Censys
Rebuilding a security brand’s voice, and the social program that helped carry it.
Role: Content Marketing Manager, Censys (2024–2025)
Scope: Content workstream of a company-wide brand refresh; content strategy and execution across blog, social, and quarterly assets
The situation
Censys read the same as every other provider in the space.
The copy was technically accurate and competently written, but you could have swapped the logo for any other attack surface management company without anyone really noticing. For a company whose value rests on seeing the internet more clearly than anyone else, sounding interchangeable is a problem, because the audience it needs to convince isn’t susceptible to marketing language (like most audiences in tech).
The brand refresh was the chance to fix it. The content workstream needed a voice that set Censys apart from other security practitioners, and a style guide specific enough so that other people could write to it.
[Screenshot slot: Censys About Us page]
You can be smart, technical, and trustworthy while still writing the way people actually talk.
What I decided
That’s the argument I make everywhere. Security marketing tends to assume credibility requires a formal, deliberately distant register. In short: vague, generic, forgettable. The voice I defined was built to be useful to somebody doing the work, without the fluff and without the distance.
The guide had to work in other people’s hands. The job of a style guide is to make voice repeatable, so I rebuilt ours to define the tone concretely enough that anyone writing for Censys knew the criteria for hitting it.
What shipped
I rewrote or refreshed every solution page and main landing page as part of the refresh, including About Us and Careers.
Alongside that: weekly blogs, daily social, and five quarterly anchor assets.
Every solution and landing page rewritten
10%+
organic reach growth in Q1, across four platforms
The social program
Social ran as a separate workstream with its own result.
Before I started, the Censys LinkedIn presence served mostly as a dumping ground for event announcements and product launches. Posts were irregular and featured a narrow content mix, so it felt like the account spoke up only when the company wanted something.
Organic reach grew over 10% in Q1, because I focused on building a steady cadence and publishing a much wider range of content: marketing assets, third-party research, webinar invitations, thought leadership from company leaders, and HR-aligned posts that gave the account a human register alongside the technical one. We also focused on more platforms than just LinkedIn and X, including Reddit, BlueSky, and had teed up a YouTube shorts strategy that hadn’t launched before I left.
Marianne Chrisos 