Do You Have The Keys To Your Online Business?
Don’t Get Locked Out of Your Digital Kingdom
Digital marketing is a powerful tool that can help your business achieve a variety of goals, such as website traffic, leads, and sales. Directing it properly ensures alignment with your business goals and keeps your messaging consistent across all channels. As a company leader, marketing doesn’t have to be your primary role or skill set, but you should maintain an umbrella of ownership. This means having owner/administrative rights to the online accounts for your business.
Even if you are not the person in your organization who manages your website and marketing, never lose your “keys to your digital kingdom”.
It may be easy to delegate your digital accounts to an employee or vendor, but that may leave you in a precarious place. Here’s how – that employee may leave and take your accounts’ access information with them, vendors can close their doors, disappear or have a falling out with you over services; time differences or communication delays can prevent a much needed update from being made in a timely manner. All of these access issues could prevent your company from staying in control of its website and online marketing.
In addition, by having administrative rights, you can make changes quickly and easily, without having to wait for someone else to make the changes for you. This can be especially important when you need to make quick changes in response to an outside factor such as weather, power outages and supply issues; or to take advantage of new opportunities.
Never Lose Control of These Online Accounts
Here is a list of critical accounts that you should have owner/administrative access to as the business owner. It doesn’t matter if you are working with a marketing agency, freelancer, IT company, in-house marketing team or any combination of these. Ultimately, it is your responsibility to be able to access these core accounts:
- Website Login – Sounds basic, right? But many businesses leave this up to their Web Developer. You need top level access of your own in case you ever need to remove/add a User or make changes. Never put yourself in a position to be locked out of your own website!
- Hosting Login – One day your hosting may have technical difficulties and go down or you might want to switch hosting services. Have this information in-house for safekeeping.
- Domain Registration – Wouldn’t it be horrible if all of the time and money you’ve invested in your domain name/web address was suddenly lost? It happens! If you can’t renew or point your domain name to a new hosting service when you need to do so, you might have to abandon it. If it isn’t renewed a competitor could buy it – or even try to sell it back to you for an outrageous sum! Don’t rely on others to keep this information safe for you. Have it in your master list of logins and passwords.
- Social Media Accounts – This means all of them, even those that may be linked to others or attached to an auto posting dashboard such as HubSpot or HootSuite.
- Google Account – With Google being the source of 80+% of searches and a strong source of marketing data, you will always need to make your Google accounts a priority in your password inventory. Google Business Profiles (fka Google My Business), Google Analytics, Google Search Console and even Google Ads can all be tied into one master Google account. Keep it close to your heart.
As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is truly worth a pound of cure. It’s been our experience that all too often we’re ready to start working with client when the client discovers they don’t know who has access to these critical accounts. By having control and access to your accounts at any time, you can ensure that your digital marketing efforts will always be in your control – regardless of who may come and go within your organization.
Playing It Safe
So, how can you secure these crucial accounts? Here are a few tips:
Use a Password Manager
Even if you typically keep your master list of passwords stored in a safe place, such as a locked cabinet, or password-protected document, it’s far safer if you switch to using a password manager such as LastPass or RoboForm. Just be sure don’t lose your own access to it! #ithashappened
Create Strong Passwords and Keep Them Confidential
This means choosing passwords that are difficult to guess and not sharing them with anyone.
In addition, be sure to change your passwords regularly, and use different passwords for different accounts. This will help protect your accounts from unauthorized access. NOTE: Keep your list updated!
Make Use of Separate User Accounts
Always have separate user accounts for individual employees or vendors that you wish to delegate account access to and remove user accounts for ex-employees or vendors you no longer are working with.
Use a Secure Login Process
Another way to protect your accounts is to use a secure login process. This means using a unique username and password to log in to your accounts.
In addition, be sure to use a secure connection (https://) when logging in. This will help protect your login information from being intercepted by hackers.
By following these tips, you can maintain control and access to your digital marketing accounts, ensuring that they are protected for the lifetime of your company.
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