Your First 30 Days as Cybersecurity Marketer

This post kicks off a 30-60-90-day series designed to help new marketers at cybersecurity startups prove their value fast — and make themselves irreplaceable.

Drawing on years of experience working with dozens of cybersecurity companies, I’ve compiled the most effective strategies and lessons learned from helping teams build and scale their marketing functions from the ground up. While my specialty is in content strategy and marketing, many of these best practices apply across all early-stage marketing roles — from demand gen to product marketing and beyond.

Whether you’re the first marketing hire or joining a small, fast-moving team, this series will give you a roadmap to deliver quick wins, establish credibility, and build the foundation for long-term impact.

The main thing in these 30 days is to avoid being branded a smoke-machine. 

Early-stage startups don’t have time for smoke and mirrors. I’ve seen too many marketing leaders take advantage of generous founders — spinning up elaborate “brand frameworks,” endless persona work, and over-complicated strategies that produce zero public output.

This kind of marketing theater is a trap — a system filled with plausible deniability and built-in excuses for why nothing is live. It’s what people do when they don’t want to roll up their sleeves and build something meaningful.

If you want to survive at a cybersecurity startup as a new marketing hire, you must move forward like a monster truck — fearlessly and relentlessly. Don’t get distracted by over-analysis or second-guessing. Move forward with your plan. Be receptive to feedback from founders and senior executives, but keep reminding them (and yourself) that marketing is completely subjective until you’re delivering MQLs. And nothing is going to stop you from showing value.

That’s why your early focus should be on quick, emotional-connection output — storytelling that reaches the market, sparks reactions, and shows traction. See what resonates, adjust, and keep moving.

Yes, you’ll work long hours. Yes, it’s demanding. But first impressions are everything. You have one quarter to show you can get more done than the other marketers can manage in a year.  Because in cybersecurity — where competition is brutal — there are hundreds of thousands of hungry B2B marketers ready to take your seat if you hesitate.

This is how you prove your value and earn your permanence.

On day one, make a list of who’s been at the company the longest. Interview founders, product leads, sales directors, and customer success. Learn how your company describes its mission, what customers care about, and what isn’t being said.

Those silences reveal your biggest content opportunities.

Deliver two key assets:

• Company Brief – Why you exist, what problem you solve, and for whom.
• Product Brief – What you sell, how it works, and how it helps.

Turn your interviews into a four-part internal storytelling series:

• How each person started in cybersecurity.
• What excites them about the product.
• How they believe it helps customers.
• Why they love working here.

This builds an emotional bridge to your audience and gives you authentic material to repurpose for future demand gen campaigns.

The series can be branded, depending on your product category. Some examples include, Risk Journeys, Threat Talk, Verified Voices, Cloud Line, and Behind the Firewall.

Building out these human stories is the fastest way to have a content base for the three core pillars of content: customer, product, and thought leadership.

Once you’ve interviewed your team and seen who shines, create a human skill inventory. Document who’s a great speaker, who’s a strong writer, excels at public speaking, and who thinks strategically. This human skill map will help you move faster later — because when it’s time to build webinars, ghostwrite blogs, or record videos, you’ll already know who to call.

But just as important: identify who to avoid.

Some people will talk in circles for 40 minutes without saying anything usable. They give long-winded explanations filled with jargon or tangents that drain energy instead of creating clarity. Others have poor time management — they miss meetings, never deliver content on time, or overpromise and underdeliver.

Then there are those with the wrong medium fit: maybe they’re brilliant technically but have a monotone “webinar voice” that loses the audience within 30 seconds, or they freeze up the second the camera starts recording.

You can’t build a reliable content engine with unreliable people.

Your job isn’t to fix everyone — it’s to identify the right talent for the right format. The quiet engineer who writes clearly might be perfect for a ghostwritten thought leadership post. The chatty salesperson with charisma might be your best on-camera guest. But the over-talker, the unreliable, and the low-energy presenters will only slow you down.

Be diplomatic but decisive. Take mental notes now so you never have to scramble later. Your first few campaigns will move fast — and the difference between shipping in two weeks or two months often comes down to knowing who not to involve.

When a new marketing leader comes in, they often want to redo the entire website. I would avoid this at all costs as a cybersecurity startup.

Focus on one website page at a time.  This often means getting the homepage optimized.

While creating an extensive website architecture is important, save it for when you have built a demand-gen engine that can reliably generate some lead flow.

Update your homepage and PDFs so visitors can answer:

1. Who are you?
2. What do you do?
3. Why should I care?

Leverage your “Getting to Know” series to build your first live campaign.

In the next post I’ll share tips and tricks I use to build a story that will resonate with your target customers.

Feature authentic voices. Repurpose everything. Build momentum.

Move forward like a monster truck— deliberate, confident, and unstoppable.

Be open to feedback but don’t let indecision stall you. Marketing is subjective until MQLs start coming in. If you’ve built alignment, published human stories, and sharpened your company’s narrative, you’ve already proven something most marketers never do: that you can move fast and get it right.

Because in this business, you’re not being judged on potential — you’re being judged on momentum.