$1 trillion. A substantial figure right?… Now imagine this, by 2025 the cost of cybercrimes will arise up to $10.5 trillion.

In the midst of 2020 and 2021; as a result of COVID 19, cyber-attacks on small businesses have been significant.

If you want to minimize the probability of your business becoming a target to cybercrime, then read this informative guide to avoid becoming a victim of cyber and digital risk.

Cyber Security Risk

Ever wondered if your business is at risk from Cyber-attacks?

For numerous years, cyber security has been a continuous obstacle for organizations and businesses. In accordance to Simply Business, approximately 73% of small businesses struggle to withstand a cybersecurity attack. Unfortunately, this can influence harm and the potential loss to the technological structure, together with affecting the businesses reputation. On a day-today- basis, Cyber Security is evolving, and as a result of this, small business are not safe and have to stay cautious in the existing Cyber world. Malware is a dangerous software that has a purpose to damage any programmable device. The cause of Malware is common especially when a dodgy link is opened via text, emails and websites. Instantly, this will give an opportunity to cybercriminals to use advanced technologies to gather unauthorized data, sensitive information and to victimize businesses.

Despite IT solutions being beneficial, in some cases they can lack with providing the support for cyberattacks and poor configuration. And by having a large number of devices that are connected to third- party vendors, it can draw attention to attacks in malware, password theft, financial fraud and phishing attacks. As stated by the FBI’s internet crime report, in 2020, the cost of cybercrimes has arisen to $2.7 billion solely.

Having a small business does not necessarily mean you are safe. So, In order to safeguard your company and avoid malicious attacks from cybercriminals, you need to take into account the protection of employee data, financial data, third- and fourth-party vendors and intellectual property.

And guess what? By following the steps below, you will be one step closer to having achieving protection from cyberattacks for your business.

• Comprehend developing risks and contemporary trends-

Phishing, Hacking, Identity theft and Malware threats.

• Phishing is an issue that arises when cybercriminals have certain links which are presented either via email or text. Unfortunately, they gain access to an individual’s private information, for example their passwords or credit card information.
• Hacking is an unlawful attack that cybercriminals use to get hold of a computer system or a private network. These activities become beneficial to hackers as they get the chance to spy on the victim’s personal data, financial gain or even hacking for the fun of it.
• Identity theft is an act that takes place when someone acquires your personal data without the user’s consent, mainly with the purpose to commit fraud.
• Malware threats (malicious software) is an attack that is designed to cause damage to your software, with the use of worms, spyware, trojans and viruses.

• Produce a Security policy

By defining security protocols, it is essential that you take into perspective every characteristic of your SMEs strategy. The more sensitive information is digitally stored, the higher the importance is for your business to bear in mind data backup, social media security, cloud computing and security audits. In addition to this, having an incident response plan as a backup will be beneficial to both you and your employers, in case an incident occurs.        

Giving some form of training to your employers about the risk of cybersecurity can help in the long-term, as they will be more attentive if an attack happens.

• Keep informed of the current Security Safeguards, Hardware and Software

Make sure your security applications are up to date to avoid the stress of new threats to your business.

These safety measures should include:

• Installing the latest software updates as soon as they become accessible
• For safer internet access, use Firewall.
• Check that WIFI networks for your employers are secure either when your employers are working in and out of office.
• Supervise your systems on a regular basis.

Digital Risk

Are you becoming more reliant on digital technology every day?

If your answer is yes, then this section will give you an insight of what digital risk is, how it can affect your day-to-day activities and solutions that will benefit you.

Similar to Cyber Security Risk, Digital Risk is primarily centred around digital technology. In certain circumstances, some organizations lack awareness and resources to realise and understand the seriousness of digital risk management. The larger the exposure a SME has to digital risk, the higher the chances are to lose customer trust and revenue or even losses of reputation.

Although Digital Risk can be complex, by distinguishing each category will give you a further understanding of the vulnerable areas of each risk.

Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity refers to the unauthorized entry to data breaches as well as sensitive data.

Cloud Technology

Cloud Technology is the negative aftermath from technological faults that have effects on systems and people.

Data Leaks Risk

Data leaks occur is when private information is unintentionally disclosed, resulting in severe security breaches.

Workforce Talent

Workforce Talent is defined to be the talent gaps that halt accomplishments of business goals.

Compliance Risk

Compliance Risk means new terms and conditions that are placed when for new technology.

Resilience

Resilience is a risk that transpires when the availability of a businesses is affected due to an interference. And having then struggle to overcome the harm that is created.

Process Automation

Third-party risk

Third-party risks are threats that are linked with third-party vendors and service providers. This can automatically generate threats to sensitive information, finances and intellectual property.

Data Privacy

Data privacy is all risks that are impacting then safeguarding of data, for example, financial and identifiable information.

Ways to manage digital risk

The use of web has been around for decades and we can all agree that it stores endless amounts of resources. Nevertheless, some businesses have failed to reflect an important element, digital footprint. In accordance to Kaspersky, Digital Footprint is defined to be the trial of data that is left when users access the internet, including websites, emails that are sent and data that is submitted online.

A great way to encourage mitigation of data leak risks and cybersecurity would be to:

1. To monitor for data leaks– Before cybercriminals get the chance to identify data leaks in your business. You need to reflect on the different aspects of digital risk and take precautions, by using virus software and anti-spyware software tools.
2. Look out for exposed assets
   1. Suspicious activities or files that have not been encrypted- banking activities or network activities
   1. Abrupt changes in system passwords or account profiles,
   1. Warning signs or anti-malware tools alerting to infections.
   1. The leakage of private client’s information

• Be certain that all risk and threat models are up to date- It is key to ensure your ‘Incident Response Plan’ is up to date every time a new version comes out.
• Establish a vendor risk management– By keeping vendors compliant, the overall vendor network needs to refined of security vulnerabilities.

At the outset of COVID-19, businesses and organizations have had to turn their attention to the 50% of employees who are having to work remotely from home since 2020. Managing Digital Risk can be challenging; however, it can be favourable in the long term for SMEs. It is important to notice detecting threats before they evolve into data breaches.

Taking practical steps to help reduce digital risks when you are working from home include:

• Consider give employees access to emerging tools to help with workloads
• Endpoint security- Putting controls on routers to enhancing the visibility of network
• resources
• Business should be able to evaluate security gaps in your working environment
• Obtain work models that are needed for a long period of time.

What are the right steps to take to achieve Digital Risk Protection?

Damaged reputation? Constant fines? Damaged reputation?

Doesn’t sound too promising does it?.. Well this is why it is vital to attain Digital Risk Protection for your SME.

Digital Risk Protection (DRP) reduces the possibility of the risks that surface from digital transformation, and protects your SME from hazardous attacks caused by cybercriminals. With the help of Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI), information is dissected and examined in order to fight against cybercriminals.  Over the years, these processes have been developed to help safeguard data and networks.

The Four Quadrants of Digital Risk Protection- Intsights

This process has been designed in order to lighten the strain for businesses, whilst retaining crucial tasks.

• MAP– Discover and map all digital assets to quantify your attack surface. Use the map as a foundation to monitor cybercriminal activity,
• MONITOR– Search the public and dark web for threat references to your digital assets. Translate found threats into actionable intelligence.
• MITIGATE– Automate actions to block and remove identified threats to digital assts. Integrate with existing security infrastructure.
• MANAGE– Manage the process used in the Map, Manage and Mitigate quadrants. Management is essential to successful DRP protection.

The following examples below demonstrate how effective DRP and CTI can be in terms of stable security, with solutions that can help diminish the chances of an attack.

• Social Media and Brand Protection- DRP keeps an eye out on fake social media accounts that imitate a company’s brand and the misuse of trademarks.
• Phishing Detection– DRP alerts customers on phishing campaigns by using threat intelligence. 
• Domain Protection– A common threat is when cyber criminals try to impersonate a company’s web domain name, and try to alter it by writing a very similar domain. DRP monitors this and intervenes beforehand.
• Data Leaks and Breaches- For some companies, a primary concern is when their account information gets leaked or stolen. This is could be the route cause to fraud and hijacking.  DRP can supervise the dark web and Telegram channels to obstruct these challenges.

What organizations you could use if your company ever comes across with a Cyber attack

UpGuard is an organization that specifically uses a threat intelligence platform and a data leak detection engine to help mitigate cybersecurity, by giving digital risk solutions. They also provide support and guidance including new conditions set by Biden’s Cybersecurity Executive Order.

BlueVoyant is another organization that constantly pays attention to domains and websites, social media platforms, deep and dark web, with the intention to achieving effective mitigation.

Kyrndyl is the world’s biggest IT infrastructure provider that builds, designs and modernizes critical information systems.

Build a predictable pipeline of leads

Your sales pipeline drives your business. No matter how you drive new enquiries into your business currently, you’ll have some systems and processes in place for following up and offering your products or services.

It’s all too common to be riding a sales rollercoaster where one month you bring in lots of new contracts and the next you’re delivering the work. So by the time you reach the third month, your business is thirsty for new leads again.

Having a predictable pipeline of leads will bring you peace of mind as a business owner. Putting a lead generation system in place helps you to explode this pipeline and bring in a steady supply of new leads flowing into your business.

Prospects that enter your lead generation system will be nurtured without the need for additional touchpoints. Most importantly, they start to build trust with your business. It’s well-known that people buy from those who they know, like and trust. With your system, you’re building trust with the value that you’re delivering.

In addition, once your lead generation system is in place you can use the data over the first few months to understand how many conversations that you need to have in order to generate a sale. Let’s run through an example:

You have an average of 200 new leads entering your system each month.

Of these new leads 25 are booking in a call with you at the end of the process.

From these calls, you’re generating 5 new customers. This gives you a 2.5% conversion rate.

If each of these new customers was worth £2,000 to your business, that’s £10,000 that is directly attributable to your new system.

What if you were able to increase your conversion rate to 5% or increase the number of new leads to 400? Now you’re at £20,000 in new business for the month.

Knowing and understanding this data is very important for your business as you can take a glance at the number of new leads entering the system at any time and have a good feel for how many of these will end up making an enquiry and hopefully proceeding on to becoming a new customer.

TIP: Look at your current sales pipeline. Do you know what your current conversion rate is? Even if you’re only able to look at the number of enquiries that you’ve received and the number of sales that this has turned into, this is still some valuable data to have as a starting point.

Test, tweak and build some more

This isn’t a whimsical look at what might happen in the future, don’t worry. We’re going to focus on actionable information that you can use for your business.

As we touched upon briefly when talking about your pipeline, it’s important to look at the data from your lead generation system and focus on optimising your offer. We do this by looking at conversion optimisation.

The aim of optimising the content in your lead generation system is to generate more enquiries (and subsequent customers) by making small changes to the copy throughout your system. This could be changing headlines, trying out different emails, even changing the cover on your lead magnet.

When you carry out tests, it’s important to just test 1 or 2 things at a time. If you make lots of changes, you’re never going to be able to track their effectiveness.

TIP: Once you have your lead generation system up and running over the first month, look at the number of people who have signed up to receive your content and how many of these who have made an enquiry. Use this as your base data for future conversion optimisation changes.

After you’ve got your first successful lead generation system in place, you can move onto the next one.

It’s not uncommon for a business to have between 5-10 lead generation systems (or more) in place and driving new leads into the business. Your only limit with new systems will be your ability to handle the new enquiries that it will generate.

In addition, you can also use the problems, questions and great content that you’ve put together for your lead generation system for other purposes. If you have a YouTube video, you can create content that answers the same questions and point users to your landing page in the description.

Do you or your team create blog articles? Great! You can repurpose content and create valuable information that leads users towards your new lead generation system. These can be optimised to rank higher in the search engines too, so they’re another source of traffic for your business.

TIP: Think about how you can repurpose the content that you have created for your lead generation system. The problems that your client has and the questions that they might ask about your product or service can be answered in many ways. The content you create can direct traffic into your lead generation system, helping you educate and nurture more potential new customers.

How it all works

A lead generation system is a process that takes visitors to your website through a series of micro commitments and leads to an end goal. Your goal could be the sale of a product / service or it could be for them to book a consultation call with a member of your team.

A visitor will come to a landing page, which is a special page on your website promoting content that they can sign up to receive. This content is valuable and will help them to achieve a goal related to a specific problem that they have.

After the visitor has opted-in to receive your content, they’ll be taken to a thank you page. Here they can read more about your business and you have the opportunity to share with them some key articles or content that is relevant to your offer.

Next, they’ll receive a welcome email with a link to your content. The content here is normally what we call a “lead magnet”. This is a short guide that delivers immediate value to your prospect.

In the following days, the prospect will receive a series of nurture emails. These build on the free content that you’ve provided, adding additional quick wins and expertise for your lead.

Finally, you’ll finish with one of two things. Either a sales email, which leads to a purchasing process or a consultation email, which leads to your prospect booking in a call with your sales team.

This whole process can be setup and run in an automated manner. It’s just like having an extra sales team member, except they don’t need to be paid a salary, because everything is handled automatically.

Your lead generation system creates trust with your prospect by delivering valuable content and quick win items that they can action in their business.

The best way to start your lead generation system is to begin with the product or service that you want to promote. What does your prospect need to know in order to make that purchase from your business?

TIP: Pick one product or service that your business offers and focus on this for your lead generation system. This should be one of your key offerings. Write this down on a piece of paper, as we’ll be diving deeper in this guide.

What is your customers biggest problem?

Your customer is the single most important piece of the lead generation jigsaw.

When selling a product or service the key focus for your content should be the problem that your customer has. This is the problem that your product or service solves.

Think about the key product or service that you’ve written down from the previous page. What problem does your product or service solve? How does this make your prospect feel? After the problem has been solved, how does it make their life better?

Your answers to these questions start to create the content that you should be using in your lead generation system. In fact, this is the type of content that you can use all over your website.

When you talk directly to your prospects and visitors about how you understand their problems, they’ll pay attention. You’re telling them that you have the solution for their problems, they’ll want to know more and to understand what you are offering.

TIP: Thinking about the product or service that you’ve written down previously, write down the biggest problems that your customer has that this resolves. Between 1-3 problems would be ideal here.

Now that you’ve noted your customer’s biggest problems, you need to think about how your product or service provides the solution to these. Can you come up with 5 reasons that your product solves these solutions?

Great! You’re now half-way there to creating your first lead magnet.

You need to take these 5 reasons and extrapolate on them. Focus on benefits, not features. The benefits are the end result for the customer. This is how they feel and the change in their life because you solved their problem.

TIP: Write down 5 reasons why your product or service solves your customer’s biggest problem. With each of these reasons, think of 1 or more questions that your customer would ask in relation to them. Answering these questions is how you will deliver value to your customer. You can take your 5 reasons and the answers to the questions and create a lead magnet. This is a PDF document typically less than 10 pages in length. It answers the questions that your customers have and provides specific action points that deliver value.

Nurture and educate your prospects

As a business owner you’ll know that one of the biggest limiting factors that you have in your sales process is time.

There are only so many new enquiries that you can follow up with and you will sometimes need to be selective to ensure that you don’t waste your precious time. It’s too easy to waste time on prospects who are not a good fit with your business.

The biggest benefit that automation will bring to your business is that it will simply save you time and money. Once your lead generation system is setup, there’s a full process that each lead will follow.

The automation sequence will nurture your prospect, providing education to them and giving them opportunities to gain quick wins for their business that deliver immediate value.

So what goes into your automation sequence?

The first step after creating your lead magnet is to write a welcome email. This email thanks your new subscriber for signing up and provides a link for them to download your lead magnet.

Next, you’ll want to create a nurture sequence. We recommend writing one email for each of the main points in your lead magnet. So if you have 5 main points, you’ll want to send 5 additional nurture emails.

A great nurture email is one that is written in a conversational tone, provides additional education for your prospect and gives them a quick win or action step that they can complete.

At the end of your nurturing sequence, you’ll want to create a Call To Action (CTA) email. This will either be a sales email that leads them directly to your product or a consultation email that leads them to a booking calendar, so they can book a call with your team.

TIP: Start creating the emails for your automation sequence. You should end up with a welcome email, a nurture email sequence (one for each key point in your lead magnet) and your CTA email. As a recommendation, if you’re selling services, the easiest endpoint will be to direct your lead to a consultation page where they can book a call with your team to talk further about your services.