Why online security should underpin your marketing campaign

When it comes to creating a successful marketing campaign, data security might not be top of your priorities. But, whether you’re targeting a market directly or indirectly, a large part of your messaging is spent developing trust between your customers and all your business operations.

Whether you are engaging a new audience, targeting existing clients or attracting new ones, a loyal customer base requires reassurance to trust the security you have in the background behind your ecommerce operations and any digital platforms you operate through. 

As a business, you must earn the loyalty of your customers because they will only feel secure if they know that your business is secure. Likewise, any clients, employees, partners and suppliers all need to feel assured that online security matters to you as much as safeguarding customers’ privacy and data.

This article explores why online security needs to lie at the core of your marketing campaign. 

Building trust in the customers you engage with

Customers, therefore, must learn to recognise and trust your brand, feeling a personal connection to your product and believing in your authenticity. However, research by PwC actually suggests that 85% of consumers wish that companies could do more to show that they can be trusted with their data and online records. 

This is especially true in a world where many of us shop online and are happy to enter our personal details and bank information on to online platforms that we need to know are safe. So, there is much more that companies can do to make changes to the way that they operate; it is the marketing department’s job to communicate those changes.

Collecting and protecting data

It is a natural part of marketing for a business that you will collect a significant amount of customer data. This happens any time that someone signs up for an email newsletter, buys a product or gets in contact with your team about anything related to the company. And any time that a business collects data as a part of its work, you also need to think about protecting that data.

Under the UK’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and other similar data protection laws around the world, companies are required to ensure that customer data is secure. Failing to do so can result in major fines. But this is only a part of the problem. Companies can also get major publicity when they are fined under the GDPR, and this tells your customers that you are simply not as secure as you should be. 

Trust is vital and transparency naturally builds trust. For example, when customers have a full understanding of what your business does with their data and how you keep it secure, they feel more positive about your company. You can also take steps such as listing cybersecurity accreditations and making available the range of measures you have put in place to keep the company secure.

The only way to effectively combat this issue is to ensure that you are investing properly in both your data protection responsibilities and your digital security. The question of how to do this depends entirely on the specifics of your business, but there are many sensible ideas that any business can implement into their cybersecurity planning.

For example, putting an incident response plan into place helps you to ensure that you react as quickly as possible to any breach, and that everyone in the organisation understands their role in dealing with the attack. Some companies can benefit from outsourced cybersecurity for the benefits of 24/7 monitoring and pro-active threat detection. 

If you did need any further motivation it should be pointed out that suffering a data breach that you have not adequately prepared for can lead to you facing a huge potential fine of up to €20 million or 4% of worldwide turnover - whichever is greater. 

Safeguarding your website and training staff 

This means educating every member of the company (whether they work in-house or remotely) on how to best protect data and safeguard the site from potential cyber attacks. Doing so might involve working with outsourced digital security teams or hiring in-house.

You should make it a priority to keep those making the decisions completely informed about the potential risks of failing to invest properly in security. It can be easy to assume that the leadership team and marketing department understand the scope of the problem, but it is not always the case. It does become important to really consider your customers and make your marketing team more aware that forcing customers to use a complex password may frustrate them. Or, in the worst-case scenario, difficult passwords and obstructive online forms might even put customers off buying.

Also, the marketing department plays a role in creating customer-facing materials that help to keep them as informed as possible. With most companies today creating informative and relevant blogs to increase their marketing reach, your business website could also publish valuable cyber security training guides. 

Aimed at both internal staff and external customers, such resources can be powerful tools for informing customers on cybersecurity issues. Sharing information across a range of platforms such as social media or the company blog, is a task that the marketing team can be entrusted with. 

So, if no part of your website marketing budget goes into digital security, you can be leaving the site extremely vulnerable. For instance, if a hacker is successful in gaining the login details for a particular website, the impact is strongly limited if those login details do not work anywhere else.

Protecting your social channels and safeguarding SEO 

Likewise, with social media marketing playing a big part in promoting your brand and advertising the products you sell to a wider audience, looking after the security of your socials is paramount. Indeed, for many businesses, social media is a vital marketing channel that brings in multiple leads and sales. 

Of course, the problem is that your social media channel is considered an official channel to speak with customers or to provide marketing information. If a criminal has access to your social media platforms they can easily scam customers with fraudulent messages that come from what appears to be a legitimate page. 

Perhaps the biggest problem is that good SEO takes a very long time to build up, but getting a bad reputation happens extremely quickly, and can take an awful lot of time to ever fully recover from. It is a much better idea to put the property security measures in place to minimise the negative impact of an attack on your digital security. 

Protecting your entire business reputation

It is important to remember that there is so much more at stake for a business that suffers a crime against its digital security than simply the money that they could lose. Of course, the immediate financial loss either from direct theft or downtime of the business is a significant issue, but there is something that is actually significantly more serious.

When your business suffers a cyber attack, it is your reputation that takes a significant hit. Customers who suffer data loss as a result of your business not keeping their information secure may find it hard to trust your business in the future.

It is interesting to note that while building trust is a difficult task, it pales in comparison to the task of regaining trust. If you lose the trust of customers because you suffer a data breach it can be a real uphill battle to attempt to get them back on side. Customers are not forgiving of businesses that lose their personal information - there is no marketing campaign that can earn trust that has been lost. 

It is your reputation that is at stake, and it is not something that is easily fixed. As such, the best overall solution is to make digital security a serious part of your holistic marketing strategy and protect your company properly.