Digital Assets Ownership
One of the greatest and often the hardest lessons to learn in digital marketing is owning the responsibility of your digital entity and assets from ‘woah to go’.
It is virtually impossible to be an expert in every part of the digital landscape. That is why we engage or partner with specialists of all types from designers, programmers, app developers, network managers, marketing specialists and digital agencies. The most successful people surround themselves with experts to achieve the greatest results.
Someone needs to own it.
Be responsible for all of it.
Bad things happen out there, sites go down, get hacked, processes get broken, staff do the wrong thing, websites break, clients complain, rankings drop, a bad post goes viral, and the outcome of any of this is that potentially the business suffers. Like snakes and ladders things can go awry very quickly and we are all at risk – no matter how large or small you are.
So, whether you are a business owner or marketing manager, you need to ensure you own every part of the digital journey. Where ignorance may be bliss for some people, it can be catastrophic in the digital landscape.
Digital asset ownership
- All domain registrations and logins.
- Maintain and check master email addresses of registered domains.
- Hosting logins and management.
- FTP and login access.
- Admin login to all platforms. Google Ads, Google Analytic, Google Search Console and Google Tag Manager, Adobe Analytics, etc.
- Admin logins to all your social media accounts.
- Ownership of your website (independent of your developer).
- Login to the website content management system.
- The ability to unpublish or publish content immediately.
- IT support out of hours contact numbers.
- Service level agreements.
- Firewalls and malware security.
- Offsite backups.
- Logins to subscribed software (check credit card statements).
- Plugins
- Staff login offboarding.
If you don’t feel all the above is taken care of, get on the blower now and get it all sorted and documented ASAP. If it’s not your exact job to manage any of this, it is prudent to ask the question for the business owner to sort out where all the above critical business continuity information can be found.
Too many times we have encountered issues where large corporate companies cannot access or control their Google Analytics account as it was set up by a web developer who is now out of business, or the person has left the building, and no one can log in. Of course, there are ways to reclaim your account through processes of reverification, etc.
However, prevention is so much better than the cure.
