Who Owns Your Digital Business Assets?

Confusion around digital account ownership is more common than you’d think.

It’s more than inconvenience and time-wasting. The wrong person having control of your assets can threaten your business’s growth.

Here are a few examples and our suggestions about what to look for.

Avoid Being Locked Out Of Your Business Accounts

Social Media

An employee is the administrator of a social media account. If that person leaves employment without providing contact information, your business’s social media pages will become inaccessible.

Recommendation: Ensure social media logins are stored securely and accessible to two senior staff.

Domain Name and DNS Hosting

Your business is launching a new asset like a website, and your Domain Name or DNS Hosting username and password are only known to a past employee or ex-owner. Even though you own the business, launching your new asset using the existing domain name can be difficult, particularly if the account owner decides to be uncooperative.

Recommendation: Ensure domain login and passwords are transferred with business ownership. Test that these logins work before completing financial settlement.

Google Ad Accounts

Your marketing agency runs your Google Ads without giving you direct access to your account, or they run your ads through their account. Accessing valuable historical data may be difficult if you change agencies or bring the ads in-house to your marketing manager. You paid the Agency for campaign setup and strategy; without transparent ownership and account access, you may lose all this data.

Recommendation: Look for an agency that ensures your Ad accounts are kept in your name and that you have the login and password information.

Graphic Design Assets

Some agencies maintain copyright over their client artwork, even when the client has paid for it. If you transfer to another agency, they might decline to transfer ownership of those art files or charge you for access.

Recommendation: Choose an agency that ensures you own your graphic design assets.

To Help Protect Yourself

Keep the details of these digital assets secure.

• Your DNS username and password
• Your website username and password
• All software accounts related to your website functionality
• All social media account usernames and passwords
• Your Google Accounts – for advertising, business profiles, etc
• All artwork relating to your business

Password Managers Can Help

Some clients use a password manager to control their account details. These tools make it easy to generate unique and complex passwords. Passwords are stored in the manager, and each employee only needs the one password that gives them access to the passwords they need. Tectalic uses a password manager called 1Password. There are several on the market.

Password managers:

• Let you assign password access only to those needing regular access. Critical passwords can be accessible to business owners or senior team members.
• Let you create unique passwords. Using the same passwords for multiple accounts may appear simple, yet it gives former employees easy ongoing access to many of your accounts. Clients with password managers report greater confidence in the security and accessibility of critical business information.

Know Your Agency Policies

Ask the agency you use about their account and copyright policies.

If you want to change providers, you will need to know that you control all of your digital marketing assets.

Agencies like Tectalic ensure that the accounts we help you set up and the assets we create belong to you.

We do this because it’s in your interest and it aligns with our values. We want you to work with us because you enjoy the experience and see value in what we do, not because you’ve been forced to by account ownership barriers.