The B2B SaaS Marketing Blog

A Proven Cybersecurity SaaS Marketing Strategy (And Mistakes To Avoid)

by 

Alan Silvestri

Last updated: February 7th, 2025

Purchasing a B2B SaaS cybersecurity product is very different from purchasing the average B2B SaaS product.

Enterprise cybersecurity products have a monumental impact on the company’s data security and often require a commitment of five, six, or seven figures.

This complexity means the buying cycle often lasts six, twelve, or eighteen months and involves a large committee of executives.

Unsurprisingly, a typical B2B SaaS marketing strategy optimized for a 1-2 month buying cycle with a buying committee of just one or two people won’t effectively convert cybersecurity prospects.

This misalignment is often the root problem that causes B2B SaaS cybersecurity marketing programs to underperform.

The real question is – how can you optimize a cybersecurity marketing strategy to cater to the unique needs of a cybersecurity prospect and ensure the marketing strategy performs?

In this post, we’ll answer that question by discussing the common mistakes we see impeding growth in cybersecurity marketing strategies and share the blueprint we implement for our cybersecurity clients.  

Why Generic SaaS Marketing Strategies Don’t Work For Cybersecurity

Here are four main reasons why a cookie-cutter SaaS marketing strategy usually doesn’t work for cybersecurity companies. 

Long Buying Cycles with Complex Buying Committees

Many B2B SaaS products fit the following description:

1. A buying cycle of 1-3 months.
2. A buying committee of 1-3 people.
3. An investment of $100-$10,000.

On the other hand, most enterprise cybersecurity B2B SaaS companies fit this description:

1. A buying cycle of 6-18 months.
2. A buying committee of 5+ executives/stakeholders.
3. An investment of 5, 6, or 7+ figures and a long term contract.

A marketing strategy optimized for the average B2B SaaS company won’t work for the enterprise cybersecurity company for a few reasons.

First, if the product is just a few thousand dollars, it’s not unreasonable for prospects to sign up for a demo after just two or three interactions with a company.

The same is not true for an enterprise prospect.

Enterprise prospects need more resources and nurturing before committing to a demo. If the only CTA is to schedule a demo, they’re more likely to simply exit the buyer journey altogether.

This means it’s critical to map out the buyer journey and understand prospects’ pain points at each step so that you offer the resources at the right time.

Also, each member of the buying committee has different pain points. To convert these prospects efficiently, it’s important to create unique content and product pages with messaging designed specifically for that individual.

Small Pool of Qualified Prospects

The pool of right-fit prospects for an enterprise cybersecurity product is often a fraction of that of a typical B2B SaaS product.

This means that while the average B2B SaaS marketing strategy can drive conversions with broad keywords and audiences, the same strategy will likely fail for an enterprise cybersecurity company. 

An enterprise cybersecurity company that uses broad keywords and targeting will likely run into two problems:

1. Low ROI on Paid Media: You’ll waste money unnecessarily on ads targeting the wrong prospects.
2. Unqualified Demo Attendees: If the wrong-fit customers sign up for a demo, your sales team wastes time on unqualified prospects.  

Instead, we’ve found that more targeted marketing strategies, like account-based marketing, are much more effective for enterprise cybersecurity companies. 

Requires Deep Trust

The average B2B SaaS product requires minimal trust to drive conversions. Simply adding some review badges and client logos is often sufficient. 

For example, if you’re purchasing a $20 per month to-do list tool, you might look at some reviews, but you probably won’t do much research into the trustworthiness of the company offering that tool. 

Yet cybersecurity is unique because prospects are selecting a partner to safeguard valuable data, and most cybersecurity contracts are six-figure investments and multi-year partnerships. 

Additionally, risk is the pain point prospects are experiencing when shopping for cybersecurity solutions, so they’re already in a vulnerable mindset when approaching cybersecurity vendors. 

Therefore, adding some reviews to your homepage isn’t sufficient for establishing trust with prospects. Instead, you need to prove your trustworthiness through resources like webinars, white papers, and case studies.  

Similar Competition

Prospects are clearly looking for a secure solution, so it makes sense to create messaging that communicates your product provides safety and security.

The only problem is that your competitors realize this and also have similar messaging. 

As a result, prospects don’t understand how your company is different from your competitors and therefore won’t know why they should choose it.

This is why it’s important to implement customer research to understand why prospects choose your product over your competitors and then showcase those key differentiators. 

Prerequisites For An Effective Cybersecurity Marketing Strategy

Before you start making changes to your existing marketing strategy, you must execute a few prerequisites first.

CRM Setup: Establishing Accurate Attribution

Many cybersecurity companies fall into one of two camps:

1. They don’t have tracking set up.
2. The data in their CRM is inaccurate and therefore doesn’t match revenue data. 

Without accurate data, you can’t understand:

1. Your current marketing strategy’s efficacy from a revenue perspective.
2. The specific stages in the buyer journey where prospects leave.

If you’re making changes to your marketing strategy without data, you’re just guessing, which is an inefficient method to improve your marketing strategy.

Therefore, the first step in every client engagement is setting up the CRM to accurately capture critical data.

We have a separate resource on how we set up tracking and attribution in a CRM, but this is always the first step before making any adjustments to the marketing strategy.  

Defining The ICP And Executing Customer Research

Moderate to poor performance across your general marketing strategy is a key symptom that the campaigns are too generic and aren’t accurately addressing the specific pain points your ideal customer feels at that moment in time.

The solution to this problem is defining your ICP and executing customer research, as this will help you improve campaign performance by allowing you to:

1. Understand who you’re targeting: This informs paid media targeting strategies, landing page optimizations (e.g., featuring reviews from similar titles), and where they exist online (and offline).
2. Understanding their pain points: This informs specific keywords to target as well as how to create messaging and ad copy that addresses those pain points and answers common objections. 
3. Understand how they experience the buyer journey: This informs which CTAs to place where and which resources prospects need to move forward at each step of the buyer journey. 

If you don’t execute customer research or define your ICP, you’ll probably find that prospects don’t complete the buyer journey (low lead to SQL conversions).

We have a detailed customer research process, and here are some of the checkpoints we fill out:

• Demographic details, like age, gender, and location
• Role and responsibilities within the company
• Publications or blogs they follow
• Preferred contact methods, marketing channels, and social media platforms
• Pain points with current systems and processes
• The solutions they’re researching

One important mistake to avoid is filling this information out based on random guesses. Instead, talk to your customers, download sales call transcripts, and leverage CRM data to ensure you answer each question accurately.

Components of A Cybersecurity Marketing Strategy

Most cybersecurity companies are already using the following strategies in their marketing plan:

• Content marketing
• SEO
• Paid Media
• Webinars/Events

Below, we’ll discuss the slight nuances to ensure these strategies work for cybersecurity, and common mistakes to avoid.

Content Marketing

We have a content marketing playbook that addresses our approach to content marketing, though we also add a few additional considerations when working with cybersecurity clients. 

First, we already addressed the importance of trust when selling cybersecurity products. 

Thought leadership content and case studies that demonstrate how you’ve helped other companies prevent data breaches are also highly effective at building trust with prospects and proving your product’s efficacy.

It’s also important to consider how you create content.

Today, many companies use ChatGPT or AI writing tools to write blog posts for them. While AI can help expedite certain steps of the content creation process, your content must provide unique perspectives and authoritative expertise on each topic. 

Originality is critical for earning trust with prospects and ranking in Google, as credibility is an increasingly important ranking factor. 

SEO

The two most common SEO challenges we hear from cybersecurity clients are:

1. They’re struggling to rank in the SERPs and can’t earn traffic. 
2. They’re earning traffic, but it isn’t converting into demos.

Here’s how we address each of these problems.

#1: Struggling to Earn Traffic

A few years ago, writing a high-quality blog post was a sufficient strategy to rank for critical keywords that would attract right-fit prospects.

This strategy no longer works because there’s more competition in the cybersecurity industry, and AI writing tools are making content production easier and cheaper, increasing competition in the SERPs. 

To rank in the SERPs, you also need to promote it.

This is why we offer content promotion strategies for cybersecurity. We identify the pages that drive the most revenue, assess the competition in the SERPs, and then use link building to boost the pages that would likely deliver the highest ROI.

We’ll discuss our link building approach (and common mistakes we see cybersecurity companies make) in more detail below.

#2: Earning Traffic, But No Demo Sign-ups

If the traffic you’re driving to the website isn’t converting, it’s likely due to one of two issues.

The first issue is that the keywords driving traffic are too generic and attracting people who don’t match your ideal customer profile.

For example, keywords like “what is encryption” or “cybersecurity basics” tend to attract students and general researchers rather than B2B buyers. Similarly, keywords like “best antivirus software” are more consumer-oriented and probably won’t attract B2B buyers.

Instead, target keywords related to specific threat types or attack vectors that prospects actively search. We also include compliance terms like HIPAA and SOC 2.

We also target competitor comparison keywords (e.g., “Cybersecurity company X vs Cybersecurity company Y”), as people searching these terms are interested in purchasing software similar to yours and tend to convert quickly. 

Alternatively, if the keywords are driving right-fit traffic to the website, prospects may not be converting because the buyer journey across your website is broken. For example, if the call to action at the end of a blog post that targets new prospects is to sign up for a demo, the conversion rate will likely be quite low as first-time visitors probably aren’t ready to schedule a demo just yet. 

Instead, they need more resources to learn about your product before they’ll be ready to sign up for a demo. 

We use the authority architecture framework to ensure each page on the website is designed with a calibrated call to action, and the prospect is always presented with the next resource they need to proceed in the buyer journey. 

The authority architecture framework also ensures the website is catered to the specific needs of each person involved in the buying committee. For example, the CISO, IT Manager, and Risk Officer may all need to sign off to close the deal, but each individual has different needs. The website therefore needs to be structured to address their specific pain points. 

It’s also important for cybersecurity companies to create different pages for different geographies, as some regions/countries/states have different compliance requirements.

Finally, the title tags, meta descriptions, and on page copy should use vocabulary that prospects understand. Using advanced technical language can make it unclear what your company offers and they may become frustrated and leave your website altogether.

Link Building

If you’re creating excellent content and it isn’t ranking, the problem is likely that your website doesn’t have the authority of the other websites in the search results. 

Link building is the solution to build your website’s authority, though not all links are equally valuable.   

If you’ve tried building links and it hasn’t worked, here are two common mistakes cybersecurity companies often make.

• Pursuing links from the wrong websites: Many companies make the mistake of relying heavily on cybersecurity new sites for backlinks, yet this creates an echo chamber and doesn’t necessarily reach your target audience. 

Instead, we pursue links from industry-specific publications where your target buyers actually spend time. For example, if you serve healthcare organizations, getting backlinks from healthcare industry publications often provides more value than general security blogs.

• Focusing on the quantity of links: Not all links are equally valuable and we’ve found that focusing on earning fewer, high-quality backlinks from respected industry sources is more effective than earning numerous links from low-authority websites. 

Paid Media

Cybersecurity companies struggling to make paid media effective typically struggle with one of these three mistakes:

• Broad Targeting
• Generic Messaging
• Poorly Optimized Landing Pages

Broad Targeting

Unlike most SaaS products with a wide range of customers, cybersecurity companies usually only have a small pool of high-value prospects. 

Therefore, targeting a broad audience, or failing to sufficiently refine your targeting to your ICP can cause paid media efforts to fail.

Instead, we refer back to the buyer persona document created earlier in the process and use that to create more targeted ad campaigns. 

Generic Messaging

Most cybersecurity companies have messaging that indicates they offer a secure, safe solution. Using this messaging makes logical sense because the main pain point prospects want to solve is reducing risk and improving security. 

Yet all cybersecurity companies offer secure solutions, and using this messaging doesn’t tell prospects how your company is different from competitors they’re researching. 

To help our clients stand out, we identify the key differentiators that set them apart from the competitors and then weave that into the messaging.

This way, prospects recognize that you’re a secure solution to their problem and understand how you’re unique from competitors.   

Poorly Optimized Landing Pages

After aligning the marketing funnel to ensure it aligns with the buyer journey and ensuring right-fit prospects are arriving on the landing page, the next step is optimizing the landing page itself. 

We have a separate resource that outlines how we create landing pages for SaaS companies, as well as a few examples and a checklist, though here are a few of the most common mistakes that cause low conversion rates:

• Failing to align pre and post click messaging: The landing page should deliver on the promise made in the ad. 
• Placing the CTA below the fold: It should always be clearly visible at the top of the page. Only include one clear CTA on the page to avoid confusion.
• Adding too many fields to the initial landing page form: We take a progressive profiling approach and collect more prospect information over time rather than overwhelming them with large forms on the first interaction.
• Poorly optimized post-click experience: Prospects should be led swiftly to the next step in the buyer journey. For example, if they filled out the form for a demo, they should immediately see a calendar on the next page to schedule a time. 

In addition to following these basic best practices, here are a few additional optimization tips specifically for cybersecurity companies:

• Include reviews and company logos from your existing clients: This further increases trust, and clients will immediately understand that your product is relevant to them if they see other similar companies (potentially even competitors) using it. 
• Include plenty of relevant trust badges: Trust badges are helpful for any SaaS landing page, but they’re critical for cybersecurity companies as trust is a top priority for prospects. If you have trust badges from Gartner or other third parties, display them prominently. 

Another important consideration is that each member of the buying committee will likely have different pain points, so we often create different landing pages with messaging tailored to their specific pain points.

Finally, because cybersecurity regulations differ across countries, creating different landing pages for different demographics is important to ensure the messaging resonates with prospects. 

Live Events/Webinars

Live events and webinars are also a great opportunity to build trust with prospects as they allow you to demonstrate thought leadership.

Webinars providing information on emerging threats and security solutions tend to perform well for our clients. Additionally, targeting general security trends tends to attract a wider audience, and unlike paid ads and content marketing efforts that are hyper targeted to your ICP, webinars can target a slightly broader audience as there isn’t an additional cost to allowing more people to join the webinar. 

In fact, if your ideal prospects see that many people are attending your webinar, that further builds credibility. It’s also helpful from a branding standpoint if your webinars attract interest from the general cybersecurity industry.

Take Your Cybersecurity Marketing To The Next Level

Cybersecurity marketing is uniquely challenging given the complexity of the buyer journey. 

This means that any mistakes during the six, twelve, or eighteen month process can cause your marketing efforts to fail. For example, mixed messaging at any point could erode trust and cause prospects to seek out your competition. To add to the challenge, it’s not always apparent where mistakes occur. 

If you want more help from a team of experts with extensive experience with cybersecurity companies, reach out to Powered By Search today and we can identify opportunities to improve performance.