With the help of creative agency project management software, you can get better at reviewing your team’s work. And here, we will cover what changes you can make in your management tactics to enact a better compliance review.
If you keep all the reviews offline, it is better to bring them online so everyone on your team has access to them. You can also generate audits of all of your marketing activities, omitting the manual work.
Marketing compliance review makes sure every ad, post, label and campaign asset follows the laws and regulations that apply to your business before it goes live. Below, we cover what it involves, the challenges teams run into, and four ways to make it simpler with the help of creative agency project management software.
What Is a Marketing Compliance Review?
A marketing compliance review is the process of checking marketing assets, and the way they are created, edited, approved and used, against the rules that apply to your business. It protects customers from misleading claims and protects your brand from regulatory risk.
The internet has made this harder. A single social post can be seen in many regions with different regulations, and online content can be changed at any time, so there are more chances for something to slip through.
An effective marketing compliance program covers:
- The components of every marketing asset: claims, disclaimers, disclosures, legal text and anything used in product design or marketing communications.
- How you check and approve that those components are used correctly, according to the rules for your industry.
- How you track and compare every version of a piece of content as it changes.
- The full history of decisions and approvals for all of your marketing and brand assets.
Compliance review is often treated as the last step of the creative process: once the work is finished, the marketing team sends the campaign to a legal or compliance team for approval or changes. Bringing it into the workflow earlier saves rounds of rework.
Challenges
There are plenty of challenges you face when doing a marketing compliance review. When it comes to such an important activity, there can be too much pressure. Nice creative management software can help you go through the marketing compliance review faster, more productively, and get better results.
The main challenges that most specialists might face are:
- Most methods of storing all data cannot be accurately traced. Many reviews are kept in GoogleDocs, Microsoft Word documents, printouts in folders, etc. And this makes it hard to track everything you have.
- There are a lot of content and materials that have to be reviewed by hand, which can complicate the process.
- The more people try to keep up with the materials, the harder it gets to keep track of the actual marketing review.
- It’s hard to keep up with all the small materials and details when you run marketing campaigns, work with influencers, track and plan content, etc.
There are just way too many tiny things when it comes to marketing, right? And many work planning software just doesn’t fit those needs when you need to add things up fast and then track them.
4 Ways to Simplify Marketing Compliance Review
It might get hard and look like a bunch of work as you plan to run a marketing compliance review as a marketing team leader. When managing creative teams, you should take many aspects into consideration, including storing all the data regarding your team’s work and running marketing compliance reviews.
1. Add Review Stages to the Workflow
Have workflow templates that would actually make your working routine easier and more productive. It will also be on hand when it comes to the compliance review process, so don’t skip those.
- You can add a marketing compliance review to your workflow template where you can state all the data regarding the process: roles, steps, and deadlines.
- There is also an option to conduct a final check a bit earlier, so you don’t have to go through all the stages if there is a possibility to finish the review.
- Run multi-stage, singular, or parallel marketing compliance stages as they can be influenced by any of your marketing actions.
- You can also track the status of the review in real-time, so basically, you can always keep abreast when it comes to the working processes.
- Approve changes as soon as each review stage is done. It is easy to check the status of the review as you can clearly see it with the help of the creative management software.
You can also decide when compliance comes in. Some teams wait until the creative work is done; others add compliance reviewers earlier, or at several stages. With parallel stages, legal and compliance review can start as soon as copy review approves an asset, while QA runs on its own track. If compliance asks for changes, the asset goes back to QA or straight to the designer or production team before it returns for another check.
2. Align Tools with Content Feedback
The problem is that marketing teams want to get rid of sending emails with reviews but face the issue that they don’t have a reliable, accurate digital way to convert proof designs into physical prints.
For example, marketing teams working with physical products often need to review the color accuracy of different product labeling options and/or verify that barcode placement measurements are highly accurate.
Small image changes, color corrections, alignment, and size of design elements can have a significant impact on how your assets perform under different regulations in your industry.
When teams have measurement tools to check assets, measuring elements down to the millimeter or pixel, your marketing team and everyone involved in the process can begin to track the very small changes that are often missed or difficult to check with their own eyes.
When you compare tools, ask: which one gives us the most accurate version and color comparison, accurate enough to replace printed proofs?
It saves a lot of time for your design team. Your design or reviewer doesn’t need to take the file out of review and into a production tool like Photoshop or Illustrator to apply gridlines and scale them to regulatory sizes or placement requirements.
3. Upgrade Security Using Workflow Templates
Another tip is to use certifications and standards to create guidance for others using your content marketing products.
Marketing compliance isn’t only about your creative and legal teams. It includes every interaction with external partners and other departments (see our guide to reviewing marketing content internally and externally), which makes it important to have security policies, monitor the workflow, and keep a log of all changes.
If different groups need different levels of access, build that into the template. For example, the first draft is seen only by design and legal, and only the fourth version goes to the client team. Applying one strict template to every relevant project means the right reviewers, the right route and every required sign-off are in place before work begins, instead of a producer guessing who should review.
Complex workflow systems allow you to use usage and security information for all your different products according to the type of project, the format, and the status it is connected to.
4. Create Dependable Audit Trails
During production, the focus is on deadlines and launch dates, not on whether you are recording everything for a later audit. Rebuilding that history afterwards from emails, chats, timestamps and files takes hours.
When compliance is a formal step in your review workflow, the system records everything in the background: each review stage, every markup and annotation, every decision and the reason behind it, even each time someone opens an asset. You can then create an audit report on demand, for a regulator, an internal check or a project post-mortem.
The same report helps you improve the process itself. It answers questions like “How long did each production stage take?” and “Is legal review the bottleneck, or is it the creative brief?”
Conclusion
Compliance monitoring is a growing area for marketers. Sometimes, following these principles can feel overwhelming when you’re marketing across channels and networks.
However, the game is worth all the candles. Compliance monitoring is an untapped area of marketing. After your sales team has adopted the group review process and started implementing controls and standards, they will also conduct compliance reviews, but with less manual work and manual inspection of your sales team.
Using robust and automated workflows with common access, decision and approval processes, automated editing tools, and automated marketing review reports will help your marketing team empower startups to manage services and track sales results over time.
These strategies and tools allow you to create and strengthen a management structure for monitoring the management of all your production processes, with the materials created at all times, internally and externally, doing the job for you.
Check out more articles on getting started with Krock.io:
- Creative Review and Approval Process: 5 Steps to Faster Sign-Off
- How to simplify your collaborative design process
- 7 Best Autodesk Shotgrid Alternatives
- TOP 10 online collaboration tools for 2022
If you have any questions or need help, just let us know.
