Let’s be honest about how your content is really consumed.
A CISO gets somewhere between forty and a hundred vendor emails a week. They have a team to run, a board to answer to, and an audit next month. Your beautifully designed whitepaper is competing with all of that.
So what actually gets read? After a decade in this market, here’s the pattern we keep seeing.
They Don’t Read. They Scan for a Reason to Stop
This is the first thing to internalise. Nobody starts reading your content intending to finish it.
They scan for one of three things: a threat they recognise, a number they can use, or a name they trust. If none of those appear in the first ten seconds, they’re gone and they won’t come back.
Which means your first paragraph is not an introduction. It’s the whole pitch. Most vendor content spends its opening explaining that cyber threats are increasing, which every CISO already knows better than the person writing it.
What Gets Read
Threat research with actual specifics. Not “ransomware is evolving.” A named campaign, an observed technique, indicators they can go and check. This is the single most reliably read format in security, and it’s the hardest to fake.
Postmortems, especially of failures. How an attack unfolded, what worked, what didn’t. If you can write about something that went wrong, you’ll get more attention than ten posts about how well things go with your product.
Anything that helps with the board. CISOs spend a genuinely painful amount of time translating technical risk into language a board will fund. Give them a framework, a slide, a way of expressing exposure in business terms, and you’ve made their week easier.
Peer detail. What a security team at a similar company actually did. Not a logo on a case study page; the decision, the tradeoff, what they’d do differently.
Comparisons that admit weaknesses. A comparison where you lose a category is enormously more credible than one where you win everything. Everyone knows no product wins everything.
What Gets Ignored
Here’s the uncomfortable list.
Anything that opens with fear. “Breaches are up 300%.” They know. They live it. Fear-based openers now signal that you have nothing else, and they get filtered out before the second sentence.
Gated content with no preview. A form standing between a CISO and a document they haven’t decided is worth reading is just a reason to leave. Give it away, or gate it after real value.
“AI-powered, zero-trust, next-generation.” These words now carry negative information. They tell a technical reader you couldn’t describe what the product does, and they wonder why.
Content that avoids naming things. If you can’t say which environments, which threats, which compliance frameworks, the reader assumes the answer is “none specifically.”
Anything a practitioner would poke a hole in. And they will. Your buyer often forwards your content to an engineer for a sanity check, and that engineer’s reply is your real conversion event. Writing for that reader without patronising them is its own discipline, and we covered it in marketing to engineers without insulting them.
The Test We Use
Before anything goes out, ask one question:
Would a security practitioner forward this to a colleague?
Not “would they read it.” Forward it. That’s a much higher bar and it’s the only distribution that matters in this market, because security people trust each other and distrust vendors.
Most content fails this instantly. The stuff that passes tends to be specific, useful without buying anything, and honest about what it doesn’t know.
One More Thing About Who’s Reading Now
There’s a second reader you didn’t used to have to think about.
Before your buyer opens your whitepaper, they’ve often asked an assistant what tools solve their problem. That answer is assembled from content across the internet, including yours. Vague, unquotable writing doesn’t just lose the human. It also gives the machine nothing to work with.
We wrote about what makes an assistant quote you, and it turns out to be the same discipline: be specific, be consistent, be easy to verify.
The Bottom Line
Security buyers aren’t hostile to marketing. They’re hostile to marketing that wastes their time.
Write like the person reading it knows more than you about their own environment, because they do. Bring them something they can use whether or not they buy from you.
Do that consistently and you stop being a vendor sending emails. You become a source they check.
P.S. If your best content is behind a form and your worst is on your blog, you have it exactly backwards.
