What is the most valuable asset of your company, the one you need to protect above all else? You might think that the answer to this question varies by company or industry, but it doesn’t. Your most valuable asset is your customers’ personal information.

How can digital marketing help protect your customer?

1. Reputation management
2. Secure your website

Reputation Management

Monitoring reputation digital is about more than sentiment and reviews. Using social listening can monitor for cybercriminals stealing your content and posing as your business in a lookalike account. Cybercriminals use these social accounts to lead your current and potential customers to websites that contain malware, gather their data in messages or comments or otherwise compromise your customer data, all while posing as your company. Therefore, protecting your social content protects your customer data and your reputation.

There’s an SEO factor to reputation management, as well. Search engines have improved over the years at pushing down nefarious websites that pretend to be legitimate. However, the risk of stolen content used on a domain that looks similar to your own is still a risk. Keeping an eye on sites that begin ranking for your brand keywords can help find and remove the stolen duplicate content with a DMCA request. Set up Google alerts for your brand name and content, search using Copyscape to find plagiarized content, and use Google Search Console to submit takedown requests when you find duplicate content.

Secure Your Website

There are multiple ways to secure your domain. The first and most important way is to keep your site updated. The easiest way for your site to be compromised is when there is a known security flaw in your CMS. As soon as updates are released, install them. Include any plugins used on the site in the updates. Once a patch is released, the vulnerability it fixes is widely known, and cybercriminals take advantage of those sites that do not promptly update. Depending on the security flaw, infect your customers’ computers with malware, stealing sensitive information entered on the site to take over your entire site, causing downtime where your customers can’t reach you.

There’s one other important aspect to securing your domain. Regularly search for lookalike sites where the hostname is nearly identical to your company’s with either common typos or foreign characters that look indistinguishable from the actual characters. There are two main dangers from lookalike sites:

• These sites can be used to gather customer data and for financial gain by pretending to legitimately sell your products or providing the same services your company does, using content stolen from your site.
• The second is through email phishing using the lookalike domain email address. With a lookalike domain email server, phishing emails are sent to your customers or your employees, putting both at risk for data loss. Since the domain looks like your own, it can be mistaken for a legitimate email, making the phishing more likely to succeed. Phishing email content can vary, but the end goal for each is the same: to gain access to customer or financial data, compromise systems through ransomware or other types of malware, or otherwise damage your reputation or systems for financial or personal gain by the cybercriminals.

There are many aspects of cybersecurity to use in your day-to-day life as a digital marketer. Everything from password management to restricting access to sensitive data impacts your ability to keep your customers safe. Reputation management and securing your website are just two tools to help secure your reputation and data.