Marketers are storytellers. They represent your brand in multiple ways, weave stories based on the essence of your brand. They are essentially the face of your organization to the outside world, providing sneak peeks into your company, generating enough curiosity to get to you through different media. The conductor of this orchestra is the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO).
This section of the C-suite wears multiple hats, and ought to have several tricks up its sleeve to make marketing happen. Customer engagement, driving the growth of the company, directs the company towards innovation, and, most importantly, driving the narration of the different facets of the company story across platforms.
Given the CMO’s and the marketing team’s relationship with the outside world, they uphold your brand’s status quo. Whenever this reputation is challenged, they are the ones who are on the front lines doing damage control. Whether it is a wrong statement by someone from the company or a product issue that went viral, they ensure your reputation is not tarnished. And worse, they have to experience public backlash when something as catastrophic as a data breach occurs. With the brand reputation, being so crucial to business, it is imperative that your CMO is fully involved in cybersecurity—there is simply no other way.
The 3 ways CMO can make or break cybersecurity –?
- It's all about data - Marketing possesses the most sensitive data and deals with potential and current customers. Thus, the CMO must ensure several data best practices are followed by the team. It can be as simple as stating the privacy policy on the website, that’s a start too. A CMO must understand the importance of even nitty-gritty details. While the marketing team collects data from various downloads and surveys, they ought to specify how it can be used. They must also provide an option for opting out of any marketing material. These are requirements for GDPR compliance, but it is not limited to EU citizens. GDPR can act as an outline for how the data of customers must be handled, irrespective of region. It doesn’t end with collecting data. Once the data is collected, they must also ensure it is handled safely. The customer data cannot just be spread across an excel worksheet and shared over email without any security measure in place. Vigilance with data sharing is critical. The marketing team might work off-site or remotely. There must be security practices on how important data has to be sent, outside the corporate network.
- The website clickbait: Hurry, the offer is up - It’s not a mere marketing gimmick, it is a psychology to generate curiosity among potential customers and get the deed done. To do so, marketing lingers on various websites daily. Social media websites, forums, and networking platforms, your marketing team spends an ardent amount of time on these platforms to get the word out on your services. Marketing is even given special privileges by IT to access these platforms. As they explore these websites, they must know the repercussions of setting foot on the wrong website. Websites without HTTPS://, clickbait notifications, phishing attempts, these are all very prominent on social networks. Their awareness to stray away from such attempts is crucial to your organizational security. The CMO must ensure the IT team has is equipped to handle the team’s digital spectrum.
- Discussion between the CIO, CISO, and CMO - More often than not, CMOs don’t hear from the CIO. They are of course, not answerable to them, but this creates a distance between data collection and data handling. Every C-suite is crucial in making cybersecurity a successful philosophy in your organization. CIOs must regularly interact with the CMO as they might have insights into data from a marketing and customer perspective which the CIO might lack. The CMO must discuss with the CIO while vetting Martech vendors. They will have insights from a data handling perspective. Third-party vendors, more often than not, end up becoming the back door to your security. This can be avoided by a simple discussion on how to carry it out. CMO must be a key participator in coming up with a possible incident plan. If ever, you are under cyberattack, the entire C-Suite must have a plan with dedicated roles of execution. With the CMO being the face of this to the media, they must know how to handle it, when to let the customers know and how to bring it under control.
The involvement of the entire C-Suite is a necessity. With different roles, you’ll get different perspectives, making your cybersecurity strategy all the more holistic. Include your CMO in your strategy and ensure your customer data and brand is always safeguarded.
