230,000 new malware are produced each day.

$133,000 is the average cost of a ransomware attack that a company has to face.

66% of businesses have experienced phishing attacks in 2020 alone.

We do not know about you, but these numbers scare us more than Conjuring. 

That is how lethal it is to be hacked. This is why the European Commission proposed the EU Network and Information Security (NIS) Directive to enhance cybersecurity across the EU. Compliance with the NIS Directive ensures a company has the technical requirements to protect its data from threats.

If you still think you do not have to concern yourself about cyber-vigilance as a digital marketer or a business owner, we beg to differ. 

How Can Hacking Affect Digital Marketers?

Like any other business, a digital marketing firm is at risk of data breaches and malware infestation. Here are four ways you, as a digital marketer, can be seriously affected if you are not cyber-vigilant.

1. Malicious Bots and Where to Find Them

You must be familiar with Google bots that scour your website for ranking and various other reasons. 

Well, they have an evil twin. These are malicious or spoof bots.

These evil twins will attack your website to steal data. 

Or they skew up your Google Analytics data and seriously affect your marketing decisions. Think about it if you do not know what your website visitor wants, you cannot cater to it. Consequently, your conversion rates are going to go down.

In 2006, Clickbot.A a botnet infected 100,000 systems and made them automatically on PPC ads. Imagine having to spend that much money and not scoring one legit viewer.

Google Analytics can help you spot bots since they have trained software to do it. You can also look at your traffic insight charts and filter ones that seem suspicious. For example, successive visits from the same IP address is a red flag that escapes Google analytics. But it will not escape your keen gaze.

2. The Pursuit Of Precious Data

What does a hacker gain by ravaging your business?

What do they achieve?

The answer is simple: data

These days it is considered that data is more valuable than gold, and hackers want this precious substance. And as a marketer, you know your business is based on data. Put two and two together, and you have the predator and the prey.

There is a myriad of vital information in the hands of a marketer, such as credit card details, future strategies, contact information, etc. And these are like a honey trap for hackers.

In the wrong hands, contact information can be used for unwanted spamming. Credit card details can be used for fraud and robbing money. 

You can prevent most of this from happening by only giving authorization to sensitive data for a limited number of people. Make sure to update your old software to avoid breaching. It is also vital to teach your employees the importance of cybersecurity and urge them not to connect their devices to your network.

3.  The Journey to Losing Brand Image

Remember when the social media page of Facebook was hacked? It felt like a wake-up call for everyone.

All of us thought at least once that if hackers were capable of hacking facebook’s own social media page, then the same could happen to us.

See what happened here?

Facebook has been around for so long, but this minor incident was enough to make you skeptical about using it. Not to mention that Facebook must have experienced heavier financial losses because of the hack.

A minor DDoS attack can shut down your website temporarily. In the meantime, your consumers will wonder about your competency because of this. 

Do not fall prey to the vengeful mindset and protect your business from the risk of losing brand image.

4.  The Plagiarist Of Wolf Street

In an ideal world, people would pay for their marketing copies and images.

But sadly, the world is anything but fair.

When you spend money on high-quality copies, images, you expect them to be original. But the content you post online has a risk of getting plagiarized. 

Especially if you are in Software as a Service (SaaS) marketing, building trust is everything. And not to mention, it requires a lot of content to lure in your customers. Original content and plagiarism free help gain trust-worthiness among your customers.

Sending copies to a non-vigilant colleague can make you lose your copy for good. 

Always make sure to use online plagiarism checkers to check whether your copy is original. If you find a plagiarized copy, contact the blog owner to take the content down. You can also contact the web hosting server of that website for further assistance.

You Vs. The Hackers: Dawn Of Justice

Just in case you didn’t notice, we are movie buffs.

And we love happy endings. Hence we want you, the heroes, to emerge out victorious against the villains, aka the hackers.

So what should you do? It is pretty simple.

For starters, you can start by educating and empowering your fellow heroes, also known as your employees. Let it be formal meetings or training sessions but make it a priority to teach them why being cyber-vigilant is necessary.

Make sure to have a hierarchy of authorization levels. Not every employee requires access to all the data. You can give access to selected people and monitor the devices that get access periodically.

Employ white hat hackers to find out how hackable your network and database are. Once you know the grey areas, make sure to rectify them. This can further prevent hackers from exploiting you for their benefit and protecting you and your client’s data.

Finally, make sure to check out the NIS guidelines and follow them to the dot for maximized protection.

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Happy marketing!