Security in Digital Marketing: Challenges and Opportunities

Introduction

The internet has created digital marketing opportunities that allow companies and their marketing teams to reach broader local and international audiences through eCommerce websites and internet-based platforms, including social media. These opportunities have enabled businesses to increase their revenues and scale up their operations, thus enhancing their financial performance (Krishen et al., 2021). In addition, digital marketing has created channels for marketers to build strong relationships with a company's ideal customers through two-communication, facilitating value co-creation and improved customization of products and services. Thus, digital marketing has increasingly become essential for business survival in the current business environment. However, digital marketing has also increased exposure to cybersecurity issues, such as data breaches, cyberattacks and malware infections (Konyeha, 2020). For instance, completing transactions on an eCommerce website often requires third-party services, such as PayPal, which require customers' financial details, including bank and personal information. Such information is constantly targeted by hackers, increasing an eCommerce website's vulnerability to cyber-attack. Thus, security in digital marketing has become a critical concern.

Cyber insecurity as a threat to digital marketing disproportionally affects digital marketers. For instance, marketers' accounts have higher risks of cyber-attacks since they have higher permissions and access rights. In addition, digital marketers tend to link their social media profiles with links to eCommerce websites they promote to encourage their followers to click through (Manocha et al., 2020). When the link harbours malware, every person who clicks on that link is subjected to a cyber-attack (Konyeha, 2020). These instances show the extent to which digital marketers can be subject to cyber insecurity and the severe consequences they may have on the marketer, their audience, and the overall company. Thus, digital marketers are subjected to the burden of safeguarding a company's and its customer's safety and privacy. Other cyber insecurity issues include attacks targeting content management systems (CMS), such as WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla, which companies use for content marketing to attract and maintain clients (Kumar et al., 2022). Phishing attacks allow hackers to create fake email accounts that match real business accounts to steal personal information such as login credentials or credit card information. In addition, hackers can target business emails used in digital marketing, which can be exploited to send spam messages that include viruses. These cyber insecurity issues require businesses to adopt best practices in digital marketing security, including proactive measures such as regular software updates and security patches, two-factor authentication and strong password policies (Konyeha, 2020).

This research aims to identify the most relevant documents and synthesize their data and findings to provide insights that can aid in developing a practical security framework in digital marketing.

The bibliometric literature review presented synthesizes data from 80 documents identified through Scopus indexing to identify opportunities and challenges in digital marketing security, thus providing practical insights that can be integrated into business to create a robust security framework.