Are all of your business systems secure? Your website? Your servers? Internal databases?

For most marketers, the answer is, I don’t know. That’s IT’s job. Right?

While it might be the job of the IT department to directly own the security of your business, marketers need to start paying more attention.

Why?

Because when systems go down, it impacts your results directly.

What happens when customers can’t check out on your website because the credit card processor goes down? Or the website is unresponsive? Sales suffer.

What happens when the phones go down and your customers can’t reach your sales or service teams? They get upset and post negative reviews. They question the validity of your business and research competitors.

What happens when you can’t get the data you need to make smart marketing decisions? Or when the data you’re looking at is wrong because of something going on in your internal systems? You make bad decisions and the marketing performance suffers.

Marketers are not in charge of the security of the systems that run today’s companies. But they must be informed. They must learn to ask the right questions. Because security directly affects the business performance, which is marketing’s responsibility.