Modern marketing is nothing if not digitally dependent. It's become common to generate all sorts of marketing assets in the cloud, not to mention handing access to sensitive campaign or customer information over to third parties. In such environments, cybersecurity consciousness isn't a desirable extra. It's absolutely essential.
Effective cybersecurity implementation requires team effort. As a leader, it's your responsibility to both set the tone and make the transition to a safer, more responsible approach to marketing. Here are the steps you should take to usher a security-conscious culture into your team's daily operations without stifling creativity or impacting workflows.
Facilitate and Encourage Regular Training
Marketers interact with diverse people, brands, and third parties much more than other company departments. As such, they're more likely to be the target of social engineering attacks. If anything, brand notoriety can attract sophisticated scammers posing as influencers looking for partnerships or vendors that offer fake services.
Regularly engaging in tailor-made cybersecurity training will equip your team with all the tools they'll need to handle anything from spotting phishing scams and domain spoofing to safely managing social media accounts and vetting third parties.
Promote Safe Credential Handling
Each member of your team likely uses dozens of tools to optimize their workflow. Some, like CRMs and email marketing platforms, amass and work with a lot of diverse and sensitive customer data. Having it exposed in a breach may cause irreparable financial and reputational damage to the company, and that's far from ideal.
Since compromised credentials are responsible for the majority of such breaches, stressing the importance of their effectiveness can't be overstated. Rather than leaving credential security up to the individual, help protect everyone by integrating an enterprise password manager, which will provide an effective and straightforward access control to everyone within your team or even the company.
Enterprise password managers generate as many complex and unique credentials as each team member needs for all their accounts. A single master password per person is required, and zero-knowledge policies ensure credentials are only visible to the person who uses them and those they choose to share them with securely.
Establish a Clear and Actionable Security Policy
Secure passwords are just one crucial component of an overarching framework of cybersecurity best practices you should implement.
For example, this policy should outline which tools team members are authorized to use when collaborating on projects or creating marketing assets. It should also outline how assets should be backed up and stored.
The policy should help create an atmosphere of trust and accountability. Encourage teammates to voice their security concerns. Focusing on resolution rather than blame will also make unreported and unaddressed human error less likely.
Since working with third parties and influencers boosts campaign results, it's important to vet the right ones first and ensure their track record and practices align with your cybersecurity expectations.
Lastly, put together an incident response plan. Having one will help define team members' roles and responsibilities in the event of a cyber threat and help take actionable steps to mitigate it in time.
Proactively Monitor for Cyber Threats
Brands with a reputation to uphold can't afford to react to cyber threats after the fact. Using threat intelligence tools to monitor for them proactively can prevent early warning signs from turning into large-scale issues.
On the one hand, threat intelligence tools keep tabs on the dark web. They may uncover plans to target your brand or ongoing campaigns through means like exposed credentials, giving you precious time to prepare for and mitigate them.
On the other hand, threat intelligence tools scan the internet for typosquatting and different types of domain impersonation. These can severely impact your company's reputation by extracting information from unsuspecting users or committing fraud. Knowing of such a site's existence as soon as it appears lets you issue takedown requests.
Coordinate with the IT Team
Working on heightening your marketing team's cybersecurity awareness is crucial for the company's resilience to threats. However, placing the cybersecurity burden on their shoulders alone is neither fair nor necessary, especially if your company has a dedicated IT team.
Siloing marketing from IT leads to longer threat detection times and weaker data handling and access policies. Conversely, collaborating closely with the IT team helps everyone out.
They're invaluable help during campaign or website launches since they can ensure the security of assets and domains. It's also advisable to run third-party tools and vendors past IT first to get their expert opinion on potential security risks or data handling issues.
Implementing Security into the DNA of Your Marketing
It takes time and effort to make a marketing culture that cares about security, but the payoff is significant. By providing your team with thorough training, secure credential management, clear policies, proactive monitoring, and IT collaboration, you can protect your company and your team. This approach will allow them to create without fear in an increasingly connected digital world.
