in particular that are worth pointing out.
The Hacker News
The Hacker News (THN) covers major data breaches, cyber-attacks, vulnerabilities, and relevant stories in the cybersecurity space. THN boasts nearly 30 million backlinks and brings in over 1,5 million monthly web visitors, according to SimilarWeb; 100,000 of those visitors come through organic search.
Wiz currently has 118,500 nofollow backlinks from The Hacker News (THN). So, while these URLs don’t pass any link equity through to the Wiz domain, they do pass on readers that perfectly fit the cybersecurity brand’s ICP.
Plus, these THN pages position the Wiz team as experts in the industry and prominently feature their branding.
Take this news story about two major Ubuntu vulnerabilities that came out in September 2023. The second sentence of the piece cites a Wiz report, making them the primary source of a major story. Not only that, but the news story even includes visual assets branded by Wiz Research, including:
- Explanatory custom graphics
- Embedded YouTube videos
The benefits of having such an extensive arrangement with a prominent industry news site are obvious: Extensive brand exposure and a position as a leading authority in the cybersecurity space.
Gov Tech
Wiz receives over 11,000 backlinks from two publications owned by eRepublic LLC: eRepublic and Gov Tech. These are prominent publishing brands in the — you guessed it — government sector, which just so happens to be one of the key areas Wiz is looking to expand into.
Upon closer inspection, the backlinks these sites are directing to Wiz are all for government summits in major states and cities across the United States. So their brand-building efforts in the field actually help drive organic success as well.
The importance of a multi-faceted marketing strategy shines through in Wiz’s organic success as well. In this case, it’s the combination of effective content and partnership marketing.
Social Selling
As important as organic marketing is to success in B2B, the SERP game is a volatile one. That’s why investing in a social selling strategy is so important. Building up an audience across channels with native and distribution content is a great way to funnel traffic to your site.
Social selling currently accounts for about 7% of Wiz’s web traffic — roughly 25,000 monthly visits. X (Twitter) and LinkedIn drive the majority of these social referrals, but Wiz also has a strong presence on Reddit.
Let’s take a quick look at what the Wizards are doing across X, LinkedIn, and Reddit.
X
Wiz drives around 39% of their social referrals through X, which is interesting considering the platform has floundered over the past few years. (I guess we can’t write it off just yet.)
The main company account does a lot of the heavy lifting, with over 1,000 posts since it started in June 2020. The majority of its recent posts contain high-quality multimedia assets like graphics, videos, and GIFs.
The Wizards are hard at work making sure the distinct imagery of the Wiz brand dominates every platform.
The interesting thing is that these X posts don’t appear to do that well in terms of engagement. The most recent posts earn around a dozen likes, a handful of reshares, and, if they’re lucky, a comment.
That said, the fact that nearly 40% of social referrals to the Wiz site come through X is much more important than how many likes or comments they get. It’s a good reminder that vanity metrics aren’t always the right measure of success.
LinkedIn is a key platform for B2B social selling for obvious reasons: Millions of organizational decision-makers and gatekeepers network on the platform. Using company and personal profiles to build an audience on this platform is a crucial part of any digital marketing strategy.
Brands like Dreamdata have documented the benefits of social selling for driving web traffic, MQLs, and even conversions.
According to Head of Growth Marketing Tom Orbach, extreme employee advocacy is a key part of the company’s social strategy. And, looking at the large following the Wiz C-suite has developed on LinkedIn, it appears this decision is driven from the top down:
- Assaf Rappaport — Cofounder & CEO: 23k followers
- Yinon Costica — VP of Product: 14k followers
- Dali Rajic — President and COO: 4.2k followers
- Raaz Herzberg — CMO: 4.1k followers
The leadership team regularly posts about major company happenings, from the official launch of the WizMart website to upcoming events. This dedication to social selling is especially important when major milestones come around — say, a historic multi-billion dollar funding round.
You’ll see similar celebratory posts from the rest of the leadership and tons of other Wizards on LinkedIn.
So what’s the secret to this widespread activation? Templates.
In the same post where Tom Orbach mentions the company’s extreme employee advocacy, he explains that the Wiz brand team provides “templates and personalized images” for their team to post on personal channels.
If you’re in the market for software and want to temper the overly positive ratings that companies get on third-party review sites like G2, Capterra, and Gartner, Reddit is a great place to go. There are tons of industry-relevant subreddits full of candid perspectives on everything from vendor pricing and customer support to troubleshooting.
According to Reddit for Business, it’s also one of the most popular social media platforms for IT decision-makers.
Wiz enjoys positive sentiment across a number of relevant subreddits, including r/DevOps and r/Cybersecurity. This suggests that the success of their product is driven by a lot more than a massive ad budget and media hype — the Wiz platform is the real deal.
But more important than this positive sentiment is how Wiz employees actively participate in these discussions using personal accounts.
In a post on the r/cybersecurity subreddit titled Wiz is {insert your experience}, there are multiple comment threads where Wiz employees respond to comments. Just take a look at this snippet from one lengthy response:
It’s another example of the company’s commitment to employee advocacy.
While Wiz does appear to have an official Reddit user account, u/Wiz_Official, they don’t use it for community management the way that a company like 1Password does. Wiz seems to use it almost exclusively for paid advertising.
The Wiz team uses Reddit Pixel Retargeting to re-engage recent site visitors with key lead-capture assets.
For example, I was scrolling through Reddit after doing some research for this breakdown, and I came across this ad for Wiz’s “State of AI in 2024” report.
Then I came across another post promoting their AWS S3 security posture cheat sheet.
Both ads are directed to lead-capture pages, like the one below, which help the marketing Wizards qualify leads for their sales team.
Marketers typically hesitate to advertise on Reddit because the audience is perceived as savvier and less tolerant of promotional material. But the Wiz team shows that they aren’t afraid of putting their brand on the line to build out an audience.
Just like with their brand and organic marketing tactics, Wiz takes every opportunity to maximize their brand exposure across social media.
Learn How Great Cybersecurity Brands Build Their Marketing Engine
After raising nearly $2 billion in venture capital over just four years, it’s not surprising to see that they are investing so heavily in marketing — or that they are realizing such success.
But it’s important to note that they are spreading this investment across a number of different marketing disciplines, from field and brand marketing to content and revenue marketing. These specialties all contribute to the Wiz pillars of brand, organic, and social marketing.
Diversification is key for sustained growth.
To learn how other SaaS companies have embraced a diversified marketing engine, check out these breakdowns:
