Webinar Recap: Campaigns That Convert: How to build & execute high-impact cyber marketing campaigns

In 2025, designing a high-impact marketing campaign in cybersecurity feels like working on a puzzle while the picture keeps changing. Budgets open and close unpredictably. Sales cycles tighten. The competitive noise is deafening. And attribution models rarely give you the full story.

Many marketers face this reality, and it’s exactly what Jessica Vose and Marcus Witte of Cyber Risk Alliance (CRA) tackled head-on in a recent Cybersecurity Marketing Society webinar. Drawing on decades of collective experience across cybersecurity, media, and demand generation, they shared a practical framework for building campaigns that cut through the noise and deliver measurable results.

This isn’t theory. It’s the playbook they use with hundreds of clients each year, the one that works in the messy, resource-constrained, rapidly evolving environment we’re all operating in now.

The 2025 Campaign Challenge

Cybersecurity marketers are working in an environment that changes faster than most campaigns can run. Budgets are unlocked in short bursts, sometimes only three-to-six months at a time, making it hard to plan sustained buyer journeys. Sales teams want marketing qualified leads (MQLs) that convert immediately, even as marketing teams face reduced resources and constant change.

Attribution is often unclear. Last-touch models credit the final click, overlooking the tactics that moved buyers along the way. And in a market where 12 companies control about 65% of the share, more than 4,000 vendors compete for the rest. Bringing brand awareness tactics back into focus after years of being cut first.

In this environment, every decision has a cost. Vose and Witte’s first piece of advice is to understand your organization’s readiness before you commit to a budget or launch a campaign.

Step 1 – Map Your Maturity Before You Market

Not every organization is ready for the same level of campaign complexity. Vose and Witte use a “maturity canvas” to help clients identify where they are in their go-to-market journey before choosing tactics.

Skipping this step can lead to wasted budget or results you can’t act on. Witte shared the example of a cybersecurity startup that came to CRA asking for leads as quickly as possible. In less than two months, CRA delivered 300 qualified leads, but the company’s sales development representative (SDR) team wasn’t set up to handle the volume. The leads sat untouched, and the campaign’s potential was lost.

Mapping maturity means asking hard questions upfront:

• Do you have the sales infrastructure to act on leads right away?
• Are your marketing and sales teams aligned on definitions of an MQL or sales qualified lead (SQL)?
• Can your systems support tracking and nurturing over time?

While the maturity canvas won’t look identical for every company, CRA finds that it fits about 70 percent of organizations. The model can be adapted for the rest, but the principle stays the same: know what you’re ready for before you build.

Step 2 – Test Your Assumptions Before You Spend

Marketers often build campaigns around what they think their audience cares about. Vose and Witte recommend pressure-testing those ideas before committing to the budget.

That means going beyond instinct and checking your assumptions against real data, first-party insights, audience panels, surveys, and even feedback from trusted practitioners in your network.

One CRA client in the identity security space believed multi-factor authentication (MFA) was the most relevant topic for their target accounts. Before launching, CRA analyzed the company’s account list against its own first-party data. MFA didn’t crack the top three topics. Instead, threat management and vulnerability management were leading engagement.

The client shifted its messaging mix to include those higher-interest areas, and content engagement increased by 134%.

The takeaway: data-driven adjustments aren’t a sign that your original plan was wrong; they’re how you strengthen it. Surprises happen, but when you’re paying attention, they’re the fastest route to better results.

Step 3 – Audit Your Content for Fit and Accuracy

Even the strongest campaign strategy can fail if the content isn’t aligned with the audience or buying stage. Vose and Witte stressed the value of a full content audit before launch, not just to inventory assets but to check whether they serve the campaign’s goals.

A proper audit looks at three things:

• Fit: Does each asset map to a specific persona and stage in the buyer journey?
• Accuracy: Is the information up to date and technically sound?
• Coverage: Are there gaps that will leave prospects without a clear next step?
  

CRA often brings in a trusted practitioner to gut-check technical accuracy and spot credibility gaps that marketers might miss. This extra step can be the difference between a white paper passed around the buying team and one ignored.

As Vose said during the webinar, “Every piece of content you launch should be able to stand on its own and lead somewhere — not just exist because it was on a schedule.”

Step 4 – Build Omnichannel, Buying-Team-Centric Campaigns

In today’s market, no single tactic can carry a campaign. CRA recommends designing programs that reach the entire buying team across multiple channels: gated content, display ads, social media, video, and nurture email sequences working in combination.

The key is to build for how buying teams operate. A single person rarely makes enterprise security decisions, and different stakeholders engage with different types of content. CRA uses buying team engagement scoring to track whether a campaign reaches across roles and departments, not just racking up clicks from one or two individuals.

This approach doesn’t replace account-based marketing (ABM) platforms; it complements them. By layering omnichannel tactics with buying team data, marketers can spot gaps mid-campaign and adjust in real time, rather than waiting for end-of-quarter reports.

When each touchpoint reinforces the others and the message reaches multiple decision-makers, the chances of progressing an account improve dramatically.

Step 5 – Plan for Post-Launch Success

Launching a campaign is only half the job. Even the most promising results can fade fast without a plan for what happens next.

In a live poll during the webinar, attendees identified lead follow-up and reporting as the biggest gaps after launch. CRA tackles this with what they call a lead nurture gap filler, a multi-touch sequence that keeps prospects engaged until sales development representatives (SDRs) can follow up directly.

Sales alignment is critical. Vose and Witte recommend building relationships with champions in sales operations or within the chief revenue officer’s (CRO) office, presenting marketing plans at sales kickoffs, and mapping campaigns to the sales roadmap. The closer the coordination, the less likely the leads will go cold.

CRA creates sales enablement kits for each campaign to facilitate alignment. These kits include ready-to-use messaging, follow-up templates, and supporting content so sales teams can move quickly and stay on message.

The goal is simple: protect the investment you’ve made in the campaign by ensuring momentum doesn’t stall after launch.

Watch the Full Conversation

High-impact campaigns in cybersecurity don’t happen by accident. They result from deliberate planning, constant testing, and tight coordination across the go-to-market engine.

The framework Jessica Vose and Marcus Witte shared isn’t about chasing the latest marketing trend; it’s about applying proven fundamentals to the realities of 2025: shorter budgets, tougher competition, and buying teams that expect relevant, personalized engagement from the first touch to the closed deal.

For marketers, the takeaway is clear: map your readiness, validate your assumptions, audit your content, build across channels, and plan for what happens after launch. The work doesn’t stop when the campaign goes live; that’s when it has the most to gain or lose.

For more examples and insights, watch the full webinar here, and explore CyberRisk Alliance’s work at cyberriskalliance.com.