Rather than sharing a scary tale of woe regarding a B2B brand that got burned, we are looking at practical approaches to ensure you have clear control over all key brand assets. For many brands that experience “brand chaos”, it’s often due to a lack of oversight or a complication of employee turnover rather than intentional sabotage.
Before we get started, we have one crucial piece of advice for all marketing leaders: you must own and have access to all your brand accounts (social media, domain, hosting, website, etc). Your company must be the primary “owner” of any accounts related to your brand. While it may seem easy now for a partner or employee to set up an account on your behalf, this will cause problems down the road if you and your company are not the primary “owner” of an account.
Critical steps to protect your brand
Below are critical steps you can take to protect your brand from unintended chaos or branding mishaps.
1. Know where your company’s website domain is registered and who can access the domain.
A common issue we have seen is that with employee turnover in either IT or marketing departments, the access to the company’s website domain registry gets lost or isn’t handed over to another team member. Essentially, you have to pay a website registry regularly (usually every 3 – 5 years) to keep control of your company’s website URL.
The best-case scenario is that you can work with IT to recover the login by reactivating a former employee’s email and resetting the password. The worst-case scenario is that you don’t have access, the credit card on file expires, your domain license cannot be renewed, and a competitor or bad actor can easily scoop it up while you are scrambling to get control of the account.
(This worst case we haven’t seen very often, but we have seen where the domain license expires which causes the company website to go down for a day or two while the team frantically tries to get access and pay the domain registration).
2. Know where your website is hosted and what type of hosting plan you have for your website.
This is a critical step for a variety of reasons. First, knowing which company is hosting your website on its servers ensures you can keep your website up and running or contact the hosting company if something appears to go down on your B2B website.
Second, you want to make sure the contact and billing information is updated on your host. Similar to your domain, if someone who originally signed up for hosting leaves the company and the payment information isn’t updated, your website could easily get shut down because no one is paying your hosting bill. We’ve seen this happen quite a few times over the years.
Third, knowing who your hosting provider is and how to access your website’s hosting is essential for updating DNS records – which is how you launch a new website. You don’t want to do all the work of designing and building a new website only to delay the launch while you scramble to gain access to your hosting.
Fourth, understanding what type of hosting plan you have helps ensure you have the proper bandwidth to support the functionality and assets on your site, don’t have too many “noisy neighbors” (aka other high-traffic websites that may overload the server and cause your site to go down), and your website is quick to load and isn’t being throttled due to an old or outdated hosting plan.
3. Keep careful track of website logins, control permission levels and deactivate accounts for past or former employees or partners.
While we rarely see issues with former employees or partners acting in bad faith to take down a company’s website, we have seen a reluctance to help or pass over control after a contract is terminated or an employee leaves an organization. This type of reluctance can stop all your B2B website updates and marketing efforts or can delay your ability to fix an issue that comes up on your website.
The best workaround to avoid this type of “cattiness” from former partners and employees is to keep careful track of all website login credentials, control closely who has access to what with their credentials, and to quickly deactivate any accounts that were assigned to former employees or marketing partners.
4. Maintain access to all GA4 accounts for your brand.
Any Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager, or Google Search Console account for your company’s brand should never be under the umbrella of your agency’s account. Your company should always own your own Google tools and accounts, and grant access as needed to any website partners or marketing agencies working with your team. This ensures your company can always take these critical pieces of data with you should you move agencies, change marketing platforms, or work with new consultants.
5. Track access to all social media accounts.
There have been scenarios where we had to come to the rescue of certain companies that had an employee or staff member leave abruptly. While the employee was being walked out of the building or being provided their last check, we have been on the phone with the manager removing that employee from all social media accounts. Why did we have to do it? The manager never got access to the accounts, but we had been given access as part of our role as a B2B marketing partner. Now, as unpleasant as it is for us an agency to be involved in this type of situation, the panic of the managers calling us is something that can be avoided with careful tracking and assigning multiple team members to logins on social platforms.
The main reason we’ve heard why companies don’t follow this as a best practice is either lack of time to assign the right people access, lack of knowledge of the accounts, or turnover that happens across a department quickly. If you actively work on managing your company’s social media accounts, stop right now and check all those accounts. Make a note of who else on the team has access and if you need to get access for anyone else. A good rule is to ensure the owner or a trusted top leadership position has access to these social media accounts.
6. Maintain a calendar of any important expiration dates – including your yearly or multiple-year plans.
Having an idea of when things will expire can help your team plan and budget (along with keeping things running). It’s a good idea to have a tracker or spreadsheet that not only lists all your martech platforms and subscriptions but also anything website-related (like those items listed in the previous steps). For example, hosting plans typically are yearly plans that are paid once during the year. Alternately, domain registries are often paid every 3 – 5 years. However, depending on your domain registry, the renewal price can vary from $200 every three to five years to $10,000 every three to five years. Getting hit unexpectedly with a large renewal fee won’t only cause the ire of your controller, but it can take a big, unexpected chunk of your marketing budget.
Most of these steps listed above are best practices for any B2B marketing leader to keep a brand safeguarded. The truth is that for many companies, these steps are only addressed or updated when going through a B2B website redesign process or bringing on a new marketing agency. We advise not waiting until one of these scenarios. Rather, it’s best to take time now to organize as much of this data for your marketing team. It’s a good way to hedge your bets for the unexpected.
