Your marketing team understands marketing. But do they understand your market?

You can hire excellent marketers who know how to build campaigns, run demand generation, create content, manage agencies, plan launches, measure performance, and operate a modern marketing function, and they can still struggle to market your company.

Because understanding marketing and understanding the market you’re selling into are two different things.

For technology companies, and particularly cybersecurity companies, that distinction matters. You’re selling something technical, often expensive, and frequently into an organisation where the person who uses the product, the person who evaluates it, the person who signs off the budget, and the person who can quietly kill the purchase are not the same person.

Marketing needs to understand that world, not just how to market to it.

Knowing your ICP isn’t the same as knowing your market

Most companies can describe their target market reasonably well. They know the industries they’re interested in, the company sizes they want to reach, and usually have a collection of job titles attached to their ICP.

That’s useful, but it only gets you so far.

The more interesting questions are about what is happening inside those organisations. Who notices the problem first, who cares enough to do something about it, what have they already tried, and what gets in the way of fixing it? Who evaluates potential solutions, who controls the budget, and who else needs convincing before anything gets bought?

Then there are the less tidy questions. What does the buyer already believe about the problem? What language do practitioners use when there isn’t a vendor in the room? Which claims make them interested, and which make their eyes roll? What seems enormously important from inside your company but barely registers outside it?

That’s where market understanding starts becoming useful.

Otherwise, you end up marketing the product instead of the problem

This is particularly easy to do in technical companies because the organisation quite reasonably knows an enormous amount about its own product.

Marketing gets surrounded by features, capabilities, architecture, integrations, technical differentiators, roadmap items, and increasingly elaborate explanations of what the technology does. Spend enough time inside that environment and it’s very easy for those things to become the marketing.

Customers don’t start there, though. They start with whatever is happening in their world.

They might have an operational problem, a customer asking difficult questions, a regulatory deadline, a capability gap, an incident, a cost they need to reduce, or something they simply cannot do with what they have today.

Marketing has to connect that reality to the product. That’s difficult if the people doing the marketing don’t understand the customer’s environment well enough to know where the conversation should begin.

Perfectly reasonable messaging can still be completely wrong

Some of the hardest messaging to fix isn’t obviously bad. It’s perfectly plausible.

It survives internal review because everything in it is technically correct. Product recognises the capabilities. Sales recognises the terminology. Leadership thinks it sounds suitably impressive. Everyone agrees, the website gets updated, and then the market responds with a resounding shrug.

Sometimes the problem is that the people you’re trying to reach interpret the language very differently from the way you intended. Sometimes you’re talking about a problem they have, but not in a way they recognise. Sometimes the differentiator you’ve built the entire story around isn’t something they particularly value.

Technical audiences add another complication because they’re generally quite good at spotting when a claim has wandered beyond what a product can realistically do. They recognise language that has come from the vendor rather than the practitioner, and they notice when a company doesn’t appear to understand how their environment operates.

At that point, polishing the copy isn’t going to solve much. You need to get closer to the market.

An ICP isn’t a buying process

There’s another trap in treating market understanding as a persona exercise.

A company can have beautifully documented personas and still misunderstand how its customers buy, because a B2B technology purchase rarely belongs to one neat individual.

The person experiencing the problem might not own the budget. The technical evaluator might have enormous influence without being the executive sponsor. Security, procurement, legal, finance, or IT might enter the process at different points and care about completely different things. Existing customers might buy the same product for reasons that look nothing like those of a new prospect.

If marketing understands those dynamics, it affects the decisions being made long before anyone starts writing campaign copy. It influences positioning, content, sales enablement, channel choices, and where marketing should spend its time and budget in the first place.

Channel strategy shouldn’t start with a list of channels

“We should do more LinkedIn.”

“We need ABM.”

“We should run events.”

“We need better SEO.”

“We should start a podcast.”

Any of those might be right, but deciding you need a channel before understanding the market is backwards.

First understand how the people you’re trying to reach discover problems, learn about possible solutions, validate vendors, ask for recommendations, build shortlists, and eventually buy. Then you can make a sensible decision about where you need to show up and what you need to do when you get there.

This matters because different audiences behave differently, and so do different categories and markets at different stages of maturity. What works beautifully for another B2B technology company might be completely irrelevant to yours.

A channel strategy should come from understanding buyer behaviour, not from whichever marketing tactic currently has the best PR.

Market understanding lets marketing challenge the business

This, for me, is where the difference becomes much more important.

Marketing shouldn’t exist purely downstream of decisions made by product, sales, and leadership. If the people leading marketing understand the market properly, they can contribute while those decisions are still being made.

That might mean challenging whether the proposition is strong enough, whether the intended audience genuinely has the problem, or whether buyers care about the differentiator the company is excited about. It might mean questioning a pricing story, pushing back on a claim that won’t survive contact with a practitioner, or pointing out that the product isn’t ready for the launch everyone has already put in the calendar.

Sometimes the most useful marketing decision is to say, “We shouldn’t take this to market yet.”

I’ve done that.

It isn’t always a particularly comfortable conversation, but it’s considerably more useful than dutifully accepting the launch date and making some noise around something you don’t believe the market is ready to buy.

That’s the difference between marketing as an execution function and marketing having a meaningful role in the commercial direction of the business.

Cybersecurity makes shallow market understanding particularly obvious

Cybersecurity buyers have seen a lot of vendor marketing, and the people evaluating products are often technically knowledgeable enough to interrogate what they’re being told.

That creates a fairly unforgiving environment for vague claims, borrowed terminology, and positioning that sounds good in a meeting but doesn’t reflect how security teams operate.

It also means “the cybersecurity buyer” isn’t a particularly useful concept on its own. A CISO at a global bank, a security engineer at a technology company, an IT leader at an SME, and a founder buying their first external security service might all be purchasing cybersecurity, but the problems they care about, the way they evaluate options, and the buying environment around them can be wildly different.

Knowing the terminology helps. Understanding the technology helps. Neither is a substitute for understanding the context around the buying decision.

So, do you need a specialist marketer?

Not for everything, and I think it’s important to say that.

A good designer doesn’t need 25 years in your industry to create a strong visual system. A talented performance marketer can bring valuable expertise from other sectors. People coming from outside a market can also spot assumptions that everyone inside it stopped questioning years ago.

But the closer a marketing role gets to positioning, product, go-to-market strategy, customer understanding, sales alignment, market expansion, and commercial decision-making, the more valuable genuine market knowledge becomes.

At senior marketing leadership level, you’re not simply asking someone to execute marketing well. You’re asking them to help decide what the company should say, who it should say it to, where it should compete, how it should go to market, and occasionally whether it should go to market at all.

That’s a much bigger job.

Marketing expertise isn’t enough on its own

Marketing expertise gives you the frameworks, disciplines, tools, and experience to do marketing well.

Market expertise gives you the context to decide how to apply them.

You need both.

If the person leading marketing doesn’t understand the market yet, that’s not automatically a reason they can’t do the job. It does mean learning the market needs to be a serious part of the job, rather than something delegated to a persona document and revisited once a year.

That understanding comes from customers, prospects, practitioners, sales conversations, product teams, competitors, won deals, lost deals, and occasionally discovering that something everybody inside the company believed simply isn’t true outside it.

Because ultimately, the market gets the final vote.