Impact of Cybersecurity on Digital Marketing

Abstract

Digital marketing is a go-to technique for new businesses and established organizations to interact with their target audience. The popularity of digital media has grown ten-fold, every consumer uses some or the other form of media through which companies aim to market their product. Reaching a wide audience has never been easier. Due to consumers’ dependency on online platforms greatly impacting their purchase decisions, marketers have shifted their business to digital means thus making digital marketing the new-age marketing technique. However, with the increased use of the digital platform for marketing, increased security risks arise in the same as well. With the advancement of technology, the occurrence of cyberattacks and data breaches that could compromise sensitive user information is also on the rise. In this study, we look at how digital platforms of various types are at a security risk while also looking at the trends in both digital marketing as well information security. This study is predominantly exploratory as the combination of digital marketing and cybersecurity is not much studied. The methodology for this study includes depth interviews with experts from the digital marketing and cybersecurity domains to get first-hand information about the trends in their respective industries. A questionnaire that tackles aspects of both industries was also formed, the purpose of this questionnaire was to gauge digital marketing employees’ knowledge and awareness about cybersecurity concerning their field of expertise. This study identified different methods of digital marketing and the possible threats that can occur in the same and understand how cybersecurity can help in mitigating risks in digital platforms.