What Marketing Looks Like at Unphish

At Unphish, marketing touches almost every part of the business.

It is the website, social media and content people see from the outside. But it is also sales collateral, proposals, events, brand design, campaigns, SEO, presentations and plenty of things that are much less visible.

For a growing technology company, that breadth matters. Marketing needs to understand the product well enough to explain it, the customer well enough to make it relevant, and the business well enough to know where to focus.

Sitting across all of that is Anna Vannisse, Marketing Associate at Unphish.

Anna joined Unphish as an intern early in her career and has grown with the business over the past year, taking on responsibility across an increasingly broad part of the marketing function.

And if there is one thing she enjoys about the role, it is the ownership that comes with it.

“I like being my own boss (until there’s an issue I need Ivor’s help with). I like being in charge of my own projects and having the freedom to execute my ideas and set my own goals. It’s really fun not being super restricted in what I can or cannot do.”

For Anna, that means having room to experiment, work things out and take something from an idea through to execution.

It also means that marketing at Unphish rarely fits neatly into one box.

“There is a lot that falls under marketing. The website? Marketing. SEO? Marketing. Sales collateral? Marketing. Xmas party planning? Marketing. What you’re reading right now? Yes, I coordinated this.”

That breadth is something she says she only really understood once she started doing the job.

And at Unphish, there is another challenge on top of it: the subject matter itself.

Cybersecurity, phishing, digital impersonation and threat intelligence can become technical very quickly. Good marketing cannot simply repeat the technical language and expect people to understand why it matters.

Anna has had to learn how to translate it.

“I try my best to put myself in the reader’s shoes as much as possible. I don’t have a technical background either, so I try to make the content easy to digest and not just a bunch of gibberish.”

In some ways, not coming from a technical background has helped.

If something is difficult for Anna to understand when she first encounters it, there is a reasonable chance other people outside the cybersecurity industry will feel the same way. Her job is to get to the point where she understands it properly, then find a simpler way to communicate it.

Sometimes that process is very literal.

Early on, Anna sat down with one of Unphish’s threat analysts and asked him to take her through the platform and service properly.

“I remember having a proper session with DJ (one of our analysts) where I got him to explain everything about Unphish. I remember thinking, ‘People should know about this,’ and ‘I would buy this service if I had a company,’ because it was actually such a good idea for a service and is really beneficial to organisations.”

That growing understanding of the product has shaped how she thinks about the Unphish brand as well.

She says one of the things that has stood out most during her first year is how quickly both the product and the people around it continue to develop.

“I think Unphish is different because of how fast we keep developing. Not just the platform itself, but as a company too. The people here are very hardworking and really care about what they do.”

Marketing a cybersecurity business is not just about making things look good. To communicate the business properly, you need to understand what customers are facing, what the technology does and why any of it should matter to the person reading.

A lot of that learning has come from working across the team.

When asked what she has learnt from sales, Anna’s first answer is perhaps best taken with a grain of salt.

“Well, from sales… nothing. I’m joking. I love the sales team.”

Fortunately, she had a little more to add.

“They’ve basically taught me what I need to know about our target audience, prospects and buyers. They’ve also taught me what kind of activities usually work best in a B2B space, because sales and marketing are very closely related.”

Threat Operations has provided another perspective entirely.

Working alongside the analysts has exposed her to the threats Unphish customers are actually experiencing, including scams and techniques she did not know existed before joining the business.

“From Threat Operations, I’ve learned a lot about threats in general and the types of threats we’re seeing across our clients and the wider industry. Some scams I didn’t even know existed before. They are getting super advanced and scary!”

And working with product has given her a better understanding of the technology sitting underneath everything she is communicating.

That cross-functional view matters because Anna has developed a pretty clear opinion on what makes good B2B marketing work.

Relevance comes first.

“This is a hard one because I think everyone is still figuring this out. But from what I’ve seen, the things that work best are usually super targeted. It needs to speak to the right person, in the right industry, about a problem they are actually dealing with.”

That means resisting the temptation to simply talk about the company or product.

“It can’t just be general ‘look how great we are’ content. It needs to feel relevant to them and show that we understand the issue they are facing.”

It is a simple principle, but an important one.

Good marketing should not make the audience do the work of figuring out why something matters to them. It should demonstrate that you understand their environment and the problem they are trying to solve.

Another part of Anna’s role that has developed significantly is design.

She now works across the website, sales collateral, slide and proposal templates, brochures, merchandise and much of the visual material associated with Unphish.

It has meant learning that good design is not necessarily about making something according to your own taste.

“I’ve learned how to make something feel like Unphish, without making it too much about my personal style. If I was making slides at uni, I’d probably make them pink and pretty, but with Unphish I have to think about the product, the industry we’re in, and what feels right for the team and the brand.”

For Anna, that has meant learning to design with a purpose beyond simply making something visually appealing.

“I think I’ve developed the skill of making something work for the brand, even if it’s not always what I would personally choose. It has taught me how to design with more purpose.”

That same willingness to learn by doing is a big part of what she has enjoyed about developing in a startup environment.

There is not always an established playbook, and the answer to a new idea cannot automatically be no simply because it has not been done before.

“I love that we are all here for the same goal. Everyone is very locked in and adaptable, and I’ve learned to be super adaptable and flexible to make things work.”

For Anna, there is also a mindset that goes with that.

“You have to have a positive mindset of, ‘Yes, we can do this,’ for things to progress and grow. Especially in a tech space like this, you have to stay open-minded and willing to try things. If you get stuck saying no too quickly, it becomes really hard to keep progressing and growing.”

In Anna’s first year at Unphish, she has seen the platform develop, the company grow and people around her step into increasingly senior roles.

That pace is part of the appeal.

One of the projects that brought many of those different parts together was the launch event for Unphish’s latest platform release.

Anna was responsible for organising the event, bringing together clients, partners and the broader team for the launch.

“That was super fun to organise and, not to brag, but it went pretty well! I got to see our beloved clients and partners all together, which was kind of a first for me, and it was a really special night for the team as well.”

For someone whose work often exists on screens, in campaigns or behind the scenes, there was something particularly satisfying about seeing the result physically come together in one room.

“I also loved that this project felt very tangible. There was so much planning behind it, so being able to actually see it all come together in front of my eyes was really rewarding.”

It also reflected how broad her role has become.

From learning the technology, to understanding customers, creating campaigns, designing collateral and bringing people together at events, marketing at Unphish requires a little bit of everything.

Outside of work, there is still plenty going on.

Anna has become a committed Pilates regular, currently making it to classes around five days a week.

“Pilates! I’ve been going five days a week, and on the days I don’t go, I also feel like something is missing. I love hot mat and hot strength Pilates.”

She also plays the drums, although in her words, she is “not good enough to brag about that yet”.

That willingness to keep learning is probably an appropriate place to finish.

Because what marketing looks like at Unphish is not simply publishing content or managing a brand.

It is understanding a technical product, staying close to the people building and selling it, learning what customers actually care about, and then finding a way to make all of that clear and relevant to the outside world.

For Anna, it has also meant being given room to take ownership early, learn quickly and grow alongside the business.

And after her first year, she is really only getting started.