No matter what your industry is, if you work in marketing, you have compliances to follow. Healthcare and banking sectors are used to navigating compliance, but other sectors like education, real estate, cosmetics, food and beverage — the list goes on — all have regulations they need to meet to operate successfully.
But understanding and abiding by compliance rules isn’t easy, and if you get it wrong, your reputation could suffer (not to mention potential legal penalties).
So, how do you produce exceptional marketing creative and navigate the hoops and hurdles of compliance?
Know the right strategies. Your marketing efforts will thrive when you cater to both creativity and compliance.
What we'll cover
Table of contents
Understanding marketing compliance in creative teams
Put simply, marketing compliance makes sure your marketing efforts play by the rules. Those rules can vary based on your industry and the laws, regulations, and industry standards that govern it.
For example, if you work in finance, you’ll need to stay within the guidelines of the SEC. Consumer goods — think everything from soft drinks to sofas — need to comply with the FTC. Tech companies should follow all CCPA or GDPR requirements.
Whatever the governing body for your industry is, they set the marketing compliance rules.
When you don’t adhere to compliance requirements, you face the consequences. You'll lose consumer trust (e.g., Chipotle following the 2015 E. coli outbreak) and damage your brand reputation (e.g., Volkswagen's 2015 emissions scandal). Fines, legal battles, or dings to your reputation aren’t worth the potential risk.
But marketing compliance isn’t just about laws and regulations set by outside authorities. It also makes sure that you stick to your internal marketing guidelines, so your brand’s voice and messaging are consistent.
Compliance rules, whether they’re internal or external, impact what you include in marketing materials. This includes any information you include on packaging, social media posts, promotions you run with influencers, and so much more — everything, down to literally the pixel level.
Get it right, and no one will ever know how much work it took.
Get it wrong? Make sure your legal team is on standby.
Compliance challenges faced by creative teams
Getting compliance correct isn’t always easy. Let’s look at the most common challenges marketers face when following compliances.
Balancing creativity with compliance
Marketers have a unique challenge: follow all regulatory requirements and maintain brand integrity. Team members have plenty of fantastic ideas, but not all of them will be compliant.
Figuring out how to let your marketing content shine while adhering to all compliance standards is a puzzle, but it’s a puzzle worth solving. Without it, your brand stands to waste time and resources trying to fix compliance issues after they’ve already occurred rather than being proactive.
Tight deadlines driven by strict approval workflows
When every creative decision must be approved by key stakeholders, content creation processes take extra time. To make sure you don’t fall behind schedule, teams have tighter deadlines, which means less time for creative content to marinate and turn into something truly innovative.
The approval process adds pressure to creative teams. Creative work and ideas take time — there’s no way around it. With compliance standards to meet and deadlines to hit, marketing teams won’t have the luxury of vetting and refining their ideas. Rapid creation takes a mental toll.
Conflicting priorities
Your marketing team may occasionally butt heads with your compliance team (okay, maybe more than occasionally). That’s because creativity and compliance don’t always go hand in hand. One wishes to be bold and break down walls. The other seems to continuously put walls up.
If you’re new to honing in on compliance issues, prepare for some choppy waters. Regular training leads to smoother sailing for all teams. Compliance guidelines exist for good reason, and understanding why they are what they are can help get everyone in sync.
Ultimately, your creative team will find new ways to tell your brand story. (Ways that fit within the regulatory requirements and keep your legal team happy!)
How creative teams can ensure marketing compliance step-by-step
With these strategies, your marketing team will become compliance pros. Let’s look at how to get your creative teams on board with marketing compliance — from start to finish.
1. Establish clear guidelines and policies
To follow compliance guidelines, your team needs to understand them. Your compliance policy should outline all expectations and procedures your team will be required to perform. When you kick off new policies, here are a few proven tactics for success:
- Host workshops: Gather your team for interactive training sessions. Encourage questions — this will be a learning period for everyone.
- Organize documentation: Process memos should be easily accessible by all team members. Keep them neatly organized and readily available.
- Talk about it frequently: Discussing policies openly is a must. Guidelines continuously evolve, so this will be an ongoing process.
- Illustrate consequences: Compliance management requires discipline. Communicating what happens when policies are broken makes expectations clear.
2. Collaborate with legal and compliance experts
Don’t parse through compliance rules on your own. Collaborate with legal/compliance experts when building your procedures and have your legal team review processes that already exist and alter them as necessary. That way, you’ll know everything is done by the book.
This also establishes an ongoing relationship between creative and compliance teams. It will benefit everyone to work closely together; the earlier you introduce these two workforces, the easier it will be to build practices that support compliance.
Strategies for fostering effective communication and collaboration between teams
- Establish achievable goals so that everyone can measure success. For example, if you’re trying to improve communications between teams, establish an acceptable length of time for follow-up. Depending on your environment, that might be 24 hours or it could be a few days. This gives everyone the same measurable benchmark for not only when to send replies, but when to expect them.
- Regularly check in with team members about project progress and concerns. During one-on-ones or team meetings, ask about any blockers or challenges within the project that require additional support — then follow through on providing it.
- Use the right marketing compliance software to make adherence simple. A tool like Ziflow that bakes compliance directly into the review and approval workflow and allows you to tag and assign cross-team team members is a lot more efficient than using traditional project management software (which isn’t purpose-built for creative assets).
3. Integrate compliance into the creative workflow
Every workflow your creative teams use should revolve around compliance infrastructure. This way, you’ll always be drawing inside the lines.
You’ll reduce risks of non-compliance, increase your team’s efficiency, and create more consistent results. The right workflows make project management more straightforward.
Skip this important step, and you’ll be stuck trying to fix the asset after the fact to make it compliant — wasting time and resources in the process.
Build repeatable workflows for standardized processes
Templates are the foundation of a standardized process. Standardized processes reduce the opportunity for costly mistakes.
By streamlining your marketing compliance workflows, you’ll be able to increase speed, output, and team bandwidth. Repeatable workflows also benefit scaling — it is easier to train when there is consistency in your procedures.
Integrate compliance checkpoints & reviews in the creative process
Creating marketing content in regulated industries shouldn’t be a free-for-all. When compliance issues and brand standards are on the table, frequent checkpoints and strategically placed reviews smooth out all the wrinkles.
Your approvals process will be faster and more straightforward when you have compliance checks along the way. Create checklists to track compliance adherence, and add templates to simplify the creative process.
Similarly, set expectations for cross-team reviews at various steps of the creation process. For instance, you may meet with your compliance teams after ideation. Then, do a content review with key stakeholders after the first draft. Gather feedback, implement it, and receive one final approval before publishing. This ensures nothing that’s non-compliant is shared.
Tools and software for compliance monitoring and tracking
Monitoring compliance is vital. The right technology offers automated compliance checks, collects an audit trail, and streamlines the approval process.
When you use tools like Ziflow during your creative process, you can automate reminders, get notifications for edit requests, and reduce bottlenecks. With comment and version histories, it promotes transparency across teams. Powerful software makes it easier to adhere to demanding compliance rules.
4. Leverage technology to support compliance
The right tools make all the difference. Without them, your procedures will be muddled, and you’ll be at risk for non-compliance. Marketing compliance software makes the asset reviewing process much more efficient with built-in workflows and automatic assignments for internal and external team members, saving time and giving you the confidence to know the asset is compliant with branding and industry standards. Tools like Ziflow, which support documentation, automation, and scalability, ensure you’re putting your best foot forward.
Use compliance-friendly tools and software
The software you choose determines how seamlessly your processes will run.
Project management tools keep deadlines top of mind, letting your projects move smoothly down the pipeline. Digital asset management software keeps all materials easy to access. Collaborative proofing software allows you to gather feedback and automate compliance checks.
Combine them all, and you’ve got a rock-solid workflow!
Document everything
Choose a software that records version and comment histories. Then, you’ll never have to wonder what someone said or why you made a change. This adds accountability for content creators and stakeholders alike while promoting compliance.
5. Manage people and culture
When establishing new brand guidelines for compliance, shifts need to happen company-wide. Cultivating a culture of awareness and education benefits all teams. Here are a few key ways to foster compliance in your creative teams.
Own your role
All organizations need strong leadership. Set the tone for success from your position. Demonstrate the importance of complying with all regulations in your day-to-day. For example, discuss compliance regularly during team meetings and highlight any relevant recent real-world examples of companies that have faced consequences for non-compliance. Encourage questions and discussion among team members. This builds trust and goodwill among team members. Plus, your brand’s reputation beyond your internal team will benefit. These are the building blocks for a positive company culture.
Embrace proactive research and education
Marketing compliance shifts over time. Staying up to date with current events benefits the whole team. Explain to your team how important it is to stay informed — and lead by example. Attend seminars, follow industry news, and hold workshops. Not only will your team be better informed, but they’ll also learn how to color inside the lines of compliance.
Conduct regular training sessions
Keeping your team in the know is a must. Compliance updates may happen frequently. Regularly training your staff ensures all procedures are followed to a T. Education regarding best practices means you’ll always hit your marks.
6. Monitoring and continuous improvement
Your marketing team should capture key metrics. When you review how your content performs, you’ll understand how to keep improving. If there are any gaps in your compliance efforts, you’ll be able to find and address them.
Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your marketing efforts and hold your team accountable. In doing so, you’ll also measure compliance effectiveness. That allows you to shift approaches as needed.
Best practices for ensuring creative marketing compliance
Want to know the best ways for your creative teams to tackle brand compliance? We’ll break down the most impactful ways to stay compliant without losing your creativity.
Use compliance checklists
Creating a compliance checklist is the first step to making sure all marketing materials meet compliance guidelines. Say goodbye to guesswork: With checklists, legal standards are met, and nothing important is missed.
Centralize your feedback process
Collecting and implementing feedback is more important than ever in regulated industries. When you have specific criteria to meet and stakeholders to impress, you can’t risk letting crucial feedback get lost or overlooked. The right software makes it easy to centralize feedback. You’ll increase team accountability, increase consistency across all campaigns, and save time making changes.
Standardize your review and approval process
With no structure, your approval process could derail months of hard work. Establishing clear procedures for review and approval keeps everything on track.
Process standardization supports higher-quality work since every campaign will be reviewed the same way. You’ll reduce rounds of feedback, which frees up creative team bandwidth. Plus, you'll minimize errors overall when you get the right eyes on each piece at the right time!
Maintain an audit trail
Detailed records are a safeguard. They provide transparency across teams and make routine audits a breeze. Maintaining accurate records of marketing decisions adds reliability to your workflows. (Not to mention, your legal team will thank you for reducing compliance risks.)
Provide ongoing training for creative teams
Frequent training encourages constant learning. As new compliance guidelines emerge and best practices shift, routine training keeps your company ahead of the game. You’ll build team confidence and cultivate a well-informed company culture. The best way to avoid compliance violations is to know what to watch out for and training ensures all team members are in the know.
Build a robust marketing compliance workflow with Ziflow
Simplifying your marketing compliance workflows is the key to working efficiently. The more streamlined your processes, the lower the risk you have of running into non-compliance.
Choosing the right tools keeps your brand out of hot water. With Ziflow, you can streamline the entire review and approval process from conception to completion. Build compliance-ready workflows and collaborate safely and securely, ensuring your assets are high quality and compliant.
