To kick off the Cybersecurity Marketing Society’s inaugural conference, Axonius CMO Nate Burke spoke on the big-picture lessons he’s learned throughout his career in cyber marketing. He emphasized the importance of keeping it simple because things so rarely go according to plan.
Lesson 1: The most important thing is knowing what you want.
Today, Axonius offers 700 products and ranks as the third-fastest growing company in North America. But when Nate joined 5 years ago as the company’s first U.S. employee, Axonius didn’t even have a product.
At the time, Nate had left Hexalite after the company’s acquisition by Microsoft. He found himself at a critical juncture in life. After meeting and receiving offers from a few early-stage startups, he just wasn’t in love with any of them.
“I need to be in love,” he said. “So I sat down and I actually wrote out requirements. I wrote requirements for what would make me decide on my next thing, and there were three things.”
- To go after a big problem that’s only getting bigger.
- To work at a company going after that problem in a simple way.
- To love the people he’d be working with.
When Axionus came along, things developed quickly. An investor introduced Nate to Axionus CEO Dean Sysman, and after a single phone call, Dean flew out to make Nate an offer.
“I knew what I wanted and [they] knew what they wanted,” Nate said. “It sounds really simple, but a lot of things fail, and a lot of frustration comes about, and a lot of pain is felt just by not knowing what you really want.”
Lesson 2: Marketing should reflect the stories that customers live out every day.
Back in 2019 at the RSAC Innovation Sandbox, Nate had to step in with less than 24 hours notice and pitch Axonius in the conference’s startup competition. Though the next day was filled with missteps, Nate managed to pull a victory out of this comedy of errors.
The narrative of unforeseen circumstances putting a person in a position to fail or succeed against all odds is a universal story — one marketers too easily forget.
“Nobody cares about your military-grade, real-time, cloud-based whatever unless they connect with a story,” he said. “Yet when we build our messaging and campaigns, we don’t understand that reality and use it in how we connect with the people we’re going after.”
Without that sense of story, markers often fall back on fear, uncertainty, and doubt. “Be afraid, and buy our product” isn’t the story marketers should be telling. The recipe for creating a compelling narrative consists of three simple ingredients:
- Problems solved
- New capabilities
- Emotional ties
“I want a message to be simple, clear, and a little bit provocative,” Nate said. “Don’t be afraid of that.”
Lesson 3: The emotion is just as important as the outcome.
Human-centric marketing in cybersecurity is a rarity. Between high-tech feature sets, promises of scale and transformation, and the threat of failure, it’s easy for marketers to forget the human behind the ICP.
“Why do we fail in cybersecurity? I think the number one problem in cyber marketing is not understanding people,” he said. “No one buys the shovel. They buy the hole it digs.”
To forge an emotional tie with your audience, marketers must discern the story they’re living and how they can position the audience as the hero within that story.
Nick recounted the story of boiling Axonius’ value proposition down to its simplest form — “controlling complexity” — and how Axonius translated that value into a stunning campaign featuring Olympic gymnast Simone Biles and CrossFit athlete Amy Bream.
“We have to take big swings. There’s no other way to stand out than to take big chances,” Nate concluded. “You have to run away from sameness. Everybody does the same thing in our industry. The more you do that, the more you become noise.”
Lesson 4: Success is fun. Failure is where we learn.
Every year, Nate puts his team’s marketing fails on their public blog because failure can be a better teacher than success.
“I always say, Superman is boring because he never learned anything,” Nate said.
Letting go of the fear of failure is vital to staying curious in the cybersecurity space. With changes happening constantly in technology, use cases, and buyer habits, curiosity is a key component of adaptability, empathy, and excellence.
Join us for CyberMarketingCon2023
Nathan Burke’s keynote at CyberMarketingCon 2022 inspired a room full of cybersecurity marketers to add emotion and story into their work. The rest of the conference had sessions, workshops, and networking with leaders, doers, and luminaries in cybersecurity marketing. Join us this year for another amazing conference: CyberMarketingCon 2023.
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