Your product launched last week and you've been getting great press, you've made some great business partnerships with some of the largest vendors, and people are talking about your brand. Your Business is off to a successful start, but profits aren't adding up.
On a global scale this is a common dilemma, one which has inspired countless companies to take proactive measures to protect their brand from rampant thievery. The answer to this widespread cyber thievery is round the clock monitoring to combat threats such as trademark infringement, online counterfeiting, PPC violations, pirated mobile apps, traffic theft and a variety of others.
Marketing managers put a lot of time and effort and a large part of their marketing budgets to make their campaigns spike, to make them interactively engaging and every marketer's dream to make them viral. However, unbeknownst to many marketers, your marketing efforts aren't only bringing your brand benefits, they are bringing benefits to online parasites, where 15% of revenues occurring online are stolen. If you thought E-commerce was exploding, exploding even faster are the likes of online counterfeiters and pirates.
At the forefront of this fight to protect your brand are brand protection tools. This is no longer an afterthought, but is one that is imperative to maintaining a healthy brand presence online. The web is a vast open landscape where almost anything goes (At least till it's caught) and may as be called the Wild Wild Web. Your brand is at risk in many places, probably more than you are prepared to count. But you must.
Take a look at just the threats of violating PPC ads and mobile apps. Google alone serves up over 5.5 Billion paid search ad impressions on a daily basis and with the use of mobile apps rising ever northward, the opportunities to scam your brand and cut into your bottom line are always present.
Just like internet marketers are becoming super savvy in their marketing efforts, brand parasites are never far behind, taking advantage of your hard work to cut into your bottom line, and especially with the case of counterfeit goods damaging your good name and reputation.
Mobile apps have replaced websites in many cases for brands and have become another avenue for cyber criminals to infringe your trademark(s), leading your unsuspecting customers to their phony goods among a vast array of other criminal activities.
Let's face it, there are so many places where your brand can be infringed upon online. It is up to you to learn from past deceitful activities and to identify a solution that will monitor your brand around the clock. The brand protection solution to monitor apps is very similar to how it monitors websites, and goes beyond by monitoring app stores, content, and reviews among others to identify instances where your app can be potentially infringed upon or misused for criminal activity.
Online criminals are following your every move, silently lurking in the Internet shadows, attempting to steal traffic by investing in paid search at the expense of legitimate brand owners. Paid search ads by these online scammers use trademarked keywords, terms and even ad copy that will lead a large percentage of users to scam sites and selling very professional looking counterfeit goods.
Monitoring PPC ads is not something that should be attempted manually. You need 24/7/365 monitoring that will provide you with detailed and prioritized visual reports on the PPC ads that most directly threaten your brand and trademark.
The whole point I am trying to make by bringing the above examples is that brand protection needs to be proactive. If you allow the infractions to pile up, you'll be playing the catch up game. With the criminal activity happening at such a breakneck pace, you want to be on the offensive and not on the defensive, monitoring and pushing your brand forward to evade the criminals and essentially have them give up trying.