In the increasingly competitive iGaming SEO Service market, online brand protection is crucial for online casinos, bookmakers, and other iGaming products. However, most entrepreneurs overlook this key step when launching a new business, and we understand why. Most people concentrate on marketing, legal paperwork, product development, and other vital steps to establish a strong brand or business.
While some Casino SEO Agency entrepreneurs have great ideas and impressive products, everything can turn into nothing if they aren’t well protected.5 That’s where protecting your casino, or iGaming brand becomes an important factor. Besides giving you the legal protection that traditional well-guarded brands like Coca-Cola, Samsung, and other leading brands out there have, having an effective online brand protection strategy pays.
But how exactly does having a solid brand protection strategy help you?
Today, poor actors are using every tech tool available to commit online brand abuse, sell counterfeit products, and scam customers through social media platforms and other online platforms. Besides helping you with trademark infringement, brand protection also helps you deal with social media impersonation and revenue loss.
But what exactly goes into protecting your brand online? Here’s a step-by-step blueprint of how our marketing experts ensure your brand is well covered against online threats.
The foundation of a healthy online brand
At this point, you understand the importance of brand protection. Today, brand imitation has become the new norm for every scammer with a smartphone and stable internet. Even worse, with the growth of online marketplaces, counterfeiting has also become easier than ever before.
Here’s the basic starter pack to help you develop your business’s ideal online brand protection strategy.
Meet all legal requirements
Registering your brand is the first key step to successfully challenging potential IP infringers. That includes registering your brand name and logos with trademarks and protecting every product design you develop with utility patents. While it will cost you money, it’s among the most worthy investment you’ll make in your online business.
A common mistake that most young entrepreneurs make is assuming that it’s enough to cover only the countries they’re marketing their products. Unfortunately, in the current digital age, where counterfeit goods sell faster than the speed of sound, your trademark deserves a higher religious following than counterfeits.
This simple blanket guarantees successful enrollment in every major platform with anti-counterfeit systems like Amazon’s brand registry. Besides the simple wins that go a long way when you’re in a court battle against an online infringer, registering your business/ brand gives your online business the legal legitimacy to facilitate non-disclose agreements (NDAs). Remember that partnering without protecting your confidential information risks your online brand.
What is IP at risk of being infringed?
Do you ever wonder what types of intellectual property are at risk of being infringed? Our brand protection experts have found these four IP types commonly infringed on worldwide.
i.) Trademarks
Trademarks are every brand’s authenticity stamp. These key identifiers can exist as symbols, words, colors, shapes, or a combination of several elements. Unfortunately, counterfeiters infringing on your trademarks will always try to make their imitations resemble your authentic brand to confuse your prospects.
In the current marketplace, knockoffs are often marketed as replicas, clones, or dupes, but the main aim is to confuse your prospects into thinking they’re buying the authentic product. Some counterfeiters will even go a step further to make your prospects believe they’re affiliated with your Online Casino Affiliate brand, company, or product.
ii.) Utility Patents
Getting utility patents protects your every invention, process, and method, e.g., the ideal way of doing something. Your utility patents give you exclusive commercial rights to every unique idea and qualifying product that you or your business designs. However, they’re expensive to get, difficult to write, and complex to understand. Nonetheless, utility patents are highly valuable in the online business world today.
III.) Design patterns
Design patterns protect the ornamental appearance of every unique article/ item. Anybody who invents a new, original, and fanciful/ unique idea for a manufacturing article can obtain a patent subject to different requirements and conditions.
IV.) Copyright
Copyright registration is essential in protecting your work from unlawful duplication/ use. Whether it’s books, poems, or art like drawing, music, film, or painting, unauthorized copying or distribution of intellectual property is illegal in every jurisdiction across the world.
So, how can you protect your intellectual property in an online business?
Online brand protection means securing your business’s economic advantage by safeguarding your unique ideas, services, products, and trade secrets. Here are a few tips for protecting your brand’s intellectual properties beyond registration and government enforcement.
Document your every discovery
Leaks are frequent in the current digital information age. While there are no guaranteed ways of avoiding them, recording your discoveries and innovations when they occur is a valuable step that millions of new entrepreneurs ignore.
If another business obtains illicit information through a leak or tries to repurpose your proprietary ideas, your records and operation dates will always legitimize your ownership rights.
Leverage digital rights management systems
When you’re working online, some of your users may attempt to copy or repurpose your work for personal or malicious gains. Digital rights management systems protect your online properties using computer programs that do any or multiple things like:
- Limits the times that users can access your work.
- Restricts the number of users that can simultaneously use or view your work, service, or product.
- It prevents online users from saving, editing, or copying your work.
- Prohibits printing, sharing, or taking screenshots of your intellectual property.
- Watermarks your IP/ work to establish ownership.
Digital rights management is similar to an encryption protocol that limits the type of users that can access your protected work. That’s an important choice when working with different types of online content like:
- Market reports
- Software
- E-books
- Surveys and data studies
With effective digital rights management systems, unauthorized use of your online intellectual property is harder, if not impossible.
Create solid non-disclosure agreements
A strong NDA restricts your clients, employees, and business associates from sharing any confidential information as outlined in your terms and conditions agreement. Having an NDA defends you against intellectual property regulation violations like misappropriation of trade secrets where your past or present employees can share sensitive intellectual property-related information with third parties.
Develop strong access credentials
Guarding your trade secrets requires proactive action unless you are the only person that knows the information. Unfortunately, no legal court will acknowledge the importance of your trade secret without adequate security systems. That’s why you’ll need strong credentials to restrict access to valuable information, especially intellectual property-related. That means:
- Separating your teams to ensure that your workers only access the files they need to fully deliver their job without getting access to trade secrets that don’t influence their work or productivity.
- Training your employees on the best security practices.
- Updating your passwords frequently.
As with every security system, leaks can happen. If your intellectual property is compromised, it’s the right time to consult an intellectual property Online Poker SEO Agency. Consulting a knowledgeable IP Sports Betting SEO Expert will help you determine the best course of action.
Benefits of online brand protection solutions
Online brand protection safeguards your brand’s name and reputation from impersonation and fraud cases.
You must understand that developing a solid brand name and reputation takes years, hence the need to protect it from online fraud. As Warren Buffet once stated, it might take two decades to build a strong reputation that may only take minutes to ruin. That’s also true when it comes to protecting your online brand. That’s why it’s essential to perform your due diligence when developing an online brand protection strategy to safeguard your brand’s reputation and name.
With a solid online brand protection solution, you can protect your customers from being scammed through fake social media accounts purporting to be your brand. Besides protecting your reputation from fraudulent activities, security can earn you loyalty in your online business.
Avoid financial loss and losing your customer’s trust
Loss of your online brand reputation will cost you the customers’ trust and financial loss. When identity theft con artists can easily steal or imitate your brand identity, it can significantly impact your brand as customers will be more cautious when dealing with your online brand. Some of your customers may even choose to sever ties with your brand completely.
Having in mind that it’s easy for your bad actors to divert your customer’s attention through online brand impersonation, you’ll easily lose money through piracy and counterfeiting. As such, digital brand protection is a key remediation plan that you should set up to avoid such losses in your business.
It protects your brand’s intellectual property
Bad actors online always try to take advantage of successful brands by impersonating their products, websites, and social media accounts to defraud unsuspecting customers. That’s a serious issue for any business as scammers, and brand impersonators will develop and publish fake websites that resemble your authentic homepage. Others also imitate your presence on social media platforms, imitating your online brand with unbelievable accuracy.
Most impersonators hijack brands for their content, imagery, and intellectual properties, using similar domain names and social media platforms to resemble your customer service team. That undermines all your efforts to develop a reasonable online brand presence.
Brands are highly encouraged to prioritize online brand protection efforts and put in place mechanisms that can handle the situations explained above if they happen. You’ll also need a strong contingency plan that you use to avoid losing your brand’s revenue through such unfortunate circumstances.
What to consider when choosing online brand protection services
Scale
As a business owner, you want all the budgets to be used efficiently and wisely. As such, when you realize your products have become targeted by infringers, you’ll want to find brand protection solutions that protect your business.
The scale of the infringements plays a crucial role when deciding the type of solution to employ. Is there a single counterfeit incident, or are several websites already doing it? Is your brand protection strategy scalable depending on the size and type of incidents you’ve got?
An effective brand protection service should be capable of assessing and auditing your brand’s current threat and help you react accordingly against IP infringements.
Reach
Whether you’re looking to resolve single or multiple IP infringements will affect your chosen strategy. With the brand protection technology available today, businesses can easily protect their brands against counterfeiting and fake mobile apps. For instance, cybersquatting will help divert all the traffic from your brand’s site, threatening your consumers and business while surrendering control of your trademarks.
If your business is looking to solve several IP infringements and continuously monitor your brand, the search capacity of your service will be crucial. Most legal firms don’t employ technology-based solutions unless they’re required, which makes them rely on manual searches. However, not every solution is designed equally, so you’ll also need to know whether your solutions will only search top-ranking marketplaces like eBay and Amazon or it can scan over the whole internet.
Efficiency
While a long-term solution is a major priority, the speed of handling infringements is key when choosing brand protection software to regain your brand control. An effective brand protection service will always advertise its removal rates and pay attention to the average detection time and removal of infringements.
We recommend choosing a brand protection solution with at least an 80% success rate and a maximum of three days to remove infringements successfully. The efficiency rates can be boosted with automated tech and industry relations that ensure online marketplaces prioritize your requests for takedowns.
Reporting
Reporting is among the most important factors as it helps you gather evidence of the complete work. Most brand protection solutions feature reporting-based systems like mobile apps or visual web dashboards.
Brand protection software should be simple to understand and work with. That will be a huge time saver as it also reduces your training costs. A good brand protection service must do more than detect brand infringements. It also needs to report every detail of the IP infringement, including the website and geographical locations of the risk.
It’s also important to consider whether you can instantly access IP infringement data through an online portal or get monthly reports through mobile apps. Real-time data is also crucial in reporting as it allows the entrepreneur to notice the infringements as they’re detected.
Auto-learning
Technology is always evolving, and so are online brand infringers attempting to avoid being detected. So, does your brand protection solution learn from previous results?
It’s important to keep innovating in the global online counterfeit market, so staying updated with keywords that can identify brand threats in the future is important to stay ahead of cybercriminals. Online brands that also employ anti-counterfeiting measures correctly work to integrate new technologies in their systems to beat counterfeiters constantly.
Industry expertise
Human analysis is important, no matter the number of tasks you can automate. While technology is a crucial tool, you can’t replicate years of experience in the industry using tech solutions.
Expert security analysis can direct your technological solutions and predict new trends, while your in-house legal teams help you with any extrajudicial action necessary, like taking down fake websites. After all, anybody that has gone through automated customer service understands the importance of having humans to protect your brand.
Online Brand Protection KPIs
While the best key performance indicators will depend on your brand’s specific goals, several action metrics can help you measure your progress. However, remember to never lose sight of how brand protection affects your bottom line.
While working with your team and other stakeholders, consider this list of questions to know the best KPIs for your program.
- Which data or trends does your company’s CEO need to feel confident that you are effectively handling online threats?
- How can you monitor your web traffic changes based on operational online scams, and how does that affect your sales?
- How do you project your revenue growth based on the proactive detection of scams?
- How can you predict that fraud has decreased from your effective brand protection strategy?
- How do you connect your brand protection efforts with customer conversion rates?
- How can using advanced technology in brand protection affect the volumes of your call center concerning complaints about scams?
- How can you track cases of new account fraud and account takeover, and can you track your brand impersonation response?
- What cost efficiencies can you realize with modern approaches against counterfeit listings and online brand impersonation?
Do you need help developing the ideal online brand protection strategy today? We’ve got your back!
Your brand is not about what you say it is. It’s all about what your customers and prospects say about it. That means you’ll need to protect your brand, especially when doing business in the ever-growing and competitive online world. Fortunately, our online brand protection experts can help you protect your business, avoid unfair competition and enjoy other benefits as discussed above.
