Cybersecurity marketing demands a different playbook. Gianna Whitver and Maria Velasquez, founders of the Cybersecurity Marketing Society, explain why emotional intelligence trumps technical specs when reaching stressed, elusive security buyers—and how CyberMarketingCon 2025 equips marketers with AI tools and timeless strategies for today's saturated market.
How to Market to Cybersecurity's Most Elusive Buyers: AI, Emotion, and the Human Touch - Interview with Gianna Whitver and Maria Velasquez | Cyber Marketing Con 2025 Coverage | On Location with Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli
CyberMarketingCon 2025 In Person & Virtual
https://www.cybermarketingconference.com
Dec 7-10, 2025 in Austin, Texas
Why Cybersecurity Marketing Demands a Different Playbook
The cybersecurity industry presents a paradox for marketers. While practitioners work with cutting-edge technology, traditional marketing approaches consistently fall flat. Gianna Whitver and Maria Velasquez, co-founders of the Cybersecurity Marketing Society, have spent six years understanding why—and they're sharing those insights at CyberMarketingCon 2025 this December in Austin.
The challenge begins with the audience itself. Security professionals operate under constant pressure, actively preventing threats while juggling competing priorities. This stress creates an environment where patience for marketing noise evaporates instantly. Unlike other industries where buyers might browse vendor websites or respond to cold outreach, cybersecurity practitioners have both the technical sophistication to evade tracking and the motivation to control their own buying journey.
"Our buyer is highly elusive," Whitver explains. "They're saving the world and their companies from threats. When vendors reach out, it's an interruption to critical work." This dynamic forces marketers to rethink fundamental assumptions about how business gets done.
The numbers tell part of the story. With over 5,000 cybersecurity vendors flooding the market, standing out based solely on technical specifications has become nearly impossible. Many solutions address similar problems with comparable features. The differentiator, Velasquez argues, isn't in the technology itself but in how that technology transforms the buyer's daily experience.
"We have to shed that technical layer and go for the emotion," Velasquez says. "If they buy our product, how is it gonna make them feel? Are they gonna get their weekends back with family? Are they actually gonna go to sleep without stress?" This human-centered approach represents a fundamental shift from the feeds-and-speeds messaging that dominated cybersecurity marketing for years.
The industry is witnessing what Velasquez calls an "evolution slash revolution" in marketing tactics. Humor, entertainment, and authentic storytelling are replacing dense whitepapers as the first touch point. The goal isn't to dumb down complex technology but to create space for meaningful engagement by first addressing the emotional reality of a stressful profession.
Trust remains the currency that matters most. Peer recommendations carry exponentially more weight than any advertising campaign. Security professionals rely on trusted networks to validate purchasing decisions, making community building and genuine thought leadership more valuable than aggressive outreach. Word-of-mouth referrals from colleagues who have seen real results trump even the most sophisticated demand generation campaigns.
The emergence of AI as a marketing buzzword presents both opportunity and risk. Whitver notes that countless vendors now position themselves as "AI-native" or "agentic AI" solutions without articulating meaningful differentiation. "If that's what you remember about their product, what do you actually do?" she asks. The challenge for marketers is communicating AI's business value without contributing to the noise.
CyberMarketingCon 2025 addresses these challenges head-on. Running December 7-10 in Austin, the conference brings together more than 550 marketing professionals for hands-on workshops, peer learning, and practical strategy sessions. Dedicated tracks cover brand, demand generation, operations, communications, and product marketing, with special summits for CEOs and sales leaders.
Hands-on AI workshops represent a conference highlight. Attendees can build marketing agents using n8n, explore Clay for go-to-market planning, or participate in a marketer-focused capture-the-flag hacking exercise. The "Marketing Time Machine" theme balances timeless fundamentals with forward-looking innovation, acknowledging that effective marketing requires both solid foundations and experimental thinking.
What sets CyberMarketingCon apart is its community-first philosophy. Despite 40-50% year-over-year growth, organizers prioritize maintaining an intimate, reunion-style atmosphere. Many CMOs bring entire teams for what becomes a working offsite, with different members attending specialized sessions then synthesizing insights into unified strategies.
The conference's success metric reflects this philosophy. "Our KPI is: is it worth your time?" Whitver says. In an industry where time represents the scarcest resource, that might be the most important question of all.
For cybersecurity marketers navigating an increasingly complex landscape, CyberMarketingCon offers something rare—a chance to learn from peers facing identical challenges, build practical skills, and remember that even in a technical industry, it's humans talking to humans.
CyberMarketingCon 2025 In Person & Virtual
https://www.cybermarketingconference.com
Dec 7-10, 2025 in Austin, Texas
GUEST:
Gianna Whitver
Co-Founder & CEO, Cybersecurity Marketing Society | Cybersecurity GTM Industry Resource | Cybersecurity Marketing | Bees & Cybersecurity | Podcast Host | Community | (I like to build things & laugh a lot & tell jokes)
Maria Velasquez 🇲🇦
Cybersecurity Marketer by Trade, Beverage Disruptor by Passion
HOSTS:
Sean Martin, Co-Founder, ITSPmagazine and Studio C60 | Website: https://www.seanmartin.com
Marco Ciappelli, Co-Founder, ITSPmagazine and Studio C60 | Website: https://www.marcociappelli.com
Catch all of our event coverage: https://www.itspmagazine.com/technology-and-cybersecurity-conference-coverage
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Gianna Whitver and Maria Velasquez, co-founders of the Cybersecurity Marketing Society, discuss their upcoming CyberMarketingCon 2025 in Austin, Texas (December 7-10). Born from personal need six years ago, their community has grown to 4,000 marketers across 1,600 security companies. They address the unique challenges of marketing to highly technical, elusive cybersecurity buyers who face constant stress and information overload. The conference features dedicated tracks for brand, demand gen, CMOs, and product marketing, plus hands-on AI workshops. With their "Marketing Time Machine" theme, they're blending timeless marketing fundamentals with cutting-edge AI innovation, creating a reunion atmosphere where teams learn together and build practical go-to-market strategies.
10 KEY QUOTES WITH CONTEXT
Gianna Whitver, CEO & Co-founder, Cybersecurity Marketing Society: "Our buyer is highly elusive, right? They're very busy, they're saving the world and their companies and people from threats. If you are in a security position, you are actively preventing bad things from happening, which is incredible."
Context: Whitver explains why cybersecurity marketing requires a fundamentally different approach than other industries, highlighting the mission-critical nature of security professionals' work.
Gianna Whitver: "They can evade your trackers, they can evade your advertisements. They wanna do the buying process and learn about technology on their own terms. And that's also somewhat different than other industries."
Context: Discussing how the technical sophistication of security buyers creates unique marketing challenges that require authentic, value-driven approaches.
Maria Velasquez, Co-founder, Cybersecurity Marketing Society: "I'd rather use what my friend is using and has seen success with versus the next ad that I see on LinkedIn. Word of mouth is massive in this industry because we have to win their heart and their trust in many, many different ways."
Context: Velasquez emphasizes the critical role of peer recommendations over traditional advertising in the cybersecurity space.
Maria Velasquez: "We've seen kind of like a little bit of an evolution slash revolution in the way marketers are doing marketing in cybersecurity. We're incorporating more fun, more entertainment, more humor, because we need to reverse that stress first so that our buyer has appetite to actually listen to our pitch."
Context: Explaining how the industry is shifting from purely technical messaging to more human-centered, emotionally intelligent marketing approaches.
Maria Velasquez: "There's probably like 5,000 plus cybersecurity vendors. There are so many of the same tools and same products. We have to shed that technical layer in our content and our messaging and go for the emotion and think about, okay, well if they buy our product, how is it gonna make them feel?"
Context: Addressing the competitive landscape and the need to connect on human outcomes rather than technical specifications alone.
Gianna Whitver: "It should not just be speeds and feeds or widgets or gidgets or whatever. It has to be about the value it's providing to the person buying it and the value that it's providing to the human."
Context: Discussing lessons learned from mentors about moving beyond feature lists to communicate genuine business impact.
Gianna Whitver: "There's like 70 out there saying 'we're the AI SOC right now.' If you're just hinging yourself on the tech of it, where's the human? Where's the value? Agentic AI is so vague and if that's what you remember about their product, what do you actually do?"
Context: Critiquing the current trend of generic AI positioning in cybersecurity marketing and the need for meaningful differentiation.
Maria Velasquez: "We're being very intentional about keeping that community, community-led identity and feel and vibe no matter how much we grow. We've seen tremendous growth from last year to this year, around 40 to 50% in person attendees."
Context: Explaining how the conference maintains its intimate, peer-driven atmosphere despite rapid expansion.
Gianna Whitver: "Our KPI, our global KPI for the conference is: is it worth your time? When people say yes, we know because people are busy. Everyone's time is the most valuable thing they have and the majority of our conference attendees say this was worth my time."
Context: Defining success by attendee time value rather than traditional conference metrics.
Gianna Whitver: "We're trying to make a name in the ecosystem of cyber. Marketing has a seat at the table, the business side of stuff has a seat at the table. The only way we can protect the world is by working together. We need to have quality products and services out in the market."
Context: Articulating the broader mission of elevating marketing's strategic importance in the cybersecurity industry.