LinkedIn and other Lead Gen strategies — Yoel Israel // Wadi Digital

Quotes

• “Two things always meet somewhere in the Venn Diagram. I moved to Israel seven years ago. There's a lot of Israel being a startup nation and has got like 40% of cybersecurity companies here and we only have like under 9 million people. So you can understand how condensed Israel is, and it’s smaller than New Jersey. It’s a tiny population and tiny geographically and everyone knows each other.” - Yoel“The Silicon Valley of cybersecurity.” - Ben “Correct and that’s why it’s called Wadi Digital because “wadi” means valley in Arabic and Hebrew. As it started to get more B2B and doing more LinkedIn ads, so then more and more cybersecurity companies and then we started to really dominate to understand the field. I like cybersecurity professionals, they’re different than any other professionals I met. They have this reserved, trust but verify, and they know a lot of what’s going on in the dark web and it’s pretty fascinating. They’re kind of conservative, quirky, and weird people and I don’t mean that in the negative way. I think they’re cool and they’re very honest, straight people, and have high integrity.” - Yoel“I’m a marketer so it’s only natural that I start to get more cybersecurity clients and then they would start recommending because we were really successful. We actually had three cybersecurity companies that sold out for over $120 million dollars for the last three years so we’re excited.” - Yoel“More than anything it’s just keeping the website secure. For smaller and medium companies, it’s the employees. Not have a rogue or disgruntled employee or who knows what. Those are the ones who can cause the most damage.” - Yoel“Make sure you don’t give them security clearance beyond what they need. Make sure you did the proper diligence. So that’s two most important for me. Employee management and make the website secure.” - Yoel“When we started in 2019, I had an idea within a scope of six months, I had cybersecurity clients asking for influencer marketing. I looked and looked, by the time I had my third one, I said ‘screw it, I’m gonna build my own.’ I would focus on my mentors and build my proof of concept.” - Yoel“I used an affiliate network so every influencer can log in and grab unique links. I take my skills as an advertiser into a pay-per-click model. They have their log in, they grab the links from different cybersecurity companies that are sharing their content and they share it on their socials. It comes off, almost like organic. I’m curating it for them and they’re getting compensated for it so they love it.” - Yoel“On the other side, my cybersecurity companies love it that they’re getting reach that they would never get. Because if they post it themselves, it’s self-promotion or when they work with us, do ads. It’s still promoted but they work. It’s nothing like an influencer standing by the product because the companies are getting unique reach and visibility.” - Yoel“There’s nothing like this even for B2B companies because everywhere else they kind of try to be a matchmaker between the B2B company and the influencer and they end up getting cut out. Here we have a platform where you basically share your blog, your content, you put ‘em up or we could put ‘em up for you and the cybersecurity professional get to choose what they want to share.” - Yoel “It’s interesting. The model of not necessarily connecting an influencer with a brand but connecting with an influencer with a piece of content and allowing them to share and distribute the content and be compensated for it. It takes the complexity out of managing the relationship.” - Ben