If you think following legal and ethical standards is only the CEO’s job, think again. Marketing compliance jobs affect your role at work too. In most cases, a business requires all of its team members to uphold and maintain compliance guidelines. That is why you must be aware of your legal responsibilities. Otherwise, you may end up making a mistake that can cost you dearly. And nobody wants that.
In today’s busy world of content production, meetings, and communications, it’s easy to overlook compliance in marketing responsibilities. To avoid this, all team members must be aware of their compliance part. It’s because when they know their role, they can hold themselves accountable.
So, where do you stand in this hierarchy?
Let’s take a look at the various roles that can help implement marketing compliance regulations in an organization.
Table of Contents
Content Creator
Content creators like copywriters, designers, videographers, and social media managers play a critical role in managing compliance standards.
They usually have a very hands-on approach with the creative content, from production to constant modifications. As a result, their work has to regularly go through changes, from client requests to version updates to stakeholder approvals.
So how are content creator’s roles a part of the marketing compliance jobs?
You may not be directly responsible for the entire compliance in marketing strategy, but your work is concerned with several marketing compliance responsibilities like:
- Updating relevant stakeholders about any new changes or versions so that they can review and approve it
- Ensuring that you receive feedback from all the stakeholders before you create new versions or drafts for review
- Keeping up with a digital trail (and sometimes, also a paper trail) for all your work and for any changes you make
- Saving and storing source files and final versions in an acceptable format and location
- Overseeing that all content meets brand standards (colors, logos, copy, etc.), as well as other regulatory requirements (disclaimers, sizing conditions, etc.)
How can they achieve their responsibilities?
The solution to most of their reviewing responsibilities comes down to using software that enables them to do that effectively. As it happens, GoVisually is just the tool to ease your reviewing process. With your high-intensity workload of creative designs and reviewing processes, you can rely on GoVisually to help you streamline the process.
Project Manager
As a project manager, you’re very much a part of the marketing compliance jobs. It includes managing the efficiency and productivity of the content creation process, distributing creative work for review, managing the collection of feedback, and getting stakeholder input while meeting big business goals.
You may feel like you don’t have the time when it comes to compliance responsibilities. But ignoring them now would cost you even more time in the future.
Becoming a good marketing compliance specialist:
- Deciding which stakeholders need access to content in projects and being able to justify why (or why not)
- Keeping careful track of the stakeholders that do have access to the content and also any actions they take
- Making sure that there are controls in place to record and distribute new comments, modifications, and decisions around marketing content
- Maintaining a record of approval sign-off from all stakeholders from start to end.
- Setting up review processes for the various clients.
- Controlling changes and updates to projects in an organized manner
Meanwhile, because of the different nature of different projects, you’re also likely to be stuck working within email reply threads and online file storage systems that allow you to stay in touch with content creators and clients. These channels’ unreliability can sometimes make it hard to ensure that everyone is completing the work properly. It can also be challenging to track and record the progress of projects.
Therefore, organizing these things properly and centralizing collaborator interactions through platforms like GoVisually can help you keep records.
Chief Marketing Officer (or the VP of Marketing)
As a marketing manager, you’re primarily responsible for all the content released to the public. If you’re not careful about your brand’s honesty and integrity, you can end up saying the wrong things. That is why you should be completely aware of the marketing compliance guidelines that will help you stay at the top of your game.
How to be a good compliance officer:
- Set concise guidelines for how external stakeholders, partners, or clients should interact with your brand and ensure your team implements them
- Stay on track with regulatory requirements when developing new campaign ideas.
- Create a compliance strategy and consistently review all corporate communications
- Manage and control brand cohesion across all of your marketing content channels – including digital, print, and social media
- Make sure that partner co-branding and content use across all partner campaigns follow legal requirements.
When you have concrete governance policies, they usually act as a tremendous competitive advantage, especially when trying to get new clients. So, if you follow through on your compliance obligations correctly, you’ll be bringing in a lot of benefits to the team.
Tech Manager (or the IT Expert)
As the tech manager, it’s your job to see how data affects compliance. Depending on how your company collects, stores, and organizes data, this can be a deal-breaker when it comes to meeting compliance standards. Lack of audit trails can often cause problems that you should avoid at all costs.
So, it would help if you were extra cautious about maintaining these. You must be able to prove that all data used by the company meet compliance guidelines.
How to become a compliance consultant in the IT niche:
- Gather and keep track of user data throughout the content creation process
- Secure data that’s collected around customer interactions and campaign analytics, and ensure that the collection of data meets all privacy laws
- Generate (whether manually or automatically) real-time compliance reports to stakeholders or regulators
- Keep a proper track of all content details and marketing data.
- Be aware and look out for any possible gaps in data governance practices.
Legal Representative
The Legal Representative of any company is usually the person most directly connected to marketing compliance requirements. And, hence, the one with the most responsibility. If you have this role, your job likely includes being involved in the processes of creative innovation, client delivery, and corporate standards.
As the legal team leader, you’re directly responsible for setting your organization’s compliance standards. And more importantly, you must also ensure that all marketing communications meet those standards.
So to achieve this, you can do the following:
- Conduct a legal review of all creative content before finalizing it
- Ensure that all brand advertisements or packaging have proper disclaimers about any related associations or clauses
- Check contractor agreements to ensure that they include appropriate policies and safety protocols regarding content access, usage, intellectual property needs, etc.
- Review brand licensing agreements to make sure that they meet all brand compliance standards.
- Ensure that social media policies are updated according to the requirements and enforced across the organization
When you have a career role as significant as this, it’s crucial that your internal systems and management processes run with the utmost precision and reliability. You can’t expect to take on all the burden yourself, so one of the best things you can do is help the team automate these systems. As a result, you’ll achieve better results and get more done in less time.
Key Takeaway
Marketing compliance jobs are involved in most business departments and must be integrated into all work roles. It’s a legal responsibility that can’t be ignored, and while it can add extra load to your job, disregarding it is not worth the cost.
Unless everyone involved takes an active role in ensuring that the brand doesn’t break any rules, consistently upholding compliance isn’t feasible.
