Companies must work harder to provide captivating visual material in the world of modern business if they want to stand out from the competition. For instance, social media marketing was originally thought to be a simple way for businesses to reach more people, but marketing is now much more competitive than simply posting a post and hoping it goes viral.
Businesses stand out online thanks to entertaining short-form content and eye-catching images, but it's crucial to maintain awareness of your cybersecurity and data protection. For instance, an apparently innocent workplace video posted on social media may unintentionally reveal crucial business information in the backdrop.
Making life as tough as possible for thieves is essential since cybercrime assaults on organisations might originate from many facets of contemporary society. Let's examine how a company's visual marketing may make it more susceptible to cybercrime and how to be vigilant about the risks.
What are company visuals, exactly?
Organizations and brands may use visual marketing as a potent tool to present their goods and services to a global audience. Visuals may take many forms in the era of digital marketing, including images, videos, and infographics. With the help of these diverse visual content formats, businesses and brands can quickly and effectively express a complicated tale.
Video is currently one of the most significant digital marketing mediums, supporting virtually any sort of content, from social media to TV advertising. The appeal of creating social media material, whether through photography or video, is that everyone can do it. In fact, social media content production is so well-liked that it is even included as one of the top dream careers for children.
However, in terms of marketing, businesses must make an effort to get their graphics right by being true to their brand, producing high-quality photos or videos, and selecting the appropriate audience. Failure to do so could be seen as a missed chance to benefit from strong marketing imagery.
Be cautious before posting
Before uploading a photograph online that was shot from their premises, businesses of any size should prioritise cybersecurity. Sharing your location through geotagging may seem innocent, but doing so puts individuals and their premises or properties in danger.
Sadly, some have learned that purposefully geotagging while on vacation alerted would-be thieves to abandoned premises. The same is true for businesses, where it's possible that your team is having fun on a team outing and tweeting about it on social media. A criminal may get interested if you advertise that your building may be vacant.
The position of phones and tablets may be tracked, and when photos are taken, the device's location can be tagged using satellites. This happens if you choose to let the gadget access to your location, and it's really simple to turn off. When developing a visual marketing campaign, businesses may decide to keep this location service enabled if they have a real store where they want to send customers.
Some businesses, however, might not want to disclose their precise operation locations to the public outside of their main office address. It only takes turning location sharing off in the specific app that utilises the camera to prevent this.
Revealing private details
Because social media enables people to share photos and videos of their life with friends, family, and followers, people adore it. However, there are dangers present. People who post images of their opulent homes, for instance, may unintentionally be tempting criminals to take a closer look. Someone who reveals their lavish lifestyle or way of life online without making it private may unintentionally become a target for crooks.
The same is true for images captured inside a company. Before publishing photographs online, a business should check any material that can be regarded as sensitive. Employees providing information about their actions might result in corporate espionage, allowing your top rivals to gain additional insight into how your business operates. Be cautious while sharing information with others since everything you give, from the places you travel to the clients you deal with, might be important information in the hands of criminals.
The good news is that efforts to protect personal information are still being made in the US (with a number of new state privacy laws) and throughout the world, as "Europe continues to promote and discuss measures that focus on privacy, platform regulation, and competition." These continuous tactics, together with business-friendly efforts that can monitor and develop fresh ideas for greater privacy and data security, will assist to stop dangerous and unlawful material, as stated in Tripwire's 2022 first quarter Privacy Update.
Online live streaming
When developing marketing images, businesses must adapt to the times, which is why they could decide to live stream a promotional event. It is a fantastic approach to developing a video that has a more intimate feel than work that is heavily edited, manufactured, and obviously corporate.
Live streaming enables brand employees to demonstrate their expertise or to show fans what they are up to behind the scenes. This approach has gained popularity among digital marketing professionals and aids in creating hype for events like product launches. This is demonstrated by the fact that 73% of B2B companies who use live video to reach their target audience report favourable ROI.
However, there are dangers for businesses that share live video material with their social media followers. A live broadcast necessitates an internet connection, making a business exposed to assaults like IP leaks and DDoS attacks. Additionally, there is a chance that someone will screen capture your work and claim it as their own, and crammed chat rooms provide fraudsters and other bad actors a chance to connect to malware.
Using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to hide your IP address and using strong passwords to prevent brute force assaults are two common defences against these attacks.
The temptation for many businesses is to leave cybersecurity in the hands of the IT department. However, given the significance of data protection, businesses must employ the best cybersecurity personnel available. This could include getting in touch with a third party, but it's a reasonable investment when weighed against the cost of a data breach and associated regulatory fines, which might total several million pounds.
Copyright your images
Millions of people may view and share the stuff you produce and publish online. It's crucial to keep in mind, though, that you are the author of that material, and without your team's expertise and originality, it wouldn't have been a success. You should safeguard your photographs, and there are several steps you can do to lessen the possibility of unauthorised usage of your intellectual property.
First, think about putting a watermark on the picture. This frequently takes the shape of the discretely placed white or transparent text on the primary image. It can stop someone from just stealing your graphic material and utilising it for their own marketing campaigns. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, anybody who removes this watermark may be held accountable for damages.
Additionally, you might want to add copyright information to the image's metadata or use sophisticated barcoding, which leaves an unmistakable, invisible fingerprint on the picture that can be used to identify you. Adding additional safeguards can strengthen your copyright defence and safeguard your intellectual property.
Cybercriminals will use original and cutting-edge techniques to break into a corporation. This also applies to the actual world, where robbers will utilise data gleaned from internet photographs to commit crimes against a company. It's crucial to be careful of the videos and photographs that your company publishes online. What you see might not be what a thief is searching for.