The problems of data security in digital marketing

The problems of data security in digital marketing

These days marketing relies just as much on technology as understanding the psychology of your customers. Whether you’re using application integration solutions to gather and analyze data, or simply communicating with your team online, you’re using technology.

As more of your operations become exposed to the internet, you become more at risk to cyberattacks. Hacks and frauds can damage your brand, put your customers' data at risk, and harm your company.
‍With that in mind, let's go over the cybersecurity risks that marketers specifically need to worry about, and how to mitigate them.

Bots

Bots are everywhere on the internet. You'll know that bots are always visiting your site, and many of them have perfectly legitimate uses, like SEO ranking.
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Unfortunately, some are malicious. Typically, their goal is to gather data, but you might also see them used to click your pay-per-click ads in mobile ad fraud. These are clicks you're paying for, but they're not real customers who are seeing your product.
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These bots' presence can skew analytics data in any case, but in cases of ad fraud, they'll skew your data to increase a scammer's profits. Often they're inserted in digital marketing networks where partners will have to cross-check their analytics to make sure it all looks legitimate.
If the amount of traffic seems too good to be true, it probably is. A lot of visits from the same IP address is one feature that may suggest bot intervention. Use Google Analytics' filtering feature to eliminate these hits, and specialist tools to prevent ad fraud, and you'll protect yourself from this kind of cyberattack.
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Threats to customer data

As a marketer, it is easy to overlook how much data your company generates every day. When your online call centers are keeping data like call recordings and transcriptions, you get a lot of personal information very quickly.
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Any store of customer data is a cybersecurity risk: the more you have, the more worthwhile it becomes to hack. The best practice for marketers is to only collect the data you need, when you need it, and discard it if it's no longer needed. Customer data should be closely guarded, with passwords cycled regularly and nothing stored outside of the most secure devices.
‍Brand damage
Your brand is one of the most valuable assets you have. Imagine you’re selling a remote work solution, and you talk about topics such as how to improve security for business communications, or why encryption is important. Then imagine a security breach such as a DDoS attack happens. This would be catastrophic for your marketing.

But you don’t need to work in a related field for it to reduce trust - any company that puts customer data at risk will quickly gain a negative reputation.

It’s not just data breaches that can put your reputation at risk, either. If the marketing team is sloppy about handling the keys to the brand's social accounts you could find your marketing channels filled with spam or offensive content. Make sure access to your accounts are need-to-know only, passwords are regularly updated, and add two-factor authentication (2FA) wherever possible.
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