What is Marketing Compliance? Why is it Important?

Marketer reviewing ads for marketing compliance violations

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The significance of compliance in highly-regulated industries is well understood. Companies are at consistent risk of incurring financial or reputational damages and can’t afford to put themselves in a negative light with regulators. The weight of their responsibility to remain compliant impacts operational and budgeting structures from the top-down. This same level of dedication must be applied to marketing and advertising laws, especially in the age of digitalization. Learn what marketing compliance is, why it’s important, and how your company can improve marketing content review processes.

What is Marketing Compliance?

Marketing compliance is the process of ensuring your company’s marketing materials, content, and platforms are compliant with rules and regulations set by government regulatory agencies. Marketing compliance also involves ensuring that your company’s legal, marketing, advertising, sales, and digital platforms such as websites and apps follow your organization’s branding and regulatory guidelines.

Why is Marketing Compliance Important?

Over the last few years, regulatory burdens have strained compliance teams with marketing restrictions that constantly change and evolve to include mediums of advertising and communication. Digital demand requires more consumer touchpoints to keep up with the competition, but the regulatory landscape is more complex than ever.

Companies that want to keep up with content velocity, brand, and regulatory compliance face expensive setbacks. With budget allocations continuing to trend towards digital marketing efforts, marketing teams have to ensure all marketing and promotional collateral is in alignment with compliance guidelines without delaying the launch of their campaigns. This process of ensuring all promotional collateral is in alignment with these standards is called marketing compliance. The challenges with maintaining marketing compliance have stunted some of the most profitable companies in the world—and even with all their access, most are still looking for a solution to their lack of compliance resources.

The Problem: A Lack of Compliance Resources

Out of 305 compliance leaders surveyed from highly regulated industries, 61% reported that they couldn’t quickly adapt to sudden changes in their regulatory or compliance environment. Regulator fines are increasing year to year, but there still seems to be a large compliance component missing from processes. Where is the gap coming from?

The interesting thing is, corporations are doing everything they can to incentivize compliance professionals to accept employment. In dealing with a tight labor market, base salaries have increased for all sectors and experience levels. Regulatory scrutiny is on the rise, and companies need to fully staff their compliance teams.

According to 2022 hiring and employment trends, 93% of legal departments are experiencing the most challenges in finding skilled compliance professionals. Compliance officers and analysts don’t have to compromise on their needs, and without a strong compliance culture and reputation, smaller markets will be left to fend for themselves. The Deloitte UK Centre for Health Solutions published a report about the challenges of compliance in life sciences as it relates to achieving larger business goals. “Successful companies will be those that are able to sustain their compliance talent pipeline to meet the increasing demand for, and changing nature of, compliance skills. As compliance complexity within life sciences grows, the demand for high-quality compliance resources will increase.”

No matter if an industry is highly regulated or not, compliance must be a top priority. In fact, 80% of marketing teams surveyed by Ziflow reported that their work was subject to at least one type of industry or brand compliance requirement. Companies need compliance support, but resources are few and far between.

The Solution: AI Brand and Marketing Compliance Software

AI has opened up a world of possibilities for both marketers and compliance professionals to work more closely together and achieve compliance accuracy on a consistent basis. Machine learning technology and artificial intelligence give brands the tools they need to proactively address risk and manage high content volumes.

Features like automated document and website scanning provide real-time feedback against industry-specific regulatory requirements so marketers can create compliant content faster and compliance professionals can streamline legal review. Sophisticated marketing compliance software should also offer integrations with project and content management applications so users can leverage enhanced workflows.

Marketing compliance technology that aligns processes between creators and stakeholders is of particular interest to the pharma industry.

“The technology applied should offer full integration from end to end. You need to see the content supply chain in a fully integrated manner with MLR being linked to a digital asset management platform and linking that to your distribution channel. That allows you to have full visibility of what is in it at any given time and it becomes your brand portal, offering an Amazon-like experience for affiliates to pull out content that is relevant to them,” said Chetak Buaria, Global Head of Customer Engagement & Channel Evolution, Biopharma Global, Merck.

Achieving Compliance Success with Red Marker

Red Marker’s AI-powered regulatory marketing compliance software has the full-stack capabilities needed to overcome the regulatory challenges of today and beyond. 30 times faster than manual review, marketing, and compliance teams can do their jobs at scale while ensuring the highest level of accuracy. Using natural language processing and advanced algorithms, text and images are instantly scanned for potential risk.

In offering total visibility over branded and promotional content, Red Marker’s powerful website scanning and monitoring capabilities analyze hundreds of domains for critical brand and compliance elements. Red Marker’s API supports deeper integrations with 3rd party tools like Asana, Google Docs, and Microsoft Word, to streamline content and legal review processes.

Protect Your Brand From Regulatory Compliance Challenges

To remain competitive, cost-efficient, and productive, companies need a solution that offers more than just risk protection. Discover what to look for when considering a software solution for marketing compliance by downloading our free guide, “A Buyer’s Guide to Marketing Compliance“, or schedule a demo to see how Red Marker’s marketing compliance software unlocks advanced compliance capabilities and achieves better regulatory outcomes.

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