Security or data breaches are quite common in digital marketing and efforts need to be put in preventing and avoiding these breaches in the data that can result in leaking of confidential information to an unauthorized individual. A data breach primarily involves transfer of confidential information about a company or an online business to an untrusted individual or someone unauthorized to handle such information.
Examples of a data breach include stealing of confidential office data, financial details, account details, confidential hospital record information, and email hacking, etc.
Digital marketing activities involve the use of digital channels, such as search engines, social media, email, mobile apps, and websites, to promote a product, service, or brand, in order to reach and engage more potential customers and convert them into paying customers. Digital marketing helps brands to get large audience using digital communication channels.
Because of the risk of breach of sensitive data over digital channels of digital marketing, there is every need to proffer important digital marketing tips to prevent such security breaches while carrying out digital marketing activities.
Importance of Preventing Data Breaches in Digital Marketing
Data breaches in digital marketing can result in great financial losses and loss of confidentiality on your brand. Once your brand data security is compromised, the hacker can steal users information and ruin your marketing team’s efforts to convert potential users to paying users.
Breaches in company data could result in loss of revenue, the company’s intellectual property, its designs and blueprints, all of which can severely impact the company’s competitiveness in the market. Malicious use of the company data by the hacker can also lead to litigations against the company. These may result in increased financial losses from the lawsuits and compensations of those affected by the security breach.
The severity of the impact of data or security breach in your digital marketing campaign varies for different companies, the types of industries, the sensitiveness of the data collected, and on how long the brand has existed.
For sake of the numerous challenges associated with data breaches when engaging in digital marketing for your company, it is important to avoid and prevent it as much as possible. Here, you will find top tips to prevent data or security breach in digital marketing to avoid the consequences of data breach in digital marketing.
Tips to Prevent Data Breach in Digital Marketing
1. Restrict accessibility
The more people you give data accessibility to, the more the chance of data breach. For example, if 100 individuals in your digital marketing team have full access to your important data, you become vulnerable to data breach by a 100 times. On the other hand, if only 10 people have such access, it reduces the chances of a security breach by 90%. In summary, the less access your data has, the less the chances of a data breach.
2. Educate staff on data security
Being security conscious is an important way to prevent data breach in your company digital marketing campaigns. Take time to educate everyone in your team and prioritize data security. Employ the use of security firewalls, VPNs and the services of well-trained cybersecurity personnel.
Employee training on standard and/or advanced cybersecurity practices can prevent data breach in your company’s marketing campaigns. These cybersecurity practices include use of strong passwords, avoidance of access company’s data using public or devices owned by non-company members, and how to secure access once a suspicious login attempt is detected.
Educating your employees and all members of your digital marketing team about the consequences of data breach can make them get serious or reduce negligence about the matter of data security. In the end, any cost incurred in the process of educating staff on data security is always worth it.
3. Use an encryption certificate
An encryption certificate is a public key incorporated into data requests via digital channels, that ensures that data is securely transferred between the sender and the receiver. This is commonly known as SSL or TLS encryption and involves creating a secured tunnel for transfer of data.
Two general data encryption processes exist; the symmetric and asymmetric key encryption. In the symmetric key setup, both the sender and receiver use the same key at each of their end, for data encryption and decryption. While the asymmetric key design, which is considered more secure, uses a set of public and private keys different on both ends.
More technical details about use of encryption certificate will not be discussed here but it is important to use an encryption certificate when doing your digital marketing campaigns to prevent data or security breaches.
4. Identifying security risks
This can be achieved through firewalls that can detect security risks, loop holes and attempts to breach your data security. Detecting threats at the earliest time gives you a good opportunity to prevent them before they cause huge damage to your marketing efforts. It can also give you an idea of what to do to prepare for a counterattack by the same hacker.
5. Setting strong passwords
We talked about the importance of training your employees or members of the marketing team about security against data breach. One effective way to prevent data breaches is to use strong passwords containing a combination of letters, numbers, and special characters.
If you are required to store your digital marketing information like customer emails and other data, do so in special vaults with very strong passwords. Data and access networks should have lock passwords/keys easy enough to remember but hard enough for hackers not to identify. Also, passwords should be different for different accounts and changed regularly.
6. Implementing two-factor authentication for security
Email marketing is one good example of digital marketing. It involves the use of promotion emails to potential clients and customers. To protect your email data, two-factor authentication (2FA) as been created. 2FA helps prevent access to your account when your password is breached. It requires a second verification step where a secret key or OTP is sent to your backup email or phone number. This can help prevent breach in data by hackers.
7. Hardware and network monitoring
Hardware faults that permits sensitive data to become available to hackers need to be checked regularly. The network needs to be monitored regularly as well. Several users may have been connected over a local network using LAN or WiFi. This connection can be breached and sensitive data obtained if a hacker finds their way into the network. To prevent this, the network needs to be regularly monitored against intruders.
Both the hardware and network need to be at high performance, unnecessary data should be removed from the system, and outdated software updated to prevent security loopholes into company data.
8. Protect critical information and data
I may have mentioned something about this already. Critical information are crucial for the smooth running of your digital marketing operations. They include algorithms, marketing strategies, distribution structure, and others. It is important to separate these critical information from random data while storing critical data in specialized more secure digital storages.
9. Use a VPN
A VPN (Virtual Private Network) is a technology that allows users to create a secure, encrypted and anonymous connection to a remove network over the internet, thus enabling the users to access resources on the remote network as if they were physically present on the encrypted network.
It establishes a virtual encrypted tunnel over the public network, allocates a temporary hidden IP address, making it impossible for prying eyes such as hackers, government agencies, and internet service providers from tracking the origin of your system.
Asides from the benefit of protecting your network and shielding your internet identity, VPNs can also allow you to bypass region-specific restrictions, making it possible to run your marketing campaigns in those places where restrictions exist.
10. Cleaning junk or decluttering
Cleaning up the clutter is necessary to organize your workspace and make it easy to know your critical files and documents. Things start to become clumsy when the volume of unnecessary data increases. Programs, apps, or software that are no longer needed should be cleaned or moved to a different place to make it easier for you to work efficiently on your digital marketing campaigns. Sensitive data should be prioritized and maintained for its safety.
Final words
Digital marketing is fraught with several challenges, among which is the problem of data breach. A breach in your company’s data can result in huge financial and physical losses. Hence, it is important to understand ways to prevent such security breaches, as discussed above. Adherence to these tips and continuous reminder of yourself and members of your marketing team about the importance of preventing data breach are of paramount importance in protecting sensitive data from malicious attackers.
