Why is cybersecurity marketing so cringey?

Cybersecurity marketing is often seen as cringey due to the disconnect between technical and commercial language, leading to confusing messages, and the reliance on outdated fear-based tactics that erode trust. Simplifying communication and focusing on ethical, educational content can help overcome these issues.

The Disconnect: Why Communication Fails

A common problem in marketing for cybersecurity is that internal organization communication between the technical and business parts of the organization is poor. When these two halves of an organization do not communicate well, the work done by either side can be subverted by the other. In marketing, this means that a strategy too often is either developed in a vacuum or imposed top-down and not fully understood. The gap leads to half-baked strategies that do not hit the target audience.

“Both business and technical teams have their own set of terminologies and acronyms.” -Tallwave

When everything is said and done, as with any translation, some very important details in the marketing message can get lost in all the jargon and be next to impossible for potential clients to make sense of, leading to a façade of what a company really does.

Isabella Kosch highlights that understanding this disconnect requires more than just addressing communication differences. It involves scrutinizing the underlying ways of working within teams. As indicated in her insights, marketing professionals need to delve deeper into these operational disparities to create strategies that genuinely resonate with their audience.

Example

Consider a company where marketing exclusively uses technical jargon in their campaigns. The disconnect can leave potential clients confused, underscoring the importance of cohesive communication between teams.

Communication Breakdown	Impact on Marketing
Different terminologies and acronyms	Messages become unclear, confusing potential clients
Development in isolation (vacuum)	Strategies do not resonate with target audiences
Imposed top-down strategies	Lack of understanding and buy-in from teams
Jargon and technical language	Potential misunderstandings in marketing campaigns

A hands-on way to mend the divide between business and technical teams within an organization is to develop strong relationships. According to Aleksandar Jovcevski, strong relationships lead to effective communication. And effective communication leads to a shared interpretation of goals, which is good for business. It is also good for technical team members who are trying to create and uphold the standards of technical accuracy when the business is attempting to pull off an audience-engaging marketing campaign.

By addressing these fundamental issues, cybersecurity marketing can shake its “cringey” reputation and forge a more authentic connection with its intended audience.

Buzzwords and Fear: Outdated Tactics

In the fast-expanding cybersecurity sector, marketing strategies that revolve around buzzwords and fear-based maneuvers have become quite exasperating for many. These methods aim to capture attention with glitzy terms and tend to appeal to our baser instincts with overstated or outright false claims. They may initially generate a lot of looks (just not necessarily in a good way), but they certainly don’t lead to a lot of trust. If you want to increase your market share in this industry, you have to get noticed. But after you get noticed, you have to lead your potential customers to the point of considering you as a credible option.

“Buzzwords need to be used in the right context.” -Candy Alexander

Tip

Use authentic messages rather than relying on buzzwords, ensuring that your marketing builds long-term trust with your audience.

Marketing that relies on fear—a tactic often referred to as FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt)—taps into the worry many people have about cybersecurity. When a significant cyber event occurs, companies often start pushing their products even harder, trying to capitalize on our fear of what just happened and the potential for more occurrences in the future. Relying on fear isn’t a good long-term approach to help people understand the complex and nuanced world that is cybersecurity.

These outdated tactics mislead us temporarily and also harm our trust in cybersecurity marketing. They perpetuate a fantasy that our business is safe and can lead to seriously dangerous decisions and a false sense of security. If our leaders don’t feel securely guided, how can we securely lead them? When ComplyAdvantage’s head of sales, Angela Smith, mentioned in a recent webinar the emphasis on clear information, she rightly highlighted why our writing aims to inform and honestly represent our capabilities.

The cybersecurity market is growing rapidly and becoming saturated. In this environment, sound and credible cybersecurity marketing promises to replace fear-based narratives that rely on buzzwords and empty claims. Marketers have the opportunity now more than ever to step up and tell the authentic, engaging, and informative stories about their companies and the security solutions they offer. In industry conversations, this evolution has been characterized as moving from “nudging” and storytelling in a way that elicits fear and concern to a more secure-by-design approach that features real education and support. This isn’t just good marketing; it’s also cultivating a cybersecurity culture that puts resilience and informed decision-making at the center.

Tactic	Impact on Audience	Longevity
Buzzwords	Attention-grabbing, superficial appeal	Short-term
Fear-based (FUD)	Instills anxiety and urgency	Unsustainable
Credible Storytelling	Builds trust and engagement	Long-term

The Complexity Barrier: Accessibility Challenges

The cybersecurity sector faces a fundamental communication problem. Marketers are caught in a quandary: They need to express the basic ideas of security in a way that resonates with a broader audience while also being accessible and not overly simplistic. At the same time, they cannot ignore the need to convey the core complexities in a clear and compelling manner. After all, if they cannot express the value of their offering, they cannot expect anyone else to understand it either.

“Connecting with possible customers on an emotional level is what really good storytelling achieves.”

Fact

Simplifying communication increases the understanding and engagement of audiences, making your marketing messages more effective.

Addressing these issues requires a concentrated effort to simplify the communication of core messages and make them relatable to the audience. Even the most complex ideas need to be easily grasped by using some basic and powerful storytelling techniques. This might include, for example, using analogies that people can relate to on a personal level, or simple visual aids that tell the story in a clear and straightforward manner. As noted in a guide on cybersecurity marketing, the aim here is to make complex ideas seem less complex and more relatable, thereby increasing their “stickiness” with audiences.

Connecting with possible customers on an emotional level is what really good storytelling achieves. In our case, we aim to tell the stories of real-world cyber threats, which not only connects with our audience emotionally but highlights the urgency of secure practices. If you don’t adopt secure practices, the story goes, here are the kinds of things that could and would and do happen to you, with the sorts of tangible impacts that hit home—such as financial losses and damage to your reputation in the marketplace.

Strategies for Simplifying Cybersecurity Marketing

Strategy	Description
Use Relatable Analogies	Turn complex concepts into relatable scenarios to make them easier to understand.
Emphasize Real-world Threats	Highlight actual cyber threats to emotionally engage and educate the audience.
Tailor Messages	Customize communication to fit the unique needs of specific target audiences.
Simplify Product Naming	Avoid technical jargon and acronyms in product names to reduce confusion.
Utilize Visual Storytelling	Employ visuals to break down complex information into easily digestible formats.
Leverage Digital Platforms	Use digital channels such as social media to reach and engage a broader audience effectively.

As the cybersecurity landscape continually changes, one increasingly effective strategy involves identifying specific target audiences and tailoring messages to connect with their distinct needs. Digital platforms—notably social media—supercharge the potential for outreach, allowing companies to elicit far greater effects from their efforts and, ideally, to reach a larger segment of what might be called a “prospect pool.” Establishing a foothold in such a segment is crucial for any cybersecurity company.

In the end, the success of cybersecurity marketing relies on bridging the gap between technical expertise and customer understanding. Yet, close to half of the communication breakdowns stem from product names and acronyms. So, instead of focusing on just how secure our products are, we need to sell them based on how understandable they are and the breathing room they give customers to live in an unsafe digital world.

Building Trust: The Ethical Marketing Approach

Trust is the foundation upon which the cybersecurity industry is built. It’s not just a marketing gimmick; it’s what allows business to happen between companies and their clients. In an era when consumers examine the brands they’re involved with down to the molecular level, this trust is built through ethical marketing. When you spend significant sums of money on a service, you want to know that you’re not being taken advantage of. Increasingly, the way to demonstrate that you’re not taking advantage of people is to go the route of fact-based content and to emphasize the old-school marketing virtue of being credible.

An excellent case of ethical marketing is CloudSafe, a SaaS supplier, which built trust with potential clients by being upfront about the risks associated with possible downtimes and what they would do to mitigate those risks. This kind of open communication establishes a standard that also fortifies a trust culture (source).

Example

CloudSafe’s approach serves as a model for others in the industry, demonstrating how transparency can enhance trust and customer relationships.

Using advanced technologies like AI to enable consumer connection is a rapidly evolving discipline. It affords marketers new ways to engage with their audiences—but doing so can expose brands to new ethical risks.

“The key to navigating these perils revolves around prioritizing the ‘connected’ part of ‘consumer connection.’ Maintaining this focus can help safeguard consumer trust, which is emerging as the true north of marketing value in the AI era.”

This focus can also help illuminate fresh ethical pathways through which brands can engage with audiences (source).

To form genuine relationships with customers, steer clear of sales tactics that veer toward manipulation. Offer instead straightforward and sincere accounts of what your products can do and where their limits lie. This kind of strategy, when practiced consistently, is a good way to lead your company toward a destination called “brand loyalty.”

I like to think of this as a journey more than a specific place, really. Brand loyalty becomes manifest in your consumers’ hearts and minds and appears to the external world more as an aura around your company than as a specific destination reached.

Today, ethical accountability is a demand of all consumers, especially those from the Baby Boom to Gen Z, who now account for much of the marketplace. This group mainly consumes and interacts with brands and businesses in the digital space. Ethically living brands pay heed and even more close attention to their digital spaces. Today, you either live and lead a brand in an ethical way or not—you can’t straddle the fence. And even for those brands that have long straddled the fence, the consumer is not blind to the implications of that. They want brand values to be consistent with their own. Transparency and authenticity are no longer optional; they are demanded, especially in the digital space (source).

To sum up, creating trust with consumers through ethical marketing isn’t just a nice thing for brands to do; it’s really crucial. Brands gain a lot more than mere loyalty when they perform in a responsible and transparent manner; they secure a pathway to long-term success when making decisions that align with an ever-increasingly conscious capitalist society.

Educational Content: A Path to Engagement

Cybersecurity marketing requires much more than using a basic set of tools in the kit. What’s wonderful about cybersecurity is that its target audience holds genuine passion and love for the field. If you’re engaging with anyone working in cybersecurity, you can be certain they’re devoting a significant amount of their brain space to the topic—both day and night. Because of this passion many in the audience hold, they have a low tolerance for “cringe” content. If boring or silly content used to be the hallmark of failed cybersecurity marketing, now it’s just a path that leads to a sure dead end.

Tip

Embrace educational content as a strategy. This not only informs clients but also establishes your authority within the industry.

Cybersecurity companies can learn from the practices of the educational sector and be successful in content marketing. When these firms produce content that is valuable and relevant to their potential clients, they are achieving far more than just attracting their eyeballs for a moment. They are empowering those potential clients to make better decisions about their cybersecurity and building trust and establishing authority along the way. Content that is good for that in the long run is far better than any transactional relationship we might have otherwise.

Courtney Kuebler, Design Director at Enthuse Marketing, emphasizes, “At every touchpoint, we want to impart knowledge. Creating beautiful, digestible ways to present information increases its impact” (source).

These points highlight the significance not just of what you say but of how you say it in such a way that it creates an emotional connection with the audience. This is a foundation of good design and, therefore, a foundation of good marketing.

Marketers can target client pain points with both gated and ungated strategies. They use gated content to capture important lead information and ungated content to build trust and display their expertise. Gated and ungated strategies serve two vital marketing functions and should be employed in tandem for maximizing impact. They shouldn’t be seen as oppositional to each other. Gated strategies shouldn’t reduce the use of ungated ones; alternatively, ungated ones shouldn’t substitute for gated strategies.

The essence of the content is to connect with the audience on a deeper level by deciphering their needs and preferences. By focusing on crafting educational content that resonates, cybersecurity companies can distance themselves from the cringe factor by simply telling their story with authority and a touch of relevance.

Strategy	Purpose	Benefits
Gated Content	Capture lead information	Builds a database of potential clients for future outreach
Ungated Content	Establish trust and demonstrate expertise	Increases visibility and credibility without barriers
Educational Content	Engage audience deeply by addressing needs	Empowers decision-making and establishes brand authority

FAQ

What is the primary communication issue in cybersecurity marketing?

One of the vital matters in cybersecurity marketing is the communication issue between technical and commercial teams. This commonly results in marketing strategies that do not hit home with the intended audience because the teams use different words and jargon to say the same thing.

Why are buzzwords and fear-based tactics problematic in cybersecurity marketing?

Eroding trust and credibility are often the outcomes of using buzzwords and fear-based scare tactics. In attempting to command attention, these strategies can oversimplify difficult problems, leading many experienced professionals to appear wary—if not outright doubtful—of the credibility of the messages being delivered. Moreover, when they deliver the appearances of being overly simplistic, the messages can also deliver the unhealthy side effect of creating overly high expectations of the solidity of security solutions.

How can marketers make cybersecurity more accessible to a wider audience?

Marketers can streamline their messages by converting intricate concepts into simple, direct ideas. They can elicit storytelling that is clear and engaging, making the information they wish to impart seem approachable, if not almost impossible to ignore. When it comes to storytelling, there are few complex ideas that can’t be broken down into straightforward concepts with the use of an analogy or two—and possibly some visual aids. If marketers are doing this, emotional appeal in their storytelling ensures that the audience remembers what they have been told.

What role does trust play in successful cybersecurity marketing?

In cybersecurity marketing, trust is everything. Practices that are ethical and lead to trust—primarily, I would argue, because they’re transparent—are beneficial to the field. If the cybersecurity practitioner community can’t trust us, then we truly are at a disadvantage.

How can educational content improve engagement in cybersecurity marketing?

Changing how people see things and making real connections with them comes through education, and powerful education happens when the information conveyed is both valuable and relevant. The conversations we initiate in this value-transmission process no longer are about what we’re selling. They’re about who we are and why we merit trust and authority—conversations that make us seem more human and less like a sales machine.