How To Protect Your Digital Marketing Campaigns From Cyber Threats

aren’t turning to secured digital marketing channels to reach more customers. In the process, they’re also more exposed to greater cyber threats. After all, your digital campaigns are storing various types of sensitive customer data that are a valuable target for cybercriminals. 

From malware to phishing attacks, numerous cybersecurity threats can jeopardize your digital marketing campaigns and disrupt your business operations. Thus, you want to implement security measures to secure and protect critical data from your digital marketing campaigns.

To help you get started, this post shares four tips to help protect your digital marketing campaigns. Keep on reading to learn more. 

1. Collect Only What You Need

As a marketer, you probably want every piece of customer data you can get your hands on which may be valuable for your campaign. But you shouldn’t overdo it. 

Keep in mind: the less data you have, the less vulnerable your business is. There are also other benefits to limiting data collection from improving customer trust to reducing overall data management costs. 

Ideally, you should only gather the info your need for marketing purposes. But this is easier said than done. All customer data seems to be useful in your campaign. To avoid hoarding data, you need to determine where the extra data comes from. You also need to spend time evaluating all the data you collect and store. In general, if the data isn’t needed, don’t collect it just for the sake of collecting it. 

2. Secure Your Software And Credentials

Marketers use various digital tools to manage local lead generation and marketing campaigns, sales, and customer data. These tools help keep everything controlled while streamlining mundane, repetitive tasks. 

Since these tools hold a huge amount of valuable data, you want to make sure that they’re secure. One thing you need to do is to always keep the software you use updated. Outdated software may contain security vulnerabilities that hackers and cybercriminals can exploit to gain access. Thus, you want to stay on top of regular updates for each tool you use and install updates as soon as they’re available. This help closes security gaps in your system, making it more difficult for hackers to break in. 

Aside from keeping your marketing tools secure, you should take good care of your login credentials on these online tools. Never reveal your login credentials to outsiders, regardless of who asks you to. Also, make sure to use strong, hard-to-guess passwords. 

Passwords are the weakest link in your security chain. Cybercriminals can use various methods to steal or guest passwords. And when they have it, hackers can gain access to marketing tools and steal valuable data. Thus, you want to make your passwords more secure. In general, the best passwords use a combination of lowercase and uppercase letters, symbols, and numbers. You should never reuse passwords, creating unique passwords for every tool you use. This way, other tools can remain secure even if one password becomes compromised. 

3. Train Your Team

Did you know that over 80% of security breaches are caused by employees? This just shows how big of a security risk your employees are. All it takes is simply opening an unknown email and malware can enter your business’s networks and wreak havoc on your marketing data. 

To prevent this security breach, you want to invest in employee cybersecurity training. This can be done through in-person training sessions, circulating a security policy, or enrolling them in online courses. Cybersecurity training allows you to create a strong security culture within your business and can go a long way in securing your digital marketing campaigns against cyber threats. 

4. Always Back Up

Regardless of how well-structured your cybersecurity protocols are, no security strategy is fully breach-proof. Even with your best efforts to protect data, there’s always a chance that your digital marketing initiatives and collected data could be hacked, disrupting your entire business. 

To minimize the impact of a potential cybersecurity breach, regular backup is a must. This way, if your system is compromised, a data backup allows you to restore damaged or lost files and keep your business operations going. 

What’s more, data backup has never been more convenient than ever. With cloud systems, you can simply set up automated backups so you don’t have to worry about remembering backup schedules. Cloud backups allow you to access your data from any internet-connected device with ease. 

Takeaway

Marketers are busier than ever. As the digital era brought several opportunities to connect and build relationships with customers, it has also opened pandora’s box of security threats. Thus, you need to stay sharp and implement the abovementioned tips and strategies to prevent security mistakes that can create a huge dent in your business’ reputation.