Although you are aware of its importance, marketing compliance is difficult. It calls for a procedure to guarantee that the marketing materials your company uses to adhere to any applicable laws or regulations. Really nice, no? No, but it is very significant anyway. Customer protection and the assurance that they won’t be duped or misled are two benefits of compliant marketing, which of course also protects your company.
In actuality, this procedure is far more precise. The Internet has made marketing outlets more varied than ever. Your most recent social media post might be seen in a variety of international regions with various regulatory restrictions. Additionally, since everything can be customized and altered continuously online, having more channels means there are more opportunities for things to go wrong. While this does increase the likelihood of exposure, it also increases the likelihood of regulatory risk.
This article will discuss strategic adjustments that marketing executives may undertake to strengthen compliance oversight of the entire creative production process. simplifying digital compliance review, switching from a manual method to an entirely digital supervision process for your entire marketing team and all of the many sorts of content you produce
What is Marketing Compliance Review
By establishing due diligence over aspects within marketing assets and the procedure by which those assets are generated, amended, approved, and used, marketing compliance reduces brand risk.
An effective marketing compliance program:
- Conducting thorough research on the components of marketing assets, including claims, disclaimers, disclosures, legal texts, and any component used in product design or marketing communications
- Every technique utilized to confirm and approve that those components have been correctly implemented in your marketing materials in accordance with the rules applicable to your business
- The method of keeping track of and comparing every version you create and every version you alter for marketing content iterations.
- The full history of decisions and approvals made for all of your organization’s marketing and brand assets.
The examination of marketing compliance is sometimes considered the final phase in the entire creative process. Once the creative work is finished, marketing teams send a campaign and its brand assets to a legal or compliance team for assessment, approval, or adjustments.
4 ways to simplify marketing compliance review
1. Add Stages for Formal Compliance Review into Your Marketing Workflows
Workflow templates standardize processes and eliminate the need for creative thought when directing assets for approval. Additionally, they give you the option of setting and forgetting approval routing rules, which improves the traceability and uniformity of your compliance review process.
It is quite simple to include legal and compliance review as a step in your entire workflow process when developing different levels of review. It’s crucial to begin including your compliance staff collectively in that process.
You can choose how you desire to allow compliance input and legal feedback on your marketing materials using workflow phases. To formalize your and the compliance team’s roles in the marketing compliance process, you can either delay compliance evaluation of assets until the creative process has begun or you can include compliance team members as active participants earlier or at various phases of the creative flow.
Instead of using a linear compliance checkpoint, you can rely on another review step, such copy review, by using parallel workflow stages. You could start legal and compliance evaluations with a parallel/split path, and QA reviews could start depending on that approval. The legal and compliance team could begin reviewing an asset if copy approves it. Send it to a different review group entirely if the copy specifies that revisions are needed.
An alternative configuration option is a divided compliance decision path. For instance, if a regulatory assessment determines that an asset needs more adjustments, it can be sent back to QA for a more thorough evaluation before being sent back to the designer, studio, or production team to make the necessary changes.
2. Integrate Content Feedback with Measurement/Comparison Tools
The lack of a reliable, accurate digital technique to replace design reviews for physical printouts is a problem that frequently arises for marketing teams looking to transition away from email.
For instance, marketing groups who work with tangible products frequently need to be able to assess color correctness with great accuracy. Small adjustments to picture positioning, color adjustments, and the size and placement of design elements can ultimately have a significant impact on how compliant your assets are with various industry rules.
Marketing teams should consider “What’s going to provide us the most accurate version comparison and color comparison?” while selecting digital solutions. Does this provide sufficiently accurate, thorough tools to provide us the assurance to recreate what we’re doing in a digital environment?
Your marketing team and everyone else involved in the process can start tracking very, very minor changes that would typically be missed or be very difficult to see with the human eye if you have a measurement tool that allows you to zoom in on an asset and measure a specific element down to the millimeter or the pixel.
3. Use Workflow Templates to Share and Secure Content More Precisely.
The final suggestion we make is to incorporate workflow and proof templates into your marketing production in order to formalize the guidelines for how other people should engage with your marketing content.
Marketing compliance extends beyond interactions between your legal and creative teams. It is crucial to extend the security and review process controls to those interactions as well in order to produce a traceable history of all business activity. This includes all interactions with your external partners or other divisions within your organization.
You can start hard-coding those rules into your marketing workflow templates if different groups require different levels of access to your marketing content as it is being created (a first draft needs to be seen by your design and legal teams, only the fourth version needs to be sent to the client team, etc.).
Using rigid workflow templates is one method to achieve this. Strict workflow templates let you apply predictable content usage access and security based on the kind of project, the version, and the stage it’s in across all your various marketing assets.
You may simply set up a workflow template, restrict the activities and settings around content usage, and apply that template to all pertinent projects rather than having one flexible workflow where your marketing producers pick (or guess) who should be a part of that review process.
This makes sure you always conduct all necessary compliance checks. There are all the appropriate reviewers. The proper route will be used throughout. Before work begins, all necessary sign-offs will be required.
4. Create Dependable Audit Trails for Digital Marketing
It’s simple to concentrate on the main campaign benchmarks while you’re in the creative development phase: Have we met our deadlines? Does this actually go online at this time? Ahead of the rollout, has everyone who needs to view this provided their input? Rather than “are, we tracking this for a post-mortem study in the appropriate way?” the emphasis is on “let’s get this out, let’s get this moving.”
Going back and performing an analysis can take a lot of time. An essential first step in automating marketing compliance review is the ability to provide an on-demand audit report of marketing content activity. This prevents you from having to later sift through emails, messages, timestamps, and files to determine a history of content changes and approvals.
Any system you use to keep tabs on your digital marketing efforts as well as the chores of reviewing and approving content should enable you to swiftly produce a report of all activity taking place there and around the content.
All the stages of a review workflow, all the markups and annotations, all the submitted decisions and their justifications, even each time someone opens an asset, are all being captured in the background and feeding right into this activity log when compliance is included as a formal step in the marketing production process.
Marketing executives may create a summary report for an audit, a regulatory report, or even just for internal reference much more easily with this real-time tracking. To piece together a history of marketing approvals, you no longer need to trawl through hundreds of emails, files, activity logs, systems, and chats. Everything is automatically recorded in the background right at the start of a project.
A high-quality, low-effort post-mortem project study is also made available to marketing teams by being able to create all of this information on demand.
Marketing executives have used audit reports to examine their complete manufacturing process as well as to demonstrate that their marketing operations were carried out correctly. It enables marketing teams to respond to questions like, “How long did each production stage take?” and “Is something continually being delayed in our legal review or does the initial creative brief process take a really lengthy time?”
In addition to reducing the amount of time spent on marketing compliance monitoring, being able to track and provide summary reports for your marketing content also enables you to more thoroughly examine the content creation process across all of your projects.
Conclusion
Marketing compliance review is a field that is always changing. When you are conducting so many various marketing efforts across channels and collaborators, upholding these standards might occasionally appear overwhelming.
Marketing compliance review has enormous potential in the domain of marketing compliance evaluation. The benefits of eliminating a disorganized review process and implementing formal controls and standards for regular compliance review and enforcement outweigh the reduction in manual effort and manual monitoring for your marketing team.
Your marketing team can start standardizing how various groups interact with your marketing content and track your marketing activities over time by utilizing strict and automated workflows with granular access, split decisions, approval paths, navigation annotation tools, and auto-generated marketing audit reports.
Every time an asset is developed, proofed internally and externally, and tracked for you behind the scenes, these strategies and tools enable you to establish and enforce a regulated structure for regulatory supervision across all of your content production activities.
Check out more articles on getting started with Krock.io:
- Support Ukraine
- Cross-functional collaboration: What it is, barriers and best practices
- Interview with Oliver Lawer
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