Guide to Safeguarding Your Digital Assets in 2024

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about your business assets? Some will think about tangibles like real estate, equipment, and cash. Others will consider their intangibles – intellectual property and branding, for example. However, one type of business asset you probably didn’t think about? Your digital assets. These form the foundation of your business presence online. And too many organizations either don’t realize the importance of these digital assets or aren’t sure how to claim and secure them.

Having a plan in place for safeguarding your digital assets ensures that you’ll have full control and ownership over your online presence. So, here’s a guide on how to form and implement that plan.

What Constitutes Your Organization’s Digital Assets?

Anything that you use to promote your business on the internet can be considered a digital asset. Every business is different, depending on how engaged it has been with the web, its priorities, and its target audience. But here are several digital assets that most organizations will have in common:

• A Website: The website forms the foundation of your digital presence. This encompasses every detail of the site, from the design and programming to the domain and hosting.
• Social Media Profiles: Social is a critical component for marketing your business to potential customers and needs to be treated as such.
• Email/Customer Lists: If your business keeps lists of customers for marketing or retargeting purposes, this also counts as a digital asset.
• Google Suite Accounts: Google’s tools, such as Search Console and Business Profiles, are powerful ways for you to optimize your online presence and understand how your website is performing.

Why is it Important to Protect Your Digital Assets?

The purpose of any business asset is to generate value in some way. That’s why businesses go to great lengths to insure and protect their assets – it’s how they stay in business. And it should be no different with digital assets.

In fact, digital assets are arguably the most important assets that organizations should be thinking about protecting. Most of the time, they are front-facing – one of the easiest ways for your business to reach its customers and grow.

Think about it this way – what would you do if you had access to a competitor’s website or social media page? Leaving aside the ethics of this scenario, chances are you’d want to take steps to ensure your own business’s website or social channels would show up ahead of your competitor’s.

Businesses that don’t secure their digital assets and protect them fiercely put their online presence at risk of being compromised. At best, their efforts to reach their target customers will be ineffective and weak. At worst, their accounts could be the target of cyberthieves and hackers.

The Steps to Digital Asset Protection

Once you’ve identified your organization’s digital assets, you’ll need to take steps to secure them. This can be a cumbersome and lengthy process, especially if your organization has been lax in its management to this point. But here are some initial steps that you should take.

1. Identify Who Has Access to Assets (and Who Actually Needs It)

The vast majority of digital assets operate on the principles of access rights. In other words, you typically won’t have a central account with one set of login credentials to access them. You’ll have an asset (an ad account, a social media profile, a website, etc.) and you’ll have users with their own separate accounts. These users are then given access rights to the assets.

So, your number one first step needs to be to identify who has access to these assets. Check to see what level of access they have. While every asset is different, you’ll usually have an admin level (where the user has full control over everything), and several levels of access below that. The admin is the most important – they control everything about the asset and who else has what level of access to it.

The admin for the asset needs to be someone high up in the organization. For small businesses, the owner is usually the best option. Larger organizations may have an entire branch or department dedicated to this, where a C-suite executive may be the safest bet.

2. Dole Out Permissions

Once you’ve secured the admin rights to the digital assets of your business, you’ll need to give permissions to your team. The key principle to follow here is known as “least privilege”: users should only have as much access to specific accounts or data as they need to complete a task.

For example, you may have a digital marketing specialist working on your outreach efforts on social media. For this scenario, you’ll want to give editor-level access to that user – it allows them to create posts and see analytics. However, it doesn’t give them permission to add other users or make fundamental changes to the information on the account.

Another example would be if you wanted an agency to audit your Google ads and present a proposal to increase the performance of your campaigns. Here, you can give the agency read-only access to your Google ad account. They are only able to see the data – they cannot make any changes to the campaigns or the billing.

The advantage of this setup is that there is no need for centralized user credentials for each asset’s account. Users set up their own user accounts with their own passwords and use these credentials to access the asset. Central control of the assets remains with the user designated as the admin. The admin designates exactly how much access each user account has and can change this at any time as needs dictate.

3. Continually Audit

Once you’ve gotten your digital assets and access rights under control, don’t just stop there. Audit your process periodically to ensure that you’re continuing to follow the principle of least privilege. Whenever you set up a brand new digital asset – like a new social channel or a new customer list – follow the same process.

Check in to ensure that your digital presence is fully controlled by your organization. If you notice duplicate accounts, there’s usually a process that you can follow to remove or merge these accounts.

Whenever your organization turns over staff, ensure that all access rights are removed promptly. Change passwords if necessary to ensure your staff doesn’t take your digital assets with them.

Take Charge of Your Digital Assets Now

Over the years, we’ve seen so many companies struggle with their online presence because they weren’t careful about their digital assets. It’s worth mentioning that it can be very challenging to reclaim these assets, especially on platforms like Facebook. Sometimes it’s even impossible to reclaim them, and the only way forward is to start over – a process that no one enjoys and that can potentially cost organizations a lot of lost revenue.

What’s the key takeaway that we hope you gain from this? If you haven’t taken the security of your digital assets seriously up to this point, it’s a good time to start!

Secure Your Digital Assets with Services from Pink Dog Digital!

Ready to put your digital assets to work for your organization? We can help! At Pink Dog Digital, we can create a digital experience that turns users into followers and followers into customers. Our team of marketing experts can create a customized strategy to meet your needs. 

Some of our services include:

• Digital advertising
• Social media management
• Content creation
• Search engine optimization
• Web design

Contact us at 410-696-3305 or email us at pinkdogdigital@gmail.com for any inquiries or to book a service. You can also fill out our online Contact Us form or visit our website to learn more about us.