As a marketing manager, your marketing compliance checklist is your best friend. It’s important to remember that the checklist requires a collective effort from the entire team, your marketers and your legal representative. It’s everyone’s responsibility to follow the guidelines and processes set out by the company, and there are tools you can use to help you. 

If you are unfamiliar with a marketing compliance checklist, here’s a summary of what it is. 

What is marketing compliance? 

Marketing compliance checklists are about following rules and setting ethical standards for your brand. Your advertising and marketing campaign is more than just the fun creative elements, it is about the strong regulatory criteria you have to follow in order to be compliant with the law. This means that your campaign needs to be fully compliant, which is half the battle. 

Why is marketing compliance important? 

Your business can be negatively impacted if marketing compliance is not done correctly. This can include expensive penalties if you break the law, and a damaged reputation, which can permanently ruin the perception of your brand. 

Here are a few ways you can keep your team on track. 

1. Document, document, document!

Documenting the approval process is essential for marketing compliance. If you don’t have an effective and complete method for managing the compliance, you can have problems finding it in the future, and keeping up with it.

Just remember: this compliance is not limited to the creatives on your team. Everyone on the marketing team needs to be aware and careful about compliance, from project managers to PR representatives.

Your team needs to come up with some internal brand standards and documents that ensure compliance across every department and stage of marketing. 

Here’s an example: you can determine what needs to be documented, and what needs to be looked over by a legal representative. Remember, it’s important that you understand where and how to find this important information. 

2. Collaborate with your team

Once you’ve completed a task, you should keep all of your important information in one central location that can be easily accessed and found. Label everything clearly, and ensure that the right people on your team know where and how to find this information.

A great location for your paperwork is a shared drive. When you have a shared drive with your team, you can ensure that those who need to, can access it, and that the right people can add information. 

IntelligenceBank has a great Governance, Risk & Compliance software, which is designed to help you easily manage marketing compliance. It has an all in one place location for creative collaboration, brand compliance and approvals, making your planning and approving of campaigns easier than ever. 

Having a collaborative view is the perfect addition to your team. Empowering your team to annotate work and make comments directly onto your assets - including PDFs, audio, video and web links. You can even have a side-by-side view so you can see changes made directly.

3. Ensure your compliance is up to date

Creating a compliance checklist is essential, but it isn’t something that you can do once and forget about. Your checklist must be updated regularly and consistently. We recommend that you update your list yearly, at minimum.

Keep in mind, laws and rules surrounding the digital landscape are constantly changing, just like the landscape itself. It’s important to stay up to date with the latest guidelines, or you may be punished for doing something you didn’t realize you were doing wrong. This is why it’s important to constantly update your information, or you may be ‘compliant’ with your personal checklist, but not actually compliant with laws and regulations. 

Rules are always changing, so it is important to keep this in the back of your mind. 

4. Ensure compliance for everyone on your team

As we’ve mentioned earlier, you need to ensure that your compliance is easy for everyone.

With IntelligenceBank’s GRC software, compliance is made easier. You can keep a record of requests, approvals and usage, and even have a disclaimer that shares the ‘fine print’ with your team, instantly.

Furthermore, you can score projects based on their potential risk, so you have more approval control over riskier projects. 

There is also a brilliant report and dashboard portal, which allow you to track marketing activity, talent usage and adherence to your checklist, budget and creative usage. This makes compliance across your team easy, and marketing ops reporting even easier.

5. Take proper security measures

Security is crucial, particularly when you are keeping your information online. Your information is very important to your company, and it should be safe at all times.

Although keeping your information online is very convenient, it is also important that your information is being kept safe at all times. 

You should also keep track of individual and team marketing activities and budgets, allowing you to see what your team is working on. Ensure that your data is encrypted and secure from both external and internal threats.