What is marketing compliance and why should you care?
Marketing compliance is a collective term that’s used to cover all of the rules, laws and standards, to which brands must adhere, when producing any type of content. This not only applies to their marketing ads and sales content but also to how consumer data is used and stored.
When you follow marketing compliance, you are ensuring that consumers are not being lied to or misled by your brand(s). In addition, there are laws that protect customers’ privacy, how a brand collects information about them and how the brand communicates with them.
Marketing campaigns that do not follow Marketing Compliance not only harm their relationships with their consumers but there can also be legal repercussions.
3 Marketing Compliance Use Cases
Marketing compliance ensures your brand follows the law. We’ve listed 3 examples of use cases, below, where marketing compliance keeps your business on the right track.
Brand consistency and consistent brand guidelines are important to make sure your company is always presented as consistent as possible. Brands with consistent presentation are more likely to be recognized than those with an inconsistent message. When your branding is uniform, your ads will also be market-compliant.
Product specifications and prices are additional aspects that fall under marketing compliance. There are national and international rules in place which businesses must follow, when listing their product specifications and prices. Only products that make evidence-based claims can be considered marketing compliant.
Terms of service is another aspect to consider for branding. Brands must provide consumers with clear and accessible information about how their services work, as well as their terms and conditions.
How to Ensure Marketing Compliance
It can be simple to make certain your marketing is compliant by taking steps such as correctly training your team, creating and using templates, and using digital tools for reviews and approval.
Training your team members is a great way to make sure everyone who deals with your brand understands and is up-to-date with the latest compliance rules. It also ensures that they know why this is important to your brand specifically. Some ways that brands can do this are by setting up an onboarding process that includes marketing compliance training, and by using internal demos to update the team when things change. In this way you ensure effective communication across all company-wide materials.
Using templates for the processes around your brand can ensure that everything has a consistent look and feel. This way all employees have access to the same templates for creating ads and messaging, which guarantees that your brand is consistent and follows market compliance.
Another way to do this is to use a formalized review and approval tool. Once any form of draft is finished, it needs to be shared with the rest of the team for feedback. A review and approval tool also means that you can collect this feedback and issue approval in one centralized location.
Once your brand has gone through the process of finalizing an ad campaign, it is important that this is the only version of the ad that is used. That’s why using a digital asset management platform is a great way to support a brand to ensure this happens. A digital asset management platform can also be used to store all of your current and historical brand files.
3 Tips for Incorporating Marketing Compliance
How do you incorporate marketing compliance into the everyday workflows of your company?
It can be simple. If you focus on creating clear guidelines, you will be ensuring your employees have a better understanding of your brand’s guidelines, which in turn helps them to follow marketing compliance. To master content governance, monitor legal updates that impact you. Try a great review and approval platform, using the right tools can ensure that issues get picked up before they are out to consumers.
2 Top Online Marketing Compliance Tools
Filestage is an online proofing tool that allows marketers to share their content within their team, with other departments in the company or with external partners, if needed. The centralized platform makes it easy to collect feedback from different stakeholders and get approval with just a few clicks.
It’s an extremely easy-to-use online tool that helps agencies and marketing teams (of small, medium, and enterprise companies) easily manage their digital projects, which assures their marketing compliance. The software helps your colleagues review and discuss branded advertising content in real-time and enables you and your team to approve your branded ad’s in one location. When you’re ready, Filestage handles the approval process smoothly and efficiently.
Canto is a digital asset management platform that gives marketers the ability to organize, find, and share their approved brand assets efficiently. This gives marketers an effective way to achieve marketing compliance, by ensuring you work as a cohesive group and share only the latest approved materials. Canto also offers powerful integrations with other popular tools.
Conclusion
We hope that this short article has given you some input for thoughts about how to include marketing compliance into the everyday workflow of your company!
Remember that it can be simple – the key is to stay organized. If you focus on creating clear guidelines, you will ensure your employees have a better understanding of your brand’s guidelines, which in turn helps them to follow marketing compliance. Master your content governance and monitor the legal updates that impact you.
Finally, try out which review and approval platform fits your team – using the right tools will ensure that issues get picked up before it’s too late.
Muriel Skusa loves to create any kind of content and is a big fan of graphics that are visually catching and provide value to the reader.
Marketing stock photo by Laddawanpunna/Shutterstock
