Courtney Haeg might be one of the most loyal employees in the cybersecurity industry.

16 years ago, she joined Fortra – then called HelpSystems – as a college intern and has stayed ever since. In that time, she’s worked her way through product marketing, regional marketing, and corporate functions, before landing in her current role: Associate VP of Marketing.

So, I picked Courtney’s brain for her thoughts on the cybersecurity marketing world today: why buyers feel further out of reach than ever, how Fortra thinks about budget allocation in a post-single-attribution world, and her key takeaways from the recent RSA Conference. Continuity gives a perspective that is genuinely hard to manufacture.

What does 16 years at the same company teach you about marketing that job-hopping can’t?

When I started at what was then HelpSystems, the company had about 250 employees, and the marketing team was 12 people. Today, we have well over 2,000 employees, and the cyber marketing team alone is almost 70.

Watching that transformation from the inside – and having touched so many different functions along the way – means I understand how the pieces connect in a way that is hard to acquire quickly. I can see where friction comes from because I have been in the rooms where it was created. That context matters enormously when you are trying to lead a team that works across a complex organization.

It also builds credibility internally. When you’ve been somewhere long enough, people trust that you understand the business, not just your corner of it. Marketing is always dependent on other people’s time and expertise, so that trust is genuinely valuable.

How has the relationship between buyers and vendors changed in the past five years, and what does that mean for how you market?

Today’s buyers want to research and learn on their own before starting a conversation with sales. It’s rare for our sales team to start a conversation with a buyer who doesn’t already have a preconceived notion, whether positive or negative. There is so much that happens before we ever get a word in.

AI has taken that even further. Are people even getting to our website to hear our story? Or are they just getting synthesized answers from an engine that may or may not represent us accurately?

With every new advancement in technology, buyers get further and further away from us. It is why ABM has become so central to what we do. If buyers are going to research us without us being present, at least we want to know who is doing the researching.

In-person events feel like they’re thriving again. People like people. People buy from people. We have seen good success with in-person events over the past couple of years – really focusing on more intimate, quality connections. Amid technological and AI advancements, the pull toward real human interaction is clear.

What channels are working for reaching your ICP?

Our website is still the biggest driver of pipeline and bookings from a marketing perspective, even though getting people there is increasingly harder. Anything that improves performance on the website, tools, content, or conversion work is money well spent.

Paid search has been ramping up for us, too. Organic visibility has moved so far below the fold on search results pages, which makes the paid layer matter more than it used to. There is a ceiling on ROI there, but it is an important part of the mix.

Events are back, but I would put a qualifier on that. The ROI is really coming from the smaller, more curated, quality connections. We still have a presence at the big shows, but we use those as a vehicle to have more intimate conversations and one-on-one meetings with prospects and customers. Coming out of a smaller event with two or three genuinely high-quality conversations that open a new opportunity, push a deal forward, or add to an existing customer relationship is worth far more than 500 badge scans.

We are also seeing strong results from a vertical approach. Government and defense, and financial services are our two main areas of focus, and tailoring messaging and campaigns tightly to those audiences has made a real difference.

How do you use AI in the marketing team, and where do you draw the line?

We absolutely use it, and it has made the team more efficient. But we use it intentionally rather than wholesale.

For content specifically, it is good for ideation, getting a starting point, generating outlines, taking a piece of expert-written content, and thinking about how to extend its reach into multiple other formats. What we would never do is publish anything that is AI-generated and isn’t vetted by our in-house expertise.

Part of that is principle. AI cannot replicate genuine authority and expertise, and right now, that is exactly what algorithms reward and what buyers respond to.

The other part is caution about where things are heading. The Google and Bing algorithms keep getting smarter, and if we can tell what type of content is AI-generated, so can Google. It’s hard to outsmart Google. We need to future-proof our content strategy and don’t want to over-rotate on a tactic that might come back to bite us. Indeed, we’re already seeing AI-generated content dropping off a cliff within 3 months of being published. That’s not good for building long-term trust.

As far as AI search goes, we are implementing tools to improve visibility into where and how we show up. But honestly, I think the whole industry is still figuring that out together. Fundamentally, our AI strategy is to use AI without letting efficiency gains come at the cost of credibility.

How do you make budget allocation decisions when your attribution model does not capture the full picture?

Candidly, our current single-touch, first-touch attribution model leaves a lot to be desired.

We know what it captures is only a fraction of the actual influence our marketing activities have. We are moving to multi-touch attribution in the next few months, and I expect that to change the story the data tell us significantly.

In the meantime, we’ve built a framework that helps us make decisions and communicate them to leadership. We categorize our activities into four buckets.

• First, there is the proven and scalable: things with consistently high ROI that we would never pull back from, like anything on the website.
• Then there’s emerging opportunities: things with good leading indicators or strong growth potential, even if the ROI is sometimes lumpy, which is where trade shows, channel partner marketing, paid search, and ABM sit.
• Then there’s activities that bring strategic value: analyst relations, PR, social, customer review sites, where we do not expect to trace a direct line to pipeline but know the investment is building brand and credibility.
• And, finally, there are things in decline, where the data has been consistently telling us that the returns are shrinking. Legacy tactics like mass outbound emails to our database, and content syndication have moved into that bucket, and we have scaled those back significantly.

The framework matters because it lets us tell a coherent story to leadership about why we are investing in something that lacks obvious pipeline attribution. We are not defending spend on instinct. We are defending it based on where it sits in a deliberate strategy.

Marketing always needs expertise from product, research, and sales. How do you make that collaboration work?

It is an ongoing challenge and probably always will be.

Marketing at Fortra is stronger when we leverage expertise from across the business. We rely on people’s time and insight to do what we do, but they also have day jobs. So, the only way to make it work sustainably is through relationships.

I push leaders to be proactive about building relationships across the organization. Each of our leaders has specific cross-functional counterparts they are meant to be connecting with regularly, not just when we need something, but as ongoing professional relationships.

The goal is to make other parts of the business feel like it’s second nature to think of marketing as part of the conversation, from the very start. You can’t shortcut that. It is a slow build, and it’s a good investment.

I also tell my team that nothing we work on should be done in a vacuum. Whatever the project, we should be bringing in voices from outside marketing. I have been hard-pressed to find something where only one person’s opinion truly matters. The output is almost always better when you have the right people in the room.

What is the uncomfortable truth about cybersecurity marketing most vendors will not say out loud?

I don’t think any of us are as differentiated as we’d like to be.

If you walked down the exhibition floor at RSA Conference this year and took four to six words from any booth, scrambled them, and redistributed them across the hall, you would be hard-pressed to tell the difference. Data security for AI, AI for data security, data security for the AI era, data security for your AI world – it’s all the exact same thing.

We have just a split second to grab a buyer’s attention. How are you going to do that if we’re all saying the same thing in our headlines? How are you going to get the opportunity to talk with them about the meat of what you have to offer?

The AI angle is part of it, but it is also a symptom of something broader. When does a word like ‘agentic’ lose its meaning? When does it just become table stakes and everybody knows that everyone else is doing it, because everyone is?

I don’t know the answer to that. But I think the vendors who will come out ahead when the terminology frenzy settles are the ones who have been building genuine differentiation underneath the buzzwords: cutting-edge product advancements, proprietary AI models and datasets, and original threat research. That is the work that actually matters, the work that truly changes the lives of our customers, even if it does not make for the flashiest booth.

Courtney Haeg is Associate VP of Marketing at Fortra. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

About Bora

We’re Bora. We work with security companies to turn complex technical capabilities into clear, credible market narratives.

Get in touch for a free 30 minute consultation. If we’re not the right fit, we’ll help find someone who is.