Balling on a Budget: Small-Team Cybersecurity Marketing Tips With Renee Haas for RedSeal
Discover how small teams methodically prioritize channels for a winning marketing strategy.
Discover how small teams methodically prioritize channels for a winning marketing strategy.
Senior Manager of Digital Marketing and Demand Generation at RedSeal
Renee Haas is the Senior Manager of Digital Marketing and Demand Generation at RedSeal, an AI-enabled exposure management company that helps organizations reduce cyber risk across hybrid environments. Renee helps shape go-to-market strategy, drive multichannel campaigns, support events and content, and connect with cybersecurity buyers as they search, learn, and evaluate solutions. With her experience at Wombat Security Technologies, Proofpoint, and RedSeal, she brings a practical perspective to building demand and brand awareness for lean, high-impact teams.
Cybersecurity buyers are moving faster, searching differently, and expecting answers on their own terms. For lean marketing teams, that means focusing less on being everywhere and more on showing up where it matters. How can small teams create meaningful impact without stretching themselves too thin?
The answer is focus: understand where buyers are searching, what problems they are trying to solve, and how to meet them with useful, relevant content. Renee Haas, a cybersecurity marketing leader with expertise in digital marketing, demand generation, events, and buyer behavior, explains why smaller teams can still compete by listening closely, reworking existing assets, and showing up in the channels that matter most. Rather than chasing every tactic, Renee emphasizes building trust, creating practical content, using events strategically, and helping buyers self-educate. The result is a more intentional approach to marketing that connects lean execution with real buyer needs.
In this episode of Cyber Funnel, Thorn Compton talks with Renee Haas, Senior Manager of Digital Marketing and Demand Generation at RedSeal, about lean cybersecurity marketing and exposure management. Renee shares how small teams prioritize channels, why buyer behavior is changing, and what companies miss about risk visibility. She also discusses the role of niche events, AI search, compliance, and hybrid environments.
This episode is brought to you by Amplifyed.
Amplifyed is a specialized SEO agency, and we partner with in-house marketing teams to boost search visibility, drive qualified traffic, and turn organic search into real pipeline growth.
From technical SEO to content strategy, Amplifyed handles the heavy lifting so your team can stay focused on building and selling. If you want to show up when your buyers are searching, Amplifyed helps you get there.
To learn more, visit us at amplifyed.io.
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Intro: 00:02
Welcome to the Cyber Funnel podcast, brought to you by Amplifyed. Where we feature the top minds in cyber security.
Thorn Compton: 00:14
Welcome to the Cyber Funnel podcast, where we hear from the top minds in cyber security. I'm your host, Thorn Compton. And today I am excited to welcome Renee Haas from RedSeal into the cyber funnel. How are you today, Renee?
Renee Haas: 00:28
Pretty good. What about yourself?
Thorn Compton: 00:30
I'm great. Except for I'm just sitting here going, wait, did I actually say your last name correctly?
Renee Haas: 00:34
Pause.
Thorn Compton: 00:35
Pause, pause. Renee Haas here from RedSeal. Very excited to talk with you today. Before we get started, I have to remind you as always, that this and all episodes of the Cyber Funnel podcast are brought to you by Amplifyed the SEO and SEO and GEO agency for cybersecurity companies. Amplifyed serves cybersecurity marketing teams by driving more leads from Google and AI search.
We'll handle all the heavy lifting and know the exact levers to pull to get you more SQLs. We've worked with hundreds of clients to improve their search presence, including some great names that you probably are familiar with. Renee, like offset, Port Knox, fireman. Just to mention a few, we're really great at specifically honing in and working with marketing teams, making their lives easier. Learn more at Amplifyed.io.
That's Amplifyed.io. And visit us today. Alright. Like I said, I have Renee Haas here, senior digital marketing manager at RedSeal with us today. We've got a lot to cover today, but first, it's time to get to know you a little bit better with the lightning round.
Are you ready?
Renee Haas: 01:47
I'm ready.
Thorn Compton: 01:47
All right. Do you say that? But you never know. No. What was the last book you read, Renee?
Renee Haas: 01:54
Well, I'm currently in the process of reading. Is that it's like that? Thinking… The Seven Success.
Thorn Compton: 02:05
Oh yeah. The Seven.
Renee Haas: 02:07
Stanford University.
Thorn Compton: 02:09
Yeah it's fantastic. That's a great book. I just finished a big fantasy novel series. Well, I finished the beginning of a fantasy novel series called the Mistborn Saga. And yeah, because I'm a nerd and that's what I read.
But then I also, I really love I kind of tried to go back and forth and I just finished another one that's unreasonable Hospitality, a great book about how to just better serve people, you know?
Renee Haas: 02:37
Yeah. Sounds great.
Thorn Compton: 02:39
Now, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Renee Haas: 02:44
I would say probably a singer. I could not sing at all. Can't even carry a tune. So that was not a realistic career path for me.
Thorn Compton: 02:55
Did you have a genre?
Renee Haas: 02:57
Probably pop. Pop. Britney Spears. ERA.
Thorn Compton: 03:03
Every. Every dude wanted to be in Backstreet Boys and every girl wanted to be Britney Spears. I'm absolutely here for it. Well, hey, that's a great little segue. You're a music girl, then.
What was your first concert?
Renee Haas: 03:15
NSYNC, actually.
Thorn Compton: 03:17
Yeah. It was. Would you also call that your favorite concert, or do you have a favorite concert you've ever been to?
Renee Haas: 03:23
I think my favorite concert was actually Gabby Gabby Barrett. She's also from the Pittsburgh, PA region. I ended up taking my daughter, so I feel like that's what made it very special was her first time seeing a concert live, and now she is obsessed with country music and, you know, walks around here all day trying to sing, sets up for karaoke mic and really goes to town with it.
Thorn Compton: 03:49
And not to do not as a Johnny Cash man who doesn't like a lot of the Nashville Current sound, I'm very happy that you're Gabby Barrett's a great introduction for that. That's fantastic. I love that. Last question for you. What's your preferred vacation destination?
Are you going to the beach? Are you going to the mountains? Are you having a staycation? What do you like to do?
Renee Haas: 04:09
I'm going to the beach 100%.
Thorn Compton: 04:12
Any specific Atlantic Pacific?
Renee Haas: 04:16
I like Atlantic, actually. The water is a little bit warmer. It's less of a travel time and we can just get there and enjoy it. I got three different beach vacations planned already this summer.
Thorn Compton: 04:27
I love it, I'm a mountain guy. Personally though, my main beach I ever was exposed to was Galveston Beach. And anybody who's ever been to Galveston Beach goes, well, you should go somewhere else.
Renee Haas: 04:39
So I've been there too.
Thorn Compton: 04:42
Hey, there's great seafood out there, I can tell you that.
Renee Haas: 04:44
So, yeah.
Thorn Compton: 04:45
Hey, you survived the lightning round. Fantastic. I feel like we just know you a little bit better now. So. Now into, like, actual cybersecurity stuff.
I'd love to know. Talk to me about your journey into cybersecurity. How did you get started?
Renee Haas: 05:00
Yeah. So I joined Wombat Security Technologies back in 2017 as the marketing communications manager. I stayed with them up to the acquisition where we became Proofpoint. And I spent about seven years at Proofpoint in a global marketing campaigns role before coming to RedSeal, where I now head Digital Marketing and Demand Gen.
Thorn Compton: 05:24
That's awesome. Talk to me about RedSeal. It seems like there's a. Y'all have a really interesting, unique kind of story as far as cybersecurity goes.
Renee Haas: 05:32
We do. RedSeal has been around for about 20 years, a little bit over. And they were really a company that was here before their time. Right now, we really help organizations with increasingly complex and hybrid remote environments, RedSeal, and agentless AI enabled exposure management platforms. So what we're really doing is making sure that we are proactive.
Yeah. Shutting down a breach before it can happen. You're able to see your entire environment, understand the different attack paths, and prioritize what is actually at risk. So it's not just the endless fatigue of alerts. Yeah.
Okay. And then making sure that you're in compliance and enabling a system. Framework.
Thorn Compton: 06:28
Yeah. Yeah. I love to say if everything's a priority, nothing is. And that's how I feel like that alert kind of situation is being able to parse through that feels like it, it really makes a big difference.
Renee Haas: 06:41
It's true. Whether you're in marketing Secops CISO, you got to just focus on what matters most.
Thorn Compton: 06:49
Absolutely. That actually leads me into everyone doing more with less lately. Just feels like that's just kind of the way things overall are going. What are some challenges that you have kind of seen working on, with a smaller marketing team, specifically in cybersecurity?
Renee Haas: 07:07
Yeah. So right. So right now our marketing team is only three people. We are looking for a fourth to join our team as a product marketing manager. A little plug, if you know.
Thorn Compton: 07:18
A little plug there. I love that.
Renee Haas: 07:20
Plug. Yeah. So we have to do a lot. We don't have a big budget. And we're, I want to say we're trying to do everything, but we're not.
We are trying to make sure that we are shifting with the current buyers. Buyers are now wanting to be able to self discover whatever they're looking for. They don't want to be taken on a journey. They want to be able to find what they need, whether they're quickly searching, whether it's going to events, they're sitting down today at the computer trying to solve a problem. And you have to be there in order to supply them with that information and make sure that they can find what they're looking for every step of the way.
So at RedSeal, we are doing that, whether it's creating awareness, content, you know, the website for housing, the journey, event marketing, PR, analyst relations, we're doing all of that even with just a team of three.
Thorn Compton: 08:22
It's so funny because like when people think of SEO, the first thing they think is like, oh yeah, am I ranking on Google? It's like, yes, that is a big part of it. But it's really, it's, it's, it's a flood the zone situation, especially when you look at, like, what a Google search looks like right now. You got that AI overview. So all right.
Cool. Now you have to have the AI AI stuff. Then you have the actual results, but then you have paid results that are coming up before those. So you have to have some kind of plan around paying. And then they have the like, what are people talking about?
Where it's got LinkedIn, it's got YouTube, that kind of stuff. So it really is. It feels like you have to be everywhere at once, which is obviously very difficult for a small team.
Renee Haas: 09:01
It is. But I think it's also making sure that it's not reasonable to be everywhere at once, but you can be where it makes the most impact. So I believe now the stats, I mean, obviously they're changing every day, but I believe it's like 86% of people are now going to AI in order to find the answers for what they're looking for. It goes back to, again, if you're a marketer, CSO, parent, whatever the case may be, things are coming at you fast, you're busy. You just need to find your answer and begin to put your short list of if you're looking for vendors, how to solve it.
Whatever the case may be. So places like RedSeal where we don't have that team, we don't have the budgets. I'm not going to be able to outspend the Palo Alto's. The CrowdStrikes. It's really just building that content well, first, listening to get an understanding of what are people searching for?
How are they searching for it, and then making sure that we are providing those answers and showing up on the platforms and where they are, whether that's Reddit, LinkedIn, if it's trusted industry articles, maybe it's even a technical partner and making sure that we're showing up and bringing them back to our website or supplying them with that journey that they're looking for.
Thorn Compton: 10:22
Absolutely. It feels like using your current assets, using case studies, using your website, obviously using analysts reviews is a big part of that.
Renee Haas: 10:33
It is. And as much as it changes, I feel like in a way, it's just going back to the basics, right? You need that good content that solves their problem and it might be able to keep the same content you have today. But taking a second look at it. Re-optimizing it for the way people are searching.
It's not necessarily outdated. You know, maybe putting in new stats. Yeah. But you can continuously always use what you have. You don't have to just say, hey, I came in here.
It shifted the way our buyers worked. People aren't filling out forms. People aren't doing this trash at all. You don't have to do that. It's really just a matter of seeing what works.
Taking a look at it and revitalizing it for how the buyers are searching today.
Thorn Compton: 11:22
Absolutely. Yeah. You don't want to square peg a round hole, but that doesn't mean that you can't shave off some of the, some of the sides of the square and turn it into a circle. It's, it's really interesting to like seeing some of the things that AI is doing and like actually trying to, to meet it because I like to tell people all the time LMS while they seem like they're really Nebulous and you're trying to figure out like, oh, how are they thinking what an LLM is all just trying to do is they're just trying to provide answers to people. So if you can start to utilize some of those old assets and use them to start answering questions that people are talking about, boom, you're starting to cook with gas.
Renee Haas: 12:01
Yeah. And LLLS are pulling from the content that is already out there. It's pulling from websites, it's pulling from the search. So again, it's exactly like that when you have a small team, if you have an asset that's working great for you, start there.
Thorn Compton: 12:20
Now I know events are near and dear to your heart. Are they still useful? Is it still useful to go out there? Especially in this day and age of AI, where people are feeling kind of impersonal, a lot of things. What is the value of an event?
Renee Haas: 12:35
I think events definitely have their place in the marketing mix. I feel like you will have some like RSA that's, you know, we're there, we are there. But it has become a circus. And it is difficult for companies like RedSeal to stand out. When no one hates them, they love their marketing, but talk might be great.
The Grave digger or. I believe they had.
Thorn Compton: 13:03
My son would love that.
Renee Haas: 13:05
Yeah.
Thorn Compton: 13:05
If they're trying to sell it to four year olds. My son is here to talk and have the grave digger there.
Renee Haas: 13:10
So yeah, so I mean, we don't have grave digger money in our marketing budget. So what we really like to do is while we are a big part of those events, we are not trying to compete and go louder, bigger, bolder. We really state our niche, state our message, stay to the storytelling and find that persona that we can actually help and really solve those challenges for. Also, what we will do is we found that those smaller events, the more niche events have become Better for us. We're seeing better return on investment.
Just even for example, we like the signups CISOs. They're not the CISO audience, which pretty much everybody targets, right? Wow. They love experiences. They're not going to, they're not the most swaggy audience.
They're not. Gartner's even saying, you know, don't bring a whole ton of swag. It's not going to give away here.
Thorn Compton: 14:11
No.
Renee Haas: 14:12
So. We really just focus on that story, building that trust, building that credibility and use those events as a place to get in-person meetings. Also connecting with maybe any accounts that we haven't talked to in a while, making sure that they're updated on the newest features that can solve their problems. It's just a really good touchpoint in the buyer's journey.
Thorn Compton: 14:40
Yeah, the niching down thing is, is so because you're right, like you almost have to think of, you know. All right. Cool. RSA is, is, is the big ocean. Go to the go to the ponds, go to the lakes, go to the places that like you're going to find your more your, your people, you know, like shout out to our friends at the Cybersecurity Marketing Society like that they're going to have, you can get some stuff about marketing for cyber security at RSA, but you're going to have an entire conference about stuff about that, you know, going on down in Austin with Cybersecurity Marketing Society or like, you know, hybrid identity's a thing for you.
HIP Camp coming up in, in, in Nashville in September. It's a great example of something like somewhere where you're going to learn about identity access management. Like you, you're going to pick up all that other stuff at, at Black Hat, but like being able to really dive into it feels like that's where you're going to get the value.
Renee Haas: 15:32
Yeah, I agree completely.
Thorn Compton: 15:34
I love it. Okay, I'm gonna throw out a phrase for you, Renee. I'm gonna see your response. Generalists are dead.
Renee Haas: 15:44
I totally disagree. Especially in the smaller organizations, right? Everybody is wearing tons of hats. And honestly, it's where we're seeing the markets. Unfortunately, we are seeing layoffs.
People want to do more for less. And being able to touch all the different aspects of marketing and bring them into one cohesive story that goes to market. What a better position than a generalist to be able to do that.
Thorn Compton: 16:12
Exactly. And it's, it doesn't mean that you don't have expertise. It means there's nothing wrong with being a jack of all trades. And there's going to be things that, you know, a little bit more of everything. But like, if you don't have a little bit of, you know, finger in every single pie, you're probably missing out on things.
Renee Haas: 16:29
I think so. And like we said, you might not have the answer really depth in every other thing, but guess what? There's Google and AI. It's going to help you get there.
Thorn Compton: 16:39
Absolutely.
Renee Haas: 16:40
As long as you can understand it and how everything comes together in a complete ecosystem, you can quickly get up to speed while you're in the job doing it hands in and delivering great results.
Thorn Compton: 16:52
I've got this great friend, Claude. He seems to know everything I need him to know. So.
Renee Haas: 16:57
Yep.
Thorn Compton: 16:59
Hey, let's talk a little bit about, you know, RedSeal. Let's talk specifically about exposure. What are some things that businesses don't realize about their exposure?
Renee Haas: 17:13
I feel like that's a great question. What people don't realize about their exposure, I feel like they know that they have their exposure right as their shadow. Different systems are coming in, mergers, acquisitions, it's this big platform or landscape, right? Of all these systems, are they misconfigured or are they talking to each other? That visibility is extremely difficult to get from a lot of companies.
And even some exposure management companies. But you need to be able to know what's in your environment in order to protect it. That's as simple as it is. If you don't know, you have a door unlocked there, somebody can come in. So when you're at RedSeal, you have that complete visibility of your network.
And then we put kind of, if you think about overarching layers, you have that analysis where you can see, can they come in here? If they do come into the store, what can they reach? I know we have people obviously that we market to that they'll complain that they went with a vulnerability management system. They got over 30,000 alerts of vulnerabilities. That's great.
What do you do? How are you going to shut it down? And while you're working to do that.
Thorn Compton: 18:39
Crazy.
Renee Haas: 18:40
Somebody still just gets in the other doors. So you need to understand where you can limit that attack path, contain that breach as much as possible. And that's where RedSeal will take the business context and give you a list of like, here is what you need to prioritize. We do that with our risk radius. And then again, we're always in compliance by continuously updating that model, making sure that we're fitting like NIST, HIPAA, whatever the case may be.
I think a lot of times people don't realize that there are those full solutions out there. I feel like a lot of people are still chasing the CVEs or they feel. That, you know, they're worried about mythos. They're worried about all these different attacks or openings that AI is providing. But at the end of the day, if you can really reduce your exposure and manage your landscape, it's okay.
!no name provided!: 19:42
You, you.
Thorn Compton: 19:43
You hit one of my, my, my antenna went up because I had a question about this. Where does compliance really come into play in things like HIPAA, HIPAA? Yeah.
Renee Haas: 19:54
What was HIPAA? Yeah. So you can't lose.
Thorn Compton: 19:58
No. Yeah.
Renee Haas: 20:00
The records. Right. Or I mean, that is very sensitive information. I feel like for me personally, I've read articles in the past where, you know, like a cancer treatment was stopped because of a data breach and all access records. I mean, that could essentially be life and death in some very severe cases.
So making sure that a company is safe and secure at the end of the day, I mean, that can be everything to your end user or essentially be who your end users are protecting. And I feel like that really just gives meaning into what we're doing here at RedSeal.
Thorn Compton: 20:38
Yeah, that's a great call out because like, I feel like a lot of times this is viewed from a financial situation. And for fintech, it is and for. Yeah. But yeah, that's a great point. Like if a breach happens for, for a, for a healthcare system and there's an issue and something gets paused for that, that could literally be life and death for somebody.
That's a fantastic way to think about the importance of what you guys do.
Renee Haas: 21:03
Yeah.
Thorn Compton: 21:03
Yeah. All right. I got like two more questions for you. I'm trying to decide what's what. All right.
How important is serving hybrid environments?
Renee Haas: 21:15
Extremely important. I know everybody likes to talk about clouds. And clouds are extremely important. But most of our environments technically are still hybrid. Everything if we were talking about the hospital systems.
Right. Those are your hospitals. They're the machines in the hospitals that set up the computers. While everything might be served on the cloud, there are physical devices still plugged in, and I think they each bring together their own or bring forward their own sense of complexity. But that's even more complex when you bring them all together.
Thorn Compton: 21:56
Yeah, absolutely.
Renee Haas: 21:56
You see the misconfigurations, things that can happen over the years. I don't want to call it legacy, but, you know, just like as marketers if you have a database, if it's not kept up to date and not clean, you feel the impact of that in Salesforce and our audience is filling that in the environments they're protecting.
Thorn Compton: 22:18
It's funny because like, I think it's because we like, we sit there and go, it's 2026. We have to pretend like it's the future. And so it's the cloud, which means all of this data is just, it's out in the ether. It's, literally , it's with the water vapors right now. It's not, it's, it's in a data center.
Like it's like, it's like even cloud is itself a little bit of a hybrid environment. So it's yeah, absolutely. That it makes if you want to just think about your cloud environment, that's great. And then when something happens on your, on your, you know, physical environment, well then, hey, we have somebody you can give a call. So yes.
Thorn Compton: 22:53
Okay, my last question for you is, you know, first, before I get into my last question, I want to point people to your business, w w w dot RedSeal, www.redseal.net. If you go to.com, I think it's some industrial thing. Make sure .net on that RedSeal.net, everybody. And the last question I have is what do you think is the biggest mistake people make when they're trying to do exposure management on their own?
Renee Haas: 23:29
I don't even honestly see. How many are you talking about building an internal system?
Thorn Compton: 23:37
Yeah. Building an internal system. And like, honestly, probably it seems like the proactivity is probably the problem with that is when you try to do it on your own or like, you know, internal systems on your own, you're going to be trying to plug up all the old holes that you have without seeing what new holes are going to be coming in.
Renee Haas: 23:50
Yeah, visibility is so crucial. I know that that's a part of full visibility, right?
Thorn Compton: 23:57
Yes.
Renee Haas: 23:58
We are even seeing other vendors. They're not there yet. Right. Some of them can't map the networks completely. And it goes back to being able to see everything.
If they can't see everything, you cannot protect it. It's also very large, very complex. I just have a hard time imagining being able to build a homegrown solution for that. And it's time consuming, right? We have an entire company here doing that, building it for years, constantly reiterating, you still got to be protecting your organization while you're building.
And it seems like a really hard thing to do.
Thorn Compton: 24:41
Yeah, I, I completely, you know, as almost the theme of the thing we're doing more with less. We're balling on a budget. When you're doing that, you kind of have to rely on people and relying on experts like y'all for, for your exposure management, for getting that visibility, for being able to see things, relying on experts like us for helping improve your rankings and that kind of stuff. This is why we use RedSeal. This is why we use people like Amplifyed to make your life a lot easier.
Renee Haas: 25:10
Oh, thank you for having me. I enjoyed being here.
Thorn Compton: 25:12
Absolutely. All right, everybody, we'll catch you next time.
Outro: 25:17
Thank you for listening to the Cyber Funnel podcast. Tune in next time for more tips and insights. And be sure to click subscribe for future episode updates.
