Marketing compliance is a critical aspect of any business that engages in marketing activities. However, it can get overwhelming for marketing teams to keep up with the ever-evolving regulatory changes, particularly in tightly regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and legal. To avoid the risks of non-compliance, it's crucial for marketing teams to be aware of the common challenges they may face and know how to tackle them effectively. In this article, we'll discuss seven issues that marketers may encounter and offer solutions to overcome them.
Issue #1: Inadequate Planning for Legal Requirements
You may have planned an exciting social media competition that's about to go live in a few days. However, during the approval process, the legal team alerts you to the fact that you need to apply for trade promotional permits in specific states. This situation can be frustrating, and your competition may have to be postponed while you sort out the legal requirements.
Solution: To avoid such situations, involve your legal or compliance team in the planning stage of your marketing campaigns. They can provide advice on any legal requirements that need to be fulfilled for the project to be compliant. This approach will help you to build legal requirements into the project's scope and prevent any last-minute issues that could derail the campaign.
Issue #2: Inefficient Marketing Approval Process
An inefficient marketing approval process can cause headaches for marketers and lead to non-compliance issues. When critical stakeholders like legal or compliance are left out of the approval process, last-minute changes may be necessary when errors are discovered. This scenario can also result in non-compliant materials going live to the market, posing a risk to your business.
Solution: To streamline your marketing approval process, create a documented approval framework that ensures artwork is reviewed by the right stakeholders at the right time. This approach will reduce errors, avoid non-compliance issues, and eliminate bottlenecks that lead to excessive artwork changes.
Issue #3: Lack of Compliance Training and Documentation
When new marketing team members join your team, they may lack sufficient compliance training and documentation. Without updated protocols, they may be at risk of non-compliance, and current staff may have no reference materials to consult when in doubt.
Solution: Document your marketing compliance protocols and keep them updated as regulations change. Understand what you need to do to meet marketing compliance requirements. Schedule regular compliance meetings to discuss any issues your team may be encountering. Ensure that marketing compliance is part of the induction process for new marketing team members.
Issue #4: Poor Project Management and Tracking
Managing multiple marketing projects simultaneously can be challenging, and it's easy to lose track of who is working on what. A lack of visibility over your projects and approvals can lead to chaos and compliance risks.
Solution: Use marketing project management or marketing approval workflow software to manage your projects effectively. The software creates an automatic audit trail of work, which helps you track and monitor tasks and resources. Software with a strong focus on marketing compliance should incorporate a range of compliance features to help manage the needs of different stakeholders including checklists, tiered approvals, approval checklists, audit trails and many more.
Issue #5: Neglecting Compliance Protocols
When marketers are busy with multiple tasks, it's easy to neglect marketing compliance protocols. However, this negligence can lead to mistakes, such as using old assets and legal terms in artwork that's up for review. Such mistakes can put your business at risk of non-compliance.
Solution: Schedule regular compliance meetings to keep yourself and your team up to date with current compliance regulations. Use resources such as consumer regulatory bodies to stay informed of any changes that could affect your brand. Global marketers also need to be aware of regional regulations outside of their local sphere.
Read more For a moment, think about everything that goes into a creative project, from receiving the brief from the client to brainstorming ideas, creating content artwork, reviews, approvals, and more. Sure, for one or two projects, managing these effectively wouldn't be too challenging.
Now, multiply the number of projects by 10, 20, or even 30, and, suddenly, managing your projects becomes much more complicated. So, it's a good idea to optimise your creative workflow for it to be as efficient as possible, which will not only enable you to complete projects faster but also allow you to be more productive.
But how should you do this? Fortunately, we're here to help, and in this post, we'll show you some tips you can use to design and optimise your creative workflow.
Read more As the marketing industry grows increasingly fast-paced, with the expectation of producing more content and campaigns across a growing number of channels, burnout is becoming more common, and many marketers are considering leaving the industry, as reported by Forbes.
In light of this, it's clear that adopting the best tools, processes, and culture to support marketing and creative teams is essential. Businesses still relying on outdated systems such as email and spreadsheets, and managing projects without dedicated creative project management tools, need to consider the negative impact these inadequate tools can have.
To improve efficiency and better support your most valuable assets, your people, it's worth exploring more advanced, collaborative tools.
Read more 
