Why Online Brand Protection Really Counts
It is essentially because it takes quite a great deal of time, effort, and even money to build a strong online brand. You cannot therefore be too careful in your efforts to protect your brand online because your brand reputation can be extremely fragile. A single fake product or impersonated website can undo years of hard work to build a great brand. Technically, online threats can directly harm customer trust, drive away business, and damage your brand reputation. By protecting your brand, it ensures your customers get the real experience they expect from your business. It also helps to ensure your brand remains authentic and secure on all online channels.
Practical Steps You Can Take To Stay Ahead Online Threats
For successful e-commerce brands, online brand protection is always a continuous effort. This is because digital threats keep evolving and keep getting more sophisticated. As these threats evolve therefore, so must be your defensive efforts. It helps to regularly monitor your business, take quick action when necessary and deploy the right tools to keep your brand safe. There are huge risks involved for your business if you neglect or ignore to take quick action on your brand protection.
Some of the risks of ignoring brand protection include:
Customer Confusion: Without brand protection, buyers really struggle to tell apart real from fake products. This leads to poor customer experiences and ultimately lost loyalty.
Reputation Damage: Cloned or Fake sites and other impersonators abound to erode trust in your business. Reputation loss means loss in business.
Financial Losses: Counterfeits and scams can divert revenue and cause expensive legal issues in your business. These are avoidable losses. Diligent brand protection helps to mitigate these losses.
Recommended Techniques for Online Brand Protection
Here are the three key techniques you cannot afford to ignore:
1. Domain Name Management
Domain name is your online business address. It must be authentic and easy to locate online. You can prevent cybersquatting on it by registering any domain variations then monitor it diligently to quickly detect fake or misleading domains.
2. Content Protection
In e-commerce business, content is king. Protecting your content helps to protect your brand. You can regularly scan the web in search of stolen content, fake listings, and misleading information that could confuse your customers.
3. Trademark Monitoring
Always keep an eye out for unapproved use of your brand identity. This includes colors, styles, logos and graphics/images across the internet.
Recommended Locations to Monitor Your Brand Online
The very first step for protecting your brand is by way of regular monitoring. Next is to know where to monitor for best results. If you want to stay proactive in protecting your brand, here are the areas to pay regular attention to:
Search Engine Checks: You can regularly Google your brand and products to detect suspicious sites or ads.
Social Media Monitoring: With the use of smart tools like Hootsuite, you can effectively watch for fake accounts and unauthorized mentions on the internet.
Google Alerts: You can set up Google alerts for brand names and product terms to catch new threats quickly.
Marketplace Watch: If you make it a habit to regularly monitor huge e-commerce platforms like Amazon or eBay for instance, you can always detect counterfeit listings.
How to Take Action Against Infringement
If and when you detect the unauthorized or misuse of your brand name, here are the right steps to take:
Carefully Collect Evidence: Try saving screenshots, links, and any communication.
Make Contact with Offenders: You can then send a takedown request or cease-and-desist notice to the offenders. If this fails to redress the issue, you can then choose to:
Seek Legal Redress: At this stage, you are at liberty to work with a legal team to take formal action as prescribed by law.
Making beneficial progress in brand protection cannot be smooth without the full cooperation of your customers. It helps therefore to educate your customers on how they can help you to protect them by protecting your brand. Along this line, you can regularly share tips on your website and social media handles to help your customers avoid fakes.
Reliable Smart Tools You Can Use to Protect Your Brand
It is much easier to keep your brand protected if you use smart tools like:
Marketplace Registries: Programs like Amazon Brand Registry do support quick removal of infringing listings, and they are very effective.
Content Protection: For content protection, you can use Copyscape to find and report stolen website content.
Brand Monitoring Platforms: With smart tools like Red Points and MarkMonitor, you can easily automate threat detection.
Legal Services: You can engage the services of IP lawyers to help takedown offending websites and other communication. They can even help out if you want to make legal claims.
