As a marketer, you can’t ignore marketing compliance checklist. Ensuring it requires the collaborative effort of an entire team and not just the legal representative. It’s everyone’s responsibility, or at least of those involved in the project. And it’s all about following rules and setting ethical standards for your brand.
So, if you’re reading this article, chances are you’re already familiar with the concept of marketing compliance. However, despite that familiarity, you might not be aware of what is a compliance checklist and the practical ways to ensure compliance in marketing.
So, let’s look at 10 of the best, easy-to-implement strategies on the marketing compliance checklist to ensure your business stays within compliance standards.
Table of Contents
1. Document The Approval Process
When you don’t have a proper method for managing marketing compliance, you can have trouble keeping up with it.
Remember that it’s not just your marketing team that needs to be careful about it. From project managers to PR representatives, everyone should be on track with compliance.
Together, your team can settle on some internal brand standards that ensure compliance across all departments. For example, you can determine what you should be documenting, and cases where legal or marketing representatives may need to give written approval.
2. Collaborate And Review
Once you’ve completed a project task, you can keep everything concerned with your marketing compliance process in one central location – such as a shared drive. When you do this, it ensures that everyone involved can access it and also update it regularly. Project teams can add materials and documents, or review projects and make necessary changes.
But to speed up and improve your review process, even more, we’d advise you to use GoVisually. The live review and feedback tracking features, among many others, will help you improve your workflow even more. What’s best is that you can even try out a free trial. So, by utilizing this online proofing software, you can make things a lot easier for your work life.
3. Build A Disclosure Checklist
Your marketing team must always look out for what disclosures might be needed from a legal perspective. It’s especially significant to consider this when you might be running advertisements on social media or marketing special offers for specific geographical regions.
For example, there will likely be a different set of disclosures for marketing a superannuation product for a financial services company than what they might be for a low-interest loan.
For the time being, you may oversee this with a simple manual checklist, but over time, it’s most effective to automate this process.
4. Stay Up-To-Date with Compliance
Marketing compliance isn’t just something that you can do once and then forget about it. It’s something that must be updated regularly and consistently.
As the digital landscape continues to change almost every day, so do regulation guidelines. Hence, it’s crucial to stay up-to-date with the latest marketing compliance guidelines, or you may end up getting penalized before you can realize what you’re doing wrong.
Here’s an example of that happening in real life.
Google was fined with $2.7B for breaking compliance standards. They were wrongly favoring a partner price comparison site by abusing their position of being a search engine. But the silver lining is that even Google couldn’t escape the strict marketing compliance policies, and neither can you.
So, it’s imperative to stay updated with compliance because rules often tend to shift and change, and if you don’t keep up with them, you may unwittingly break them.
Now that you know the essential marketing compliance checklist let’s delve into features that will help your creative team stay on track.
5. Have A Tool for Collaborative View
You have to understand that marketing compliance is everyone’s job. One of the most effective ways you can ensure compliance is to have a software that enables the entire team to stay connected and on track with what’s happening.
As it happens, GoVisually would make an excellent choice for you to gather everyone on a platform where they can collaborate, review, and speed up the approval process.
6. Share The Marketing Material With Your Clients and Keep Backlogs
Do you know the best part of using GoVisually to help you in ticking things off your marketing compliance checklist? Its that you can even share your designs or marketing material with your clients (and they wouldn’t need an account). How cool is that?
So, one of the most significant advantages that you’d gain from it is that you can keep them up to speed by following things on the marketing compliance checklist. Moreover, with GoVisually, you can even save all comments and attachments for future reference.
Moreover, you can even record old versions and track changes on them, which always comes in handy as a reference tool.
7. Take Proper Security Measures
These days, nothing might be as important as security is.
When looking for compliance software, security is one of the critical components you should be considering. You must ensure that all your data is encrypted and secure.
8. Keep Data Organized
As your business expands, your organization skills must stay consistent and on point.
The best compliance software will have organization tools at the core of its plan, and it should offer your business a flexible structure and choices to deal with your undertakings such that suits you best.
With adjustable verifications and channels, you can tailor your work processes anyway you like. And as a result, you can set up such organization tools to deal with tactical and technical tasks, leaving you to zero in on growing your company.
9. Maintain An Audit Trail
While the time of keeping paper trails may have long gone, you still need proof of your company’s processes if the regulatory bodies do come checking.
For that reason, you should make sure that any software you use for marketing compliance has the functionality to record an audit trail. It should save comments, collect both old and new versions of projects (so that progress is not lost), and save all details to keep a neat record.
10. Track Your Progress
An organized dashboard that offers progress following all records and materials identified with compliance makes it simple for individuals to collect quick insights on how everything is going. In this way, you can immediately figure out where the action is required.
With this comprehensive view, it’s anything but difficult to stay on track with compliance, and you can find potential issues before they become more prominent.
Still wondering why marketing compliance checklists are essential?
It’s not just about breaking the rules. Customers also care when brands are consistent. Studies show that millennials tend to spend more on brands that demonstrate transparency and integrity. Because in the world of social media, customers know what’s happening, and they don’t put up with anything less than what they expect.
While the information on the guidelines is significant, it’s likewise fundamental that associations engage their marketing groups with the right instruments to ensure compliance in each step of the review and approval process.
