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# You Don't Have To Say Everything, To Everyone All At Once
- URL: https://www.cybrsecmedia.com/you-dont-have-to-say-everything-to-everyone-all-at-once/
- Published: 2026-10-09T14:21:32.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-09T14:32:07.000Z
- Description: A product may have ten important features, but that does not mean every communication needs to explain all ten. The job of marketing is to establish quickly why the target audience should be interested in the product, and move them to the next stage.
- Author: Lucy Millington
- Tags: Adventures in Cyber Comms and PR, blog, CYBR.SEC.Community, Cybersecurity Marketing

*It's not just internal comms that suffers with noise overload. If you are frustrated that your potential customers don't understand your product value or analysts put you in the wrong category, then maybe it's time to start saying less more often.*

Long before *Everything Everywhere All at Once* became a film title, I found myself often repeating a version of the same phrase, you do not need to say everything, to everyone, every time.

It came up most during press release editing, preparing spokespeople for interviews, or when developing a pitch. It is a natural instinct for an enthusiastic leader to want to explain all the capabilities of the technology and the many reasons the audience should care, at every opportunity.

I used to remind technical leaders that one, people have short attention spans; two, they carry multiple priorities; and three, busy people have a low tolerance for irrelevance. TL;DR became part of the tech vernacular because even when we are interested in something, we don't always make time to read it.

And that is why some technical companies find marketing really hard.

The instinct to try to say everything you can do, every time you communicate, often makes it harder for people to understand why they should care. Scale-up cybersecurity companies are vulnerable to this because they often have sophisticated products and leaders who are very close to the technology. They understand the architecture, know what was difficult to build and are proud of the innovation underneath it. When it comes to marketing the product, there can be an expectation that all ten important features and five possible use cases should be front and centre because they have sat in many meetings and remember all the technical detail that interested the customer at that time.

## **Levels of detail should change through the buyer journey**.

The job of marketing is to establish quickly why the target audience should be interested in the product and move them to the next stage of a buyer journey. This can look to the people who built the product as though important information has been left out or suffered the worse crime of having its value "dumbed down." But if that first question of "does this fix my problem?" is difficult to answer, adding more product features, speeds, and feeds rarely clarifies it further. 

Google Wave offers an example of when the feature list is not enough. Google had the marketing expertise and brand recognition when Wave launched in 2009, combining elements of email, instant messaging, collaboration and real-time communication. The product was innovative for the time, yet people struggled to understand what to do with it. The little marketing it had focused on the breadth of the technology and didn’t explain how it benefited the user, which was cited as one of a few reasons that it didn't take off. Google announced it was stopping development of Wave in 2010 after disappointing user adoption.

## **Every communication should have an identified primary objective**.

Marketing describe products in the simplest, most obvious terms because they understand how much the audience can absorb at any one time, and because they know they have more than one opportunity to tell the story. 

Your press interview needs to establish a market issue and drive enough interest to perhaps read your blog, which in turn needs to describe the challenge and why it matters enough to drive readers to download a whitepaper that describes exactly how your solution solves the challenge a customer faces. Customers absolutely need to understand the architecture, controls, and integrations before they buy a security product, but only when they have decided that the product belongs on the consideration list. Each communication at each stage of the journey should have a simple purpose and trying to make one piece of communication perform all of those jobs at once will dilute its ability to do anything.

Effective communication is about matching the content to who is listening and where they are in their understanding. It means resisting the temptation to have every marketing piece carry the entire company story and instead be deliberate about what each interaction is supposed to achieve. 

Before rewriting a press release, approving a campaign, or even starting your own pitch presentation, ask yourself: who is this for, why do they need it, and what do they need to know or do next? Make sure you are sharing what that audience will benefit from knowing, not just everything you want to tell them.

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