Why Does Cybersecurity Marketing Have to Feel So Impersonal?

Every Friday night, my partner and I dine at the same local Greek restaurant, where we are warmly greeted, the owner knows what we like, and also plies us with extras, like bottles of wine and desserts we didn’t order and he doesn’t charge us for. In return, we have become very loyal customers, regularly spreading the word about his restaurant on every single local Facebook group, and leaving very generous tips.

 

I was thinking about this the other day and wondered, why can’t cybersecurity marketing be more like that? Warm and personal, caring and considerate, and something that people look forward to?

 

I realize that a Greek restaurant and a cybersecurity company have very different business models (nobody is going to suffer a ransomware attack because their moussaka wasn’t up to par!). Even so, people want to do business with people who make them feel valued, who understand what matters to them, and who give them a reason to come back.

 

So why does cybersecurity marketing often feel like the exact opposite? You know what I mean:

 

• The emails that arrive with breathless subject lines warning you about the latest threat, followed by a call to action to download a white paper that may or may not be relevant.
• The LinkedIn ads promising to solve all your security problems.
• The endless webinars, reports, nurture sequences, and automated follow-ups, all designed to move you through a funnel toward a sales conversation you may or may not want or be ready to have. 

 

Somewhere along the way, we seem to have swapped building relationships with marketing activity and forgotten that our prospective customers are people – not leads, MQLs, or opportunities. They’re CISOs and other security leaders responsible for protecting their organizations against threats that grow more sophisticated by the day. They have to navigate complicated technical environments, manage budgets, explain all kinds of risk to executives (and the board) who may not fully understand, and make decisions that could have serious consequences if they get them wrong.

 

What they don’t need is another vendor telling them that cybersecurity is important. They already know that, and live with that responsibility every day. What they really need is someone who understands their world well enough to help them navigate it.

 

Yet so much cybersecurity marketing starts with the vendor’s needs rather than the customer’s. Marketing needs to generate leads, fill the pipeline, increase engagement, and move prospects through the buying journey. So we build campaigns around our product launches, our messaging, our quarterly targets, and our need to demonstrate ROI.

 

There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of that. Businesses need revenue, and Marketing needs to contribute to it. But when the pursuit of those objectives becomes the entire experience, we can lose sight of the actual person we’re trying to reach.

 

Our Greek restaurant owner isn’t thinking about how to move me from awareness to consideration to purchase. He knows I’m already a customer, and he gives me reasons to remain one. He remembers what we like. He makes us feel welcome. He occasionally surprises us with something unexpected. And he never makes us feel as though we’re just another table he needs to turn. As a result, we often remark how lucky we are to have discovered that restaurant and how special we feel when we eat there.

 

Imagine what would happen if cybersecurity companies brought that same sensibility to their marketing. What if we spent less time asking, “How do we get this person into our pipeline?” and more time asking, “What would make this person’s job easier today?” Here are some ways to make that happen:

 

1) Provide content with technical depth and understanding.

 

Every company has a report. Every vendor has a webinar. Every marketing team has a library of ebooks, blog posts, threat intelligence briefings, and downloadable guides. And so much of it sounds remarkably similar (especially now with AI), only with different logos attached.

 

The irony is that buyers themselves have been telling us what they want. A 2026 study by NOLA Marketing and the Ponemon Institute, which surveyed 320 enterprise cybersecurity decision-makers, found that more than half of respondents felt cybersecurity marketing content lacked sufficient technical depth, while 49% cited inadequate ROI justification.

 

So instead of publishing another generic report about the evolving threat landscape, why not help a security leader make the business case for an investment to the CFO? Instead of another webinar about why your product is different, why not provide a practical framework for evaluating competing solutions? Instead of a carefully curated success story that conveniently leaves out all the messy details, why not explain what implementation actually looks like, what can go wrong, and what a customer should realistically expect? (Shameless plug: APG excels at this kind of in-depth, technical content. For example, I almost always recommend that my cybersecurity clients create a “Getting Started” guide so prospective customers understand the buying journey after the demo and what implementation and what the customer journey really looks like, including potential pitfalls and timelines.)

 

Give people something they can use, whether or not they ever buy from you. That’s the equivalent of my restaurant owner bringing us something extra because he knows we’ll love it and appreciate it.

 

2) Personalization isn’t the same thing as being personal.

 

Somewhere along the way, we decided that putting someone’s first name in an email was a meaningful expression of personalization.

 

We marketers have become very good at tracking prospects and responding to their behavior. For example, we know which:

 

• pages they visited
• emails they opened
• events they attended
• reports they downloaded
• forms they visited, but didn’t fill out

 

We score their engagement, feed them into automated sequences, and serve them ads for products they’ve already spent twenty minutes researching. And yet, for all this sophisticated technology, the actual experience can feel really impersonal. That’s because there’s a difference between knowing what someone clicked on and understanding what they really care about. (I know that intent data tries to fill the gap, but it’s not the same as actually knowing your prospects.)

 

A security leader who downloads a report about cloud security might be researching a problem for a client, preparing for a board meeting, comparing vendors, or simply trying to understand a new development in the industry. Those are very different situations, and a generic automated email response sequence isn’t going to distinguish among them particularly well.

 

Nor does every person who downloads a report want a sales call. Not everyone who attends a webinar is ready for a demo. And not everyone who visits your website wants to be pursued around the internet by advertisements for the next three weeks. Sometimes the most respectful thing you can do is give someone the information they came for, make it easy for them to find more if they need it, and let them decide what happens next.

 

While technology can make marketing more relevant and more responsive, it cannot substitute for the judgment and context required to know when to reach out, what to say, and when to leave someone alone.

 

My restaurant owner doesn’t need an email sequence to tell him that we like coming back. We’ve already told him we’ll be there every Friday and so he reserves our table and sets it up especially for us (with wine glasses, extra napkins, and appetizer plates). That’s personalization on a whole new level!

 

3) Stop trying to manufacture advocates; give people a reason to become one.

 

Not surprisingly, my partner and I have become avid advocates of our Greek restaurant. We talk about it on local Facebook groups and recommend it to friends. We want other people to discover it because we genuinely enjoy the place and want it to succeed (and the food is really scrumptious). Nobody asked us to do this. There’s no referral campaign, no incentive program, and no carefully orchestrated customer advocacy initiative. We do it because we’ve had awesome dining experiences worth sharing.

 

It works the same way in cyber, where peer recommendations and professional networks play an important role in how buyers discover vendors. The same 2026 NOLA Marketing and Ponemon Institute study referenced earlier in this post found that peer recommendations were the leading influence on vendor discovery, cited by 55% of respondents.

 

It makes sense: when you’re evaluating a cybersecurity solution, you want to hear from people who have actually used it. You want to know whether the vendor delivers on its promises, whether its team is responsive, whether implementation is painful (or not), and whether the product works as advertised in the real world. You want the truth from someone who has no particular reason to embellish it (or get rewarded for it).

 

Which makes me wonder why so many companies devote so much energy and budget to generating leads and comparatively less attention and resources to creating the kind of product and customer experiences that make people want to recommend them.

 

We spend so much money on brand campaigns, sponsorships, analyst relations, advertising, events, etc, But how much time and money do we spend asking our customers whether they feel genuinely supported? Does the product work as expected? Whether we’re making their jobs easier? Whether they’d recommend us to a colleague without being asked?  And if they wouldn’t, do we know (or want to know) why not?

 

Advocacy flourishes when companies consistently deliver an experience people believe is worth talking about. My restaurant owner understands this intuitively. He doesn’t need us to recommend his restaurant; he just gives us lots of reasons to do so.

 

4) Trust isn’t a tagline.

 

There’s another reason this matters so much in cybersecurity: trust is not just a nice thing to have. It’s fundamental to the business.

 

Security vendors are asking customers to trust them with some of their most sensitive systems, data, and operational decisions. We’re promising to protect organizations against threats that can have devastating consequences.

 

Yet cybersecurity marketing sometimes relies on the very tactics that undermine trust: exaggerated claims, manufactured urgency, fear-based messaging, and promises that are difficult to substantiate.

 

Every new vulnerability becomes an opportunity to suggest that your prospect is exposed. Every emerging threat becomes a reason to imply that their current defenses may be inadequate. Every product claims to be the missing piece of the security puzzle.

 

I understand the pressure. Security vendors operate in a competitive market, and fear is an easy emotion to activate when you’re selling protection against genuine danger. But there’s a difference between communicating risk responsibly and using anxiety as a conversion tactic.

 

If we’re asking customers to trust us, shouldn’t our marketing demonstrate the qualities we claim to bring to the relationship?

 

Be honest about what your product does well. Be clear about where it fits into an existing security environment. Explain what implementation really requires. Acknowledge limitations. Give buyers the information they need to make an informed decision, even when that information complicates the sales conversation. You can tell people you’re trustworthy – or you can demonstrate it, one interaction at a time. I’d argue the second approach is considerably more effective!

 

5) Good service means knowing when not to sell.

 

There’s one more thing my Greek restaurant owner gets right: he doesn’t make the experience about himself. For example, he doesn’t interrupt our dinner every five minutes to tell us about the specials, remind us how wonderful the food is, or ask us to reserve our next visit before we’ve finished dessert (not that we need to, as he now holds the table for us every Friday). Instead, he gives us space to enjoy ourselves.

 

Yet in cybersecurity marketing, we can become so focused on our desire to interact with prospects that we forget engagement isn’t always what the customer wants. We send the follow-up email. Then another. We ask whether someone has had a chance to review the proposal. We invite them to a demo, then a webinar, then a meeting with a product specialist. We retarget them with ads and enroll them in another nurture sequence because they haven’t responded to the first one. At what point do we stop and ask whether we’re actually being helpful?

 

Sometimes that might mean acknowledging that your product isn’t the right fit. This happened to me recently when I was looking for technographic solutions and the vendor’s sales rep quickly surmised that their platform was not the right one for my needs. I appreciated that so much, I ended up posting on LinkedIn my appreciation about them saving me time in my search!

 

Other times, it might mean recognizing that the buyer isn’t ready and giving them space to make their own decision. That can be difficult when you’re working toward a quarterly target, and it means understanding that the relationship is bigger than the immediate transaction.

 

People remember how you make them feel, particularly when they’re under pressure. And they remember the companies that made a complicated decision easier rather than adding another layer of friction to it.

 

What if we made cybersecurity marketing more human?

 

I don’t expect cybersecurity companies to abandon their marketing technology, stop measuring results, or replace their demand generation programs solely with in-person dinner invitations. But we do have an opportunity to build a different kind of relationship with the people we’re trying to reach:

 

• We could start by understanding their actual challenges instead of assuming we know what keeps them up at night. (Marketing needs to talk with prospects and customers, not just listen to recorded calls.)
• We could create more technical, in-depth content that helps them do their jobs, even when it doesn’t lead directly to a sales conversation.
• We could be honest about our products, our limitations, and the circumstances in which we’re the right choice.
• We could respect their time and attention rather than treating every interaction as permission to initiate another one.
• And we could invest as much thought in the product and customer experience after the sale as we do in getting the sale in the first place.

 

None of this is revolutionary. It’s what good businesses have done for ages. What’s changed is that we have more technology, more data, more channels, and more sophisticated ways to reach people than ever before. Somewhere in the midst of all that capability, we’ve managed to make it remarkably easy to forget the human being on the other side of the screen. And that’s a shame, because the opportunity is enormous.

 

We can spend all our time trying to optimize the journey to purchase. Or we can think about what it would take to make someone genuinely glad they chose us. Those two choices are not the same!

 

And if you want to know what that looks like in practice, come have dinner with us some Friday night. I’ll introduce you to a restaurant owner who understands something about marketing: that the best way to earn someone’s business is to give them a reason to care about yours.