November 22, 2024March 14, 2025 by Jen Fields

Cybersecurity Marketing Strategy: How to Market Cybersecurity Solutions

The cybersecurity industry is experiencing extreme growth—but also volatility. Funding and revenue growth have increased significantly over the last 5 years, which is only expected to continue. However, this flood of money has driven up costs, made talent scarce, and increased C-suite expectations. On top of that, a potential recession and rising interest rates have reset valuations and resulted in uncertainty, hiring freezes, and job cuts.

Virtually every expense associated with cybersecurity marketing is increasing, the markets are gyrating wildly, and everyone expects a miracle from their marketing budget.

The Commonalities of Marketing Cybersecurity Solutions

It can all sound daunting, especially with so much uncertainty, but it doesn’t have to be. Even with a shifting market, certain elements remain the same:

Cybersecurity solutions come at a high price point
You have to reach multiple audiences
Those target audiences are relatively small
The purchasing process is long and complicated
The products themselves are complex

In cybersecurity, virtually everyone has a technical background, whether or not their current position involves a lot of day-to-day technical work. So, you must create content that resonates with them and appeases both the business and technical sides of their background. That means offering content that delves into not just what and why but also how. Here’s how you get started.

Cybersecurity decision-makers want technical, content-driven resources like eBooks and white papers, not slick advertising.

Want all the nitty-gritty details of marketing cybersecurity solutions?

Check out our free eBook: Marketing Cybersecurity: A How-To Guide

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Define Your Target Audience

To successfully promote cybersecurity solutions, it’s essential to recognize both your audience and their key concerns. This understanding allows you to tailor your messaging accordingly. Given that cybersecurity purchases often involve lengthy sales cycles with multiple stakeholders, it’s crucial to segment your content and messaging according to three primary audience roles:

Buyers

The people in charge of the purchasing decision.

This is typically the IT department or SecOps teams, who will focus on security performance, usability, and how well your solution meshes with their department goals.

Users

The people who will be using your product regularly.

These are typically lower-level folks, who will care most about usability and how well it helps them do their job.

Influencers

Anyone else whose opinion carries weight in the decision process.

This could include the CFO, risk management department, head of operations – since cybersecurity decisions have wide ranging impacts, there tends to be a lot of other decision-makers

Quick Tip: Once you understand each buyer, user, and influencer role, you can select the messages that will resonate best with each audience based on their unique set of priorities.

Create Engaging, High-Quality Content

Start with content focused on your primary target audience, then build a robust funnel and customer journey by strategically combining the right CTA with the right topics and formats.

Targeting the top of the funnel with buyer-focused content is the best approach for generating initial lead flow.

And keep the content coming— more than 50% of B2B buyers consume at least 3-7 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep.

Pick the CTA

Many marketers get so swept up in campaign design and overarching messaging that they forget the most crucial task: picking the right call to action (CTA).

To ensure your marketing campaigns really shine, it’s essential to start with the right offer. Many prospects might not be ready to immediately jump into a demo, chat with a salesperson, or sign up for a trial. In most cases, people want to take their time to learn at their own pace before connecting with a salesperson. If you rush into a sales pitch too soon, it might turn them away entirely. So, start with engaging and informative content to get that initial attention and then build trust.

56% of B2B buyers say that most of the content they interact with is too sales pitch-y and needs to be more objective.

Then the Topic

At baseline, you have to pick a topic that’s relevant to your audience. Even better, choose one that captures their attention. (To achieve real success, write about something so enticing they’ll give up their contact information to access it.)

If you don’t already have content topics, here are some ideas to get you started:

How your product benefits each target segment
What makes your solution unique (aka your secret sauce)
An overview of direct and indirect ways to solve a higher-level problem
How and why your solution is best for certain kinds of organizations
High-level discussions of the problems the target audience faces (and how to solve them)

Don’t forget to make your content authoritative. You have to strike a balance between dense white papers and fluffy marketing – this can be done with simplified formatting to make things easily scannable.

And Then, the Format

Once you’ve picked your topic, consider how you want prospects to digest that content. Each CTA will need to be supported by a unique content mix. Some of the most common formats include:

eBooks
White papers
Blog posts

Podcasts
Webinars
Interactive tools

Infographics
Videos
Solution sheets

Quick Tip: There are a million existing acronyms in cybersecurity. SOAR, PAM, MDR – the list goes on. So, instead of standing out by creating yet another product category, frame your unique features as differentiators. It’s much easier to sell yourself as the ideal solution to fill an existing line item on a budget than it is to convince a prospect that something new should be added to their budget.

Go to Market

You can create incredible content – but none of that matters if your prospects don’t see it. Since marketing to cybersecurity decision-makers is a niche audience that can be hard to reach, you must develop a robust media mix strategy to make sure that content is seen.

Paid search (SEM)
Organic search (SEO)
Syndication
Retargeting
Paid social media
Industry publications

Quick Tip: Test various platforms, content, and CTAs to determine what best suits your product. Once you have found the right balance, focus your energy on that area.

Nurture Top-of-Funnel Leads

Cybersecurity marketing thrives on consistent and thoughtful lead nurture programs that gently guide leads through the funnel. However, the most common challenge that organizations struggle with is balancing engagement and consistency without becoming obnoxious or ineffective.

Many organizations start their lead nurturing processes by writing and sending a series of emails in a particular order to force prospects through a predetermined customer journey. Unfortunately, we know that real life never works out this way. No prospect will attentively read all of your emails. You’ll be lucky if they read any of them. Instead, we recommend thinking about an array of actions you’d like the prospects to take, as well as the pieces of content that are relevant to these actions. Then, you can draft emails in an order that makes sense while helping remove the assumption that your leads have seen anything else you have sent them.

Quick Tip: If the ultimate goal is for prospects to engage with a salesperson, don’t make that the focus of every email, but include it as a secondary call to action. Giving prospects an easy way to communicate with sales as they interact with your content ensures you are ready when they leap from evaluation to purchase.

Track, Measure, Optimize, and Repeat

Each component of cybersecurity marketing requires a significant investment. To ensure effective collaboration, whether with an in-house team or an outside agency, campaigns must be tracked, measured, and optimized based on revenue—not just leads.

Review Your Funnel

Tracking based on revenue is not easy—it requires a lot of coordination across an organization to track inquiries from initial conversion to final sale. So, it’s ok if you can’t track all the way down to revenue (but you should push it as your next big marketing initiative).

Build a Matrix

Once you’ve figured out how far in the funnel you can track, it’s time to organize marketing spend in a way you can make sense of. We typically use campaigns (the offer or CTA) and platforms (the tools you use to reach your audience). Then, combine your metrics, the marketing budget spent, and the campaign/platform breakdown to create a matrix to understand which campaign and platform combos work best.

Quick Tip: This matrix will help you quickly identify what topics your audience is responding to and which platforms work best.

Keep in mind, that campaigns should run for at least two weeks before checking these numbers, although we recommend four to give you more meaningful data. And remember, short-term and long-term goals will differ.

Short term: Verify that campaigns are running correctly and that nothing is broken, and look for optimization opportunities-
Long-term: Maintain goal metrics and check to ensure campaigns aren’t getting stale.

Want Some Help?

For cybersecurity marketing to work, organizations require high-level skills, industry expertise, and abundant time to create incredible content. Unfortunately, growing companies rarely have the bandwidth to get all of this done as quickly as needed. That’s why we recommend partnering with a lead gen expert. The right team can get the work done and leverage the insight of your key evangelizers and SMEs so you can spread your message without adding more to their to-do lists.

We have an expert team of writers, designers, developers, and campaign managers who know exactly what it takes to effectively reach and engage cybersecurity audiences. We provide start-to-finish content marketing and lead generation for organizations delivering the latest cybersecurity solutions.

Want to learn more about what we can do for you?

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Jen Fields

Jen was born and raised in the Bay Area and graduated from UC Davis with a degree in psychology and dramatic arts. She enjoys participating in musical theater and is a trained ballet dancer. She is now resides in LA and spends her free time trying new restaurants and attempting to pet as many dogs as possible.