Marketing technical products

Before my current role in cybersecurity, I worked in content and product marketing for cloud, identity and cybersecurity companies. At LoginRadius I shaped the messaging and positioning for a customer identity platform, explaining identity, authentication and data privacy to developers and the people who buy for them.

I rebuilt the LoginRadius engineering blog’s editorial strategy around what developers search for, and organic traffic doubled in six months. The work page says what that involved, and what I did with the blog’s guest-author program.

When marketing cybersecurity products, we need to understand the pain points very clearly, and the solution we propose should clearly show its technical value. Testimonials are important, and so is showing how the product works and how it solves a specific pain point.

We should be very selective about the language we use, which can gain trust as well as lose it if we get it wrong. For example, are you targeting the enterprise buyer or a startup, or are you selling a product where the influencer is different from the buying decision maker? Then you have to plan whom you target at which stage of the marketing funnel, although you don’t have to be too strict about the boundaries within the funnel itself.

Creating interest in your product, or gaining attention, is the easier part; building trust is key to a purchase decision, or even a proof-of-concept (PoC) decision. Technical products are complex, and buyers are usually skeptical about unproven players promising something good. This is also a reason why bigger deal values often go to known vendors, or to vendors with whom top executives have personal relationships.

I have more experience in marketing technical products to technical buyers. Sometimes a technical product has a buyer persona in a traditional enterprise, where the marketing dynamics are different; this is not an area of strong expertise for me, but I can adapt.

I write about marketing technical products: AI, cybersecurity and developer tools.