The day before a cyber security client’s webinar, a prospect read the invitation email and signed on as a new client. Nobody had spent a dollar on advertising. More than 40 people registered, and another asked for a demo while the session was still live.
That is what a cyber security campaign is for. Most agency reports would lead with impressions and follower counts, but neither books a meeting. A campaign is a planned run of content, invitations and conversations aimed at a short list of named companies, and it works when someone on that list agrees to talk.
Every campaign we run follows four steps. Name the target accounts, and the two or three people who decide at each. Then find one idea that sticks: something those buyers worry about this quarter, backed by real stories and numbers. The pieces come next, digital and printed, each with one job and one easy next step. Every stage gets measured, from the first email opened to the contract signed.
Most of that work happens before anyone buys an ad. At any given time, 95% of business buyers aren’t in the market, according to Ehrenberg-Bass Institute research cited in the 2024 Edelman–LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report. A campaign has to reach them before they start shopping, with something worth reading now.
Cyber security campaign ideas
The best cyber security campaign ideas start with one problem your buyer is already trying to solve, then build one large piece of content around it. A webinar, a survey, a video interview series or an executive roundtable can each carry a whole campaign. Everything else, from the LinkedIn posts to the follow-up email, is cut from that one piece.
A webinar or virtual roundtable on one problem, with an invitation list of named accounts. Our 40-registration result came from a list like that, with no paid promotion.
A thought leadership survey you run every quarter. Your own numbers give reporters something to quote and give your sales team a reason to call.
A filmed interview series with your engineers and customers, cut into clips under two minutes. Buyers who can’t meet your people in a room can still watch them think.
A roundtable dinner for a small group of security leaders. Every seat goes to a named account, so the follow-up list is done before the night ends.
A printed briefing addressed to one person, with a digital follow-up behind it. Inboxes are crowded and desks are not, and the follow-up turns the parcel into a meeting.
Test the idea before you build any of it. Our free sticky idea scorer checks a message against six principles buyers remember.
Content like this works because buyers trust it more than a brochure. In the Edelman–LinkedIn study, 73% of decision-makers said an organisation’s thought leadership is a more trustworthy way to judge its capabilities than its marketing materials. The survey covered 3,484 business executives in seven markets, Australia among them, and 86% said they were likely to invite organisations that consistently publish good thought leadership into a request for proposal.
The order matters as much as the idea. We plan every campaign through the PESO model of paid, earned, shared and owned media, which Gini Dietrich launched in 2014 with her book Spin Sucks. We start with what the client owns, the webinar or the survey. We use it to earn coverage and give people something to share. Paid media comes last, once the client’s own data shows which messages work, because until then the only feedback comes from platforms that profit from the budget.
Cyber awareness campaigns
A cyber awareness campaign teaches people to recognise and stop threats, usually the staff of one organisation or the customers of one service. In Australia the national moment for these campaigns is October. It was called Cyber Security Awareness Month until this year, when it was renamed Cyber Security Action Month, with the 2026 theme ‘Take a second. Stay secure.’
For a cyber security company, that month is a campaign calendar the government hands you. The Department of Home Affairs publishes a stakeholder toolkit of posters, email copy and social captions for any organisation to use.
Your competitors use it too. iTWire’s October roundup carried more than 30 named voices, and most of them came from vendors.
So plan the campaign in winter, not in the last week of September. Pick the one action from the theme your product supports, build your owned piece around it, and pitch your commentary to reporters before their October lists fill up.
Best tools for managing a cyber campaign
You need four kinds of tool to manage a cyber campaign: a prospecting and email platform that holds your named account list, a website you can change in an afternoon, AI tools for research and drafting, and a way to trace every meeting back to the campaign that produced it. The last one matters most, and it is the one most teams skip.
Here is the stack behind our campaigns. Apollo holds the target accounts, shows which of them visit the website and runs the email sequences. Landing pages go up in Webflow, one per buyer type, each with one next step. Claude and ChatGPT do the research, the first drafts and the testing of angles, while LinkedIn and YouTube carry the founder posts and the video clips.
None of these tools tells you whether the campaign worked. We track every target through six stages: reached, engaged, met, opportunity, client and advocate. Each week we find the stage where most prospects stall and test one change there, such as a subject line, a post or a next step. Each month the client sees every target’s stage against the target map.
Where to find experts for running a cyber campaign
Look for experts who have worked inside the cyber security community rather than marketed into it from outside. In Australia that usually means a specialist agency, or a fractional marketing director with security clients behind them.
Generalist agencies can write and design. What they rarely bring is the network: the CISO who will sit on your panel, the editor who will run your survey results, the conference committee that reads your speaker submission. That network takes years to build, and a campaign aimed at a few dozen named accounts depends on it.
Before you hire anyone, ask for the last campaign they ran in this sector and the number of meetings it booked. Then ask who they would invite to your first roundtable, by name. If they can’t answer either question, they will be learning on your budget. There are three more questions worth asking before you sign.
Murfin Group works as a fractional marketing director with a team behind them, for cyber security, quantum and technology companies. Clients have included Fortinet, Qualys and GuardWare. Some start with one piece of work, such as a filmed interview, a ghost-written opinion piece for $2,000 or a media release for $2,500. Others grow into an ongoing program, from $10,000 a month, that runs the whole campaign.
Whoever you talk to, ask how many meetings their last campaign booked. If the answer comes back in impressions, keep looking.
To talk about a campaign, book a 30-minute meeting or email tom@murfin.au. To see where your marketing stands first, take the Marketing Pen Test: 16 questions, about three minutes, scored out of 100.