Welcome back to Digital Rage. I'm Jeff the producer here at Phish Tank Digital.
Phish Tank is our new cyber security marketing company. We have an unfair
advantage of having cyber security experts join our team, validate our content,
and most importantly how to generate leads for mid-market cyber security
vendors. So no more of me. Let's dig in.
Okay, so for this deep dive we've pulled together your sources and they focus on
a really fascinating intersection. We're talking about the super technical world
of enterprise cyber security on one hand and the well the often misunderstood
world of digital marketing on the other. Right, two worlds that don't always
speak the same language. Exactly. So our mission here is to tackle a big question.
How do you actually market these highly complex sometimes abstract cyber security
and SaaS? That's S-A-A-S solutions. To an audience that is by its very nature
skeptical. Incredibly skeptical. Yeah, super technical, super savvy. We're talking
about the enterprise buyer but really the cyber security buyer specifically.
Once you can spot fluff from a mile away. 100%. And the subject of our dive is a
company called Phish Tank Digital. They're an agency that works only in the
space. Cyber security, SaaS, InfoSec brands. So they're specialists. Portal
specialists and we need to unpack their strategy because they claim to bridge
that that huge gap between the cutting edge tech and marketing that actually
delivers results. And what's so interesting right out of the gate is how the
sources frame the problem. The cyber security marketing landscape today is just
it's more crowded than it has ever been. It's incredibly noisy. It really is. It's
not enough to just have the best firewall anymore or you know the most advanced
XDR platform. If your messaging is unclear. If your content is generic. If your
SEO is basically non-existent. Even the most groundbreaking technology gets
completely lost. Right. And the sources really emphasize why that generic
marketing fails. They call it the fluff factor. And that kind of stuff. It just falls
completely flat with a technical audience because they're being hit with it all
day every day. And you're not just competing for clicks. I think that's a key point.
No, it's something more. You are competing for trust. That's the real currency.
Yeah. If you waste a technical buyer's time with marketing jargon or worse with
something that's just plain wrong. Yeah. You don't just lose a potential sale. You
lose all credibility. Yeah. Instantly. And that trust deficit is everything. The
sources point to this key audience. The enterprise buyers, the technical teams.
And especially the CsOs, the CISOs. You see so's right. They are literally
professional risk managers. That's their job. So they look at marketing with just
like extreme skepticism. Yeah. So isn't just you know reading your
brochure. They're evaluating your fundamental competence to protect their
entire organization. That's a great way to put it. So if your marketing feels weak
or shallow, they just assume your product's architecture is weak and shallow too.
So the goal according to the sources is to make your brand visible, credible,
and irresistible. But that credibility piece. How do you actually earn that?
That's the million dollar question. And that is the absolute hinge point for this
whole deep dive. You know, any agency can promise to make you more visible. But how
does fish tank digital claim to solve this specific, deeply rooted trust
problem? This isn't just about a better logo. No, it's about a better understanding.
It is. And this is where it gets really interesting. Their core selling point,
what they call their unfair advantage is that they are not just another
marketing agency that you know, learned a few security buzzwords. Yeah. They
embed actual cybersecurity intelligence expertise right into the marketing
engine from the ground up. So what you mean they have actual security
practitioners on the marketing team? That's exactly it. And that's what
inoculates them against that skepticism we were just talking about. The agency was
founded by a veteran digital strategist Jeff buyer. But the really unique part
is who else is on the team guiding the work? Okay, I'm listening. The sources call
out two specific roles that just completely redefine what you think of when you
hear marketing agency. Right. First, they work with a former director of a
global threat intelligence center. Hold on, say that again. A director of a
global threat intelligence center. Yeah. So someone whose job was tracking, you
know, nation state hackers and analyzing zero day exploits. The highest level.
And now they're guiding SEO strategies. It sounds like a huge leap, right? But
think about what that perspective brings to the table. It changes the entire
game. It means your content strategy isn't just based on what's trending on
Google. It's based on actual real time defense priorities. Exactly. When they
write an article or a white paper, that former threat intel director is
ensuring every detail is precise. It's timely. And it actually speaks to a
practitioner who lives in that threat matrix every single day. They know it keeps
a seesaw up at night. They literally do. And they can use that insight to frame a
solution as an absolute necessity, not just another nice to have tool. And
that's not all that expertise is paired with a former product manager from a
major cybersecurity vendor. Someone who worked on things like MDR or XDR platform.
Well, that's the other half of the puzzle. A former product manager is I mean,
they're arguably the perfect translator for technical marketing. They know exactly
how a technical buyer evaluates features. They know the checklists and
comparison charts that sees those use. And crucially, they know which buzzwords are
just fluff and which one's signal real validated ROI. So they can cut to the
noise because they helped create the original signal.
Precisely. It allows the agency to market based on provable value, not just
vague promises of better security. So when they claim to have an unfair
advantage, it's really rooted in that combination. It's deep, battle-tested
cyber expertise mixed with top-tier digital marketing. They speak the
customer's language because they were the customer and the architect.
Okay, so they have the expertise. But that's only one piece of it. You still have to
deliver growth in a structured, repeatable way. Right. And what really stood out to
me in the sources is how they package their services. It's not just a menu of
options. They're organized into these very specialized structured systems for
growth. The systemic approach. That's smart. That appeals directly to the
engineering mindset of their clients. I thought so too. I mean, insecurity.
Everything is about structure and frameworks, right? We rely on NIST or
MITRE for defense. So applying that same systematic thinking to generating
leads, it just makes sense. And it creates transparency. The sources suggest that
having these predefined systems allows them to be much clearer about scope and
cost, which immediately helps fight that skepticism. People have about agency
pricing. So they're not just selling services. They're selling a methodology, a
roadmap. Yeah, it's almost like a security framework. But for marketing. It is. So
let's unpack these four systems they offer. The first one is the go-to-market
system. Okay. This one is aimed squarely at cybersecurity startups or maybe an
established company that's launching a totally new product. The whole goal is
to build that foundational strategy, the core messaging, the basics, the
critical basics. Yeah. And then run the launch campaigns to get those first few
really important early adopter customers. And that's where that thread-in-tell
directors expertise would be front and center. I imagine. Absolutely. Because the
entire strategy has to be built on real security concepts like zero trust or
specific compliance needs, right? And day one. Right. So once you have that
foundation, you need to scale. That brings us to system two. The lead generation
system. The workhorse. Totally. This is for the established SaaS security
platforms. The goal here is pure reliable scale. Delivering a constant
pipeline of qualified sales leads by targeting the right people on search and
social. And that's where the former product manager shines. We're making sure
the landing page copy they add to all of it. It focuses on the exact technical
pain points and ROI that gets a buyer to actually click request a demo instead of
just closing the tab. Then you have the third system, which is about reputation
and dominance. It's called the visibility and exposure system. That's for the big
players. Yeah. This is for the large enterprise vendors who want to be seen as
the definitive thought leader. So it's all about deep content, strategic PR,
authority building SEO. Moving beyond just getting leads to actually shaping the
market conversation. You got it. They want their clients to be the ones
quoted by industry analysts. The ones people search for by name, basically
making them the mentors of the security world. And the last one. The fourth one is
the build your own system. It's more of a flexible package. It's for companies
that maybe already have a marketing team, but need to plug a specific gap, you
know, without buying a whole prepackaged system. So it's augmentation. That makes
sense. When you look at them all together, you can see a really clear, logical
progression. Yeah. It maps to a company's lifecycle. It maps directly to the
maturity stages of a cyber company from launch to growth to market dominance.
Yeah. It ensures the marketing grows up right alongside the technology.
So if we dive a little deeper into the actual like day to day tactics, the
sources lists some really specific services that show how technical their
focuses. This isn't just generic stuff. Okay. Let's hear. So they're not just
doing SEO. They do AI adaptive cybersecurity SEO. It's not about ranking for
broad terms. It's about hitting those super specific high-intent searches that
only a real practitioner would type in. Like what will give me an example? Like a
mighter 18ck mapping for container security or zero-trust implementation
guide for financial services. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Only a qualified buyer is searching
for that. The hobbyist isn't exactly. And their content marketing for cyber
security is the same idea. It's built to earn trust with CISOS and technical
buyers, which is a totally different skill than writing for consumers. It has
to be accurate and it can't be condescending. And then there's this one, which I
think is a huge challenge. Most people don't think about graphic design for
cybersecurity. Oh, this is a good one. It's not about making a pretty chart.
It's about being able to accurately visualize something incredibly
complex, like a security architecture diagram or how data flows through an
XDR system. And it has to be right for two different audiences at the same
time. Exactly. It needs to be clear enough for an executive to understand the
risk. But detailed and accurate enough that a security architect doesn't
immediately dismiss it as wrong. A generic designer would make it look nice.
But their experts make sure that data flow diagram is actually, you know,
correct. A fundamental difference. And even their approach to nurturing leads is
different. Their email marketing isn't just a bunch of sales pitches. It's
focused on delivering relevant threat intelligence and solutions. Ah, so
they're using that threat intel expertise to provide value first value
first. They send emails that people actually want to open because they might
learn something. And only then do they introduce the product that solves the
problem. And of course, they handle the big scaling tools too, like targeted
PPC advertising on Google and LinkedIn. But even there, the targeting is just
smarter because they actually understand the buyer personas. They know an
InfoSec analyst cares about different things than a procurement manager does.
So who is this all really for? The sources get pretty specific about their ideal
clients. It sounds like it's for companies that are already serious about their
tech. It is. They target established SaaS security platforms that need that
scaled legion to keep growing. Also, B2B InfoSec solution providers who are
looking to expand into, you know, really competitive markets like the US or
Europe. So companies that need to scale big but can't afford to lose credibility
while doing it. Exactly. And what I found really interesting was the mention of
cybersecurity e-commerce. It's a service for securely selling cybersecurity
products and subscriptions online. That's a niche within a niche. You need to
understand the distribution, the licensing, the secure payments. It's complex.
So when you tie it all back, the main message is that their entire approach is
tailored to a company's business stage from a startup with a great idea all the
way to a global enterprise vendor. Right. It's all designed so that a company's
marketing performs just as powerfully as its technology. So they stop leaving
money on the table. So if we try to synthesize all this, what's the big takeaway?
I think for me, it's that in a market like cybersecurity, credibility is
everything. It's the only currency that matters. And Fish Tank Digital's model
is built from the ground up to earn that credibility by putting real cyber
intelligence from former threat directors and product managers at the
absolute core of their marketing. It's a complete shift from the traditional agency
model. It's the difference between hiring a marketing generalist versus hiring
a specialist who could probably sit in on your internal C-suite meetings and
contribute meaningfully. 100%. They're selling structure, a proven method, a
roadmap for generating demand that has the same kind of reliability you'd
expect from a security framework. The whole goal is to make sure your
communication is as precise and powerful as the code you're selling. And that
combination of transparency and deep expertise is what it takes to convince a
buyer who is paid to be skeptical, which brings us to our final provocative
thought for you to think about. If we know that cybersecurity buyers are so
skeptical of marketing fluff, what specific details in your own company's
content, or maybe the content you read every day signals that it's genuinely
expert-backed versus just generic sales copy. That's a good question. Where else
could embedding a former threat intelligence director be the key that unlocks
trust in a super crowded, highly technical market? Think about the specific
language, the scenarios, the level of detail you look for, and ask yourself if
the content you create or consume actually reflects that same depth of knowledge.
Thanks for joining us with this deep dive into marketing to the mentors. We
encourage you to look at your own content sources through that lens, necessary
expertise versus what could be dangerous generally. Until next time, stay curious.
Reach out to us at jbuyer.com for comments and questions. Follow us at buyer
company on social media, and if you'd be so kind, please rate and review us a new
podcast app.