Australia’s cyber security agency responded to more than 1,500 incidents in the year to June 2026, up more than 20%, and warned over 4,400 organisations of possible malicious activity, ASD’s latest Annual Cyber Threat Report shows. The people who handled those incidents are the buyers every security vendor in the country wants to reach. They have heard every warning before.
Cyber security marketing is how a security company earns their attention without adding to the noise. It is narrower work than most marketing, and harder.
What is cyber marketing?
Cyber marketing is an older name for marketing done online: websites, email, search and social media. Most people who search the term mean digital marketing in general. For a company that sells security products or services, the useful term is cyber security marketing, which is defined by who you sell to, not by which channels you use.
The difference matters because the channels are the same and the buyer is not. A retailer’s email can lean on urgency. A security vendor’s email that leans on fear lands with a reader who manages fear for a living.
Cyber security marketing
Cyber security marketing is the work of making a security vendor known, trusted and shortlisted by the small group of people who buy security. Those people are CISOs, CIOs and IT leaders, plus procurement teams with rules of their own when the buyer is government or defence. The work runs on evidence and relationships more than on reach.
Four things set it apart from marketing most other products.
The buyers are professional sceptics. Their year has been busy: ASD’s 2025–26 report calls artificial intelligence ‘the defining force in the cyber threat landscape’, and its notifications to organisations rose 80% in a year. A reader under that pressure tests every claim, and one overstated claim can cost the vendor the whole relationship.
The buyers are few, and you can name them. A vendor selling to the ASX 200 has 200 possible customers, and fewer once you count who already runs a competitor’s product. That is a list, not a market, and it changes the job from finding an audience to earning a meeting with each name on it.
Trust comes before the purchase, often long before. In the 2024 Edelman–LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, more than 75% of decision-makers said a piece of thought leadership had led them to research a product they hadn’t been considering. The survey covered 3,484 executives in seven markets, including Australia.
Regulation sits in the room. A buyer with obligations under the SOCI Act, APRA’s CPS 234 or the Essential Eight reads content that maps to those obligations, because it helps them make the case internally. Content that ignores them reads as written for somebody else.
What are the fundamental elements of cyber security marketing?
The fundamental elements are a named list of target accounts, one idea those buyers will remember, content you own before anything you pay for, proof a sceptic can check, and a measure tied to meetings rather than reach. Miss one and the others weaken.
A named target list. Pick the accounts you want and the two or three people who decide at each. Every campaign we run is built for that list, not for a broad market.
One idea that sticks. Base it on what those buyers worry about this quarter and back it with real stories and numbers. Our free sticky idea scorer tests a message against six principles buyers remember.
Owned content first. Build what you control, such as articles, webinars, surveys and video, then earn coverage and shares from it. Paid promotion comes last, and only for pieces that have already performed. That is the PESO order we work in.
Proof a sceptic can check. That means a named client, a figure with its source, a survey that publishes its method or an engineer explaining the product on camera. An anonymous claim is worth little to a reader who checks claims for a living.
A measure tied to meetings. Follow each target from first contact to signed contract, and judge the work by meetings booked and clients signed. How to track it is a subject of its own.
The same reader tests all five: a security leader with a full inbox and a long memory. Write for that person, and most of the hard choices make themselves.
To see how your marketing scores against these elements, take the Marketing Pen Test: 16 questions, about three minutes, scored out of 100.