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What’s been happening in the cybersecurity sector over the last 3 months?
Our Buyer Intelligence platform has been continuously tracking first-party buyer signals across our database, bringing you timely insights in the form of our latest cybersecurity intent report.
Our mission? To help tech vendors keep their demand generation strategies tightly aligned to real market demand.
Published quarterly as part of our category-specific intent reports, our latest blog takes a deeper dive into the shifts most likely to impact your cybersecurity campaigns — and how you can action these insights to drive success.
Ready to level up your strategy? Let's go...
This quarter vs last quarter: what’s changed?
Buyer demand in cybersecurity didn’t change drastically between Q3 and Q4 2025, but how buyers are researching and progressing decisions has matured noticeably heading into Q1 2026. Core threat concerns remain firmly in place, yet buyers are moving away from broad education and towards operational readiness, evaluation depth, and implementation confidence.
4 key shifts shaping Q1 2026:
Threat priorities stayed consistent, but engagement matured
Buyers continue to focus on data breaches, insider threats, and phishing, but Q4 showed a clear shift from understanding risks to mapping them against controls, architectures, and outcomes.
Evaluation became more structured and criteria-led
Research behaviour moved from surface-level cost and capability checks to deeper comparisons, integration requirements, and ROI justification.
Decision-stage behaviour moved downstream
Buyers are spending more time on implementation timelines, onboarding, and post‑deployment support, signalling proximity to activation rather than early exploration.
Attention shifted from people-led defences to technical controls
Security awareness training declined while endpoint and infrastructure‑level security rose sharply, reflecting pressure to automate and harden environments.
Cybersecurity buyers are no longer asking “what should we protect?” but “how do we deploy, operate, and prove this works at scale?” Content and campaigns that answer those questions will outperform abstract thought leadership.
Market snapshot
Here's what our latest cybersecurity intent report reveals about the current market:
- Interest is strongest in the technology, finance, and healthcare industries.
- Traction is highest among enterprises with 1,000–5,000+ employees.
- IT security, compliance, and risk management functions show the greatest engagement with cybersecurity topics.
From insight to impact, here's how to apply our insight into your campaigns:
Targeting and segmentation action points:
1. Segment enterprise organisations in surging industries and geos into priority tiers.
2. Within these tiers, filter intent signals among trending job functions to inform topic clusters.
Why?
Segmenting your market into priority tiers helps to focus go-to-market teams on the accounts most likely to convert. Further segmentation techniques such as topic clusters opens up opportunities to tightly align content to specific audience segments. The result? Relevancy at scale.
Research patterns at account level
5 hot topics dominating research in the cybersecurity space (over the last 3 months), are:- Cloud security – Buyers continue to prioritise securing hybrid and multi‑cloud environments, with growing emphasis on visibility, configuration control, and shared‑responsibility clarity.
- Threat intelligence – Research reflects a need to move from static alerts to actionable intelligence that improves detection speed and response confidence.
- Identity and access management – Buyers are increasingly focused on identity as the new perimeter, exploring access governance, privilege control, and behavioural signals.
- Data protection – Interest centres on reducing breach impact through encryption, resilience, and recovery rather than prevention alone.
- Network security – Organisations are reassessing segmentation and traffic monitoring to limit lateral movement across complex infrastructures.
The topic showing the greatest decline in popularity is:
- Security awareness training with a 20% MoM decrease
What do these insights mean for your content strategy?
To keep your strategy aligned to market demand, we recommend:
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Prioritise cloud security and data protection narratives that show how security strategy is operationalised in hybrid environments, supported by practical proof around threat intelligence, identity controls, and recovery readiness.
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Reframe network security and IAM content around modern architectures (Zero Trust, identity‑centric access, segmentation) and real integration scenarios, avoiding legacy or appliance‑centric positioning.
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Anchor thought leadership in measurable security outcomes, linking threat intelligence, access control, and network visibility to metrics such as detection speed, response time, and regulatory assurance.
Pro tip: Use AI/NLP tools (topic modelling, entity extraction, semantic clustering) to audit your content library against competitor coverage. Flag underserved subtopics and build differentiated assets where demand is growing fastest.
Buyer group analysis
For cybersecurity buyers, the stakes are especially high: threats evolve, budgets tighten, and compliance pressures grow. Our report shows the order in which buyers prioritise these factors depend on their role and seniority.
What does this mean for your persona development?
Tailoring content to buyer role nuances is critical for engagement and conversion. Here's how you can translate these insights into accurate personas.
Persona A: Influencers and researchers (often IT analysts or compliance specialists)
- Concerns: data breaches, skill shortages, and insider threats dominate, with a strong focus on understanding evolving attack paths.
- Content preferences: they want technical explainers, threat breakdowns, and control‑level guidance that helps them educate internal stakeholders.
Persona B: Mid‑level decision makers (such as IT managers and heads of compliance)
- Concerns: data breaches remain critical, but phishing defence and resource constraints shape short‑term priorities.
- Content preferences: they want evaluation frameworks, integration guidance, and practical examples that reduce decision risk.
Persona C: Senior budget holders (CISOs, CIOs, CFOs)
- Concerns: budget constraints lead, followed by insider threats and breach exposure, indicating a need to balance cost with resilience.
- Content preferences: they want business‑level narratives, ROI evidence, and clarity on operational ownership and accountability.
Action point: Create a persona matrix aligned to job functions (e.g. IT security analyst vs. CISO). Map their pain points against the funnel stages they are most likely to participate in. For example, security analysts may engage early (awareness content on threat trends), while CISOs will respond to BOFU tools like ROI calculators or negotiation checklists.
Recommended reading: How to map content to the new buyer journey
3 cybersecurity demand gen plays:
Our AI Buyer Intelligence platform is able to interrogate research patterns by buyer stage. Here's how to action these insights into a full-funnel demand gen strategy aligned to real buyer behaviour:
Tip: Keep the exact keyword phrases in page titles, H2s, alt text, and internal links so performance teams can tie content to intent spikes and prioritise syndication/remarketing accordingly.
Ready to activate these insights?
Why not try our demand gen planning framework? It’s a collection of templates and planning aids, including:
- Buyer group intent mapping
- Multichannel campaign blueprint
- Funnel‑aligned strategy shortcuts
Everything you need to turn category intent insights into campaigns that convert.
