Marketing departments’ dependence on online digital tools and platforms means delegating all cybersecurity matters to the company’s IT team is no longer an option. As a manager, it is your responsibility to ensure your team operates with essential cybersecurity for marketing precautions in mind. This article brings all the answers regarding which precautions you should implement.
Data Privacy and Protection in Cybersecurity for Marketing
Marketing is among any company’s most data-dependent departments. Everything from lead generation through campaign planning to your coordinated social media presence generates data. Much of that data is sensitive, whether it’s customers’ personal and financial information or company secrets, patents, etc.
A secure data sharing and storage policy should be among a marketing manager’s top priorities. This entails data encryption at rest and in transit, as well as familiarity with and adhering to data protection standards and laws like CCPA and GDPR.
Safeguarding personal and business data is gaining importance, especially now that consumers are increasingly aware of their rights and willing to exercise them. For example, It’s become popular to use data removal services to have data brokers remove records they have on individuals. Being transparent about data usage and offering a straightforward opt-out policy can be a potent marketing tool to attract privacy-conscious clients.
Secure Data and Account Access
The reputation you’ve painstakingly built up for your brand may suffer a hit it will never recover from if data breaches expose sensitive data you’re in charge of. Mitigating this risk involves coordinating with the IT team to set up tiered and controlled access. That way, team members can only work with files needed for current projects. Meanwhile, logging helps identify incidents sooner and prevents malicious insiders from exposing stored data.
Enforcing a strong password policy is imperative. Accounts for all the CRMs, social media, analytics tools, and other marketing tools all need unique, complex passwords and two-factor authentication to be truly secure. Enterprise-level password managers help streamline the process and securely store newly generated passwords.
Be Aware of Scams in Cybersecurity for Marketing
Interacting with followers, searching for potential partners, and dealing with dozens of emails per day means a marketer is much more likely to come across a scam than the average person. In fact, some scammers tailor their practices to target unaware marketers.
For example, a seemingly legitimate “influencer” might contact you on social media for a collaboration opportunity, only to vanish once they get paid. Other scammers pose as companies that promise to boost your social media presence or drastically improve your SEO in a suspiciously short time. When interacting with third-party vendors, make sure that the vendor is legit — we have all heard of PayPal scams, after all.
Phishing emails are also common. They appear to come from potential clients, social media platforms, or event promoters. Such emails usually lure marketers in with “exciting growth opportunities” or ask them to provide account information to fix a supposed problem. Either way, a marketer who falls for this scam may unwittingly grant hackers account access or infect company systems with malware.
Continuous cybersecurity marketing training focused on specific scenarios marketers may experience ensures your team can identify, ignore, and report such incidents.
Choose the Right Cybersecurity for Marketing Vendors
Modern marketing is highly interdependent. While this lets you target audiences with pinpoint precision or instantly create a buzz that puts most pre-internet campaign results to shame, it also involves risks. You can invest in employee training and set up formidable cybersecurity for marketing defenses yet still become a victim when a third-party vendor suffers a data breach.
Thoroughly vetting vendors, reading over their privacy policies, and specifying strong security measures they need to implement as a prerequisite for working with your company greatly reduce the risk.
Develop an Incident Response Plan
A security breach or other incident may still affect your company despite your best efforts. During such crises, the marketing department is instrumental in managing the company’s reputation and getting things back in working order ASAP. Preparing and following an incident response plan beforehand will make a huge difference.
Incident response plans account for various threatening situations and outline the steps necessary to mitigate the fallout. They include strategies for identifying and containing the incident, maintaining normal operations, role delegation, and practices that help identify & eliminate factors that lead to an incident in the first place.
Conclusion
While not in the job description, cybersecurity awareness needs to be a crucial part of any marketer’s toolkit. This is especially true for marketing managers since they coordinate others’ efforts and are directly responsible for any repercussions stemming from their team’s lack of knowledge and preparedness. Reference this article whenever you’re in doubt to make your cybersecurity efforts more effective.