No matter how brilliant, successful, or engaging your marketing campaigns are, if your compliance policies aren’t up to scratch, it could undermine all your hard work.
Compliance is a legal necessity—and a lack of it can lead to all sorts of terrifying repercussions: reputational damage, hefty fines, and even class-action lawsuits.
To help you stay on the right side of the law, we’ve compiled this handy guide to marketing compliance. Below, you’ll learn about some of the most common laws and acts that affect marketers, how to stay compliant, and how to leverage tools with strong safety protocols (like Bitly’s Trust & Safety commitment) to keep your business out of hot water.
What is marketing compliance?
Marketing compliance is all about making sure your marketing strategy and activities align with established regulations and industry standards.
These range from data protection laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to advertising regulations like those imposed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
If you work in a large organization, you may have a whole team (or even an entire department) dedicated to ensuring enterprise-wide compliance. In a smaller organization, you’ll probably have just one person—or compliance may be a shared responsibility.
But regardless of how big or small your company is, you need to take marketing compliance seriously, as the consequences could be severe. In 2020, ticket reseller Viagogo received a fine of $7 million for misleading consumers with their Google advertisements.
What are the consequences of non-compliance in marketing?
Non-compliance in your marketing activities can lead to a host of negative outcomes. Here are the major ones to be aware of:
- Fines and penalties: Regulatory bodies like the FTC and GDPR enforcers can impose hefty fines on companies that fail to comply with marketing regulations. For example, French regulators fined Google €250 million (about $270 million) for breaching intellectual property rules.
- Legal battles: Non-compliance can lead to lengthy legal disputes and class-action lawsuits, which are a huge drain of time and money. More troublingly, these kinds of cases are on the rise, with a report finding that plaintiffs filed more data breach class-action lawsuits in 2023 than in the years 2016 to 2021 combined.
- Loss of customer trust: According to McKinsey, today’s consumers value trustworthiness almost as much as they do price and quality when making purchasing decisions. The thing about trust, though, is that it’s hard to build and incredibly easy to lose. If you’re caught in a non-compliance scandal, it can tarnish your brand’s reputation.
Key areas to know about marketing compliance risk
To avoid the consequences of non-compliance, you need to understand the regulatory requirements that affect your brand and its industry. Here are some of the most prevalent to be aware of:
Data protection and privacy
Some of the best marketing campaigns use personal data as fuel. To skyrocket conversions and leads, you need to gather the insights to target the right audience at the right time with the right message.
There’s just one catch: You have to use the personal data you collect ethically. Otherwise, you could be in breach of compliance regulations like the CCPA or GDPR.
If you’re in a larger organization, your compliance team can help you check that your compliance management policies and practices are in line with these regulations. Otherwise, you may want to lean on an IT consultant or outsourced compliance specialist to help you get the right compliance guidelines in place for your workflows.
Advertising standards
Under the FTC’s laws, marketing advertisements “must be truthful, cannot be deceptive or unfair, and must be evidence-based.”
Hopefully, your marketing team is already abiding by these principles in your marketing practices. But if you’re not sure, here are some tips to help you meet the FTC’s advertising compliance laws:
- Be honest: Ensure you can back up all the information in your marketing content.
- Substantiate your claims: Use reliable evidence like scientific studies or genuine customer reviews to support your statements.
- Disclose material connections: If you’re getting paid to promote a product, let your audience know. Transparency builds trust.
- Monitor and review: Regularly check your ads to make sure they’re still in line with FTC guidelines.
Email marketing regulations
Email marketing can be a fantastic way to re-engage customers and move prospects down the sales funnel. However, you have to be careful about who you send your email marketing communications to.
Under the CAN-SPAM Act, individuals have specific rights regarding the email messages they receive. Namely, businesses must give the people they email the ability to opt out of receiving future communications through an obvious “unsubscribe” button.
You’ll then need to ensure you honor any such requests within 10 business days. Otherwise, you risk a fine of up to $51,744, as noted on the FTC’s website.
Social media compliance
If you work with social media influencers or engage in brand partnerships, you need to be aware of the FTC’s Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers.
With this legal requirement, all influencers and brands must disclose any endorsements, sponsorships, or paid advertisements. Thankfully, this is pretty simple to do. All you need to do is ask the influencers you work with to use hashtags like #ad, #sponsored, or #partner.
On top of that, each social media platform has its own advertising policies. For instance, Instagram requires you to use branded content tags for paid partnerships. It’s a good idea to create a policy document with each platform’s rules so your team can triple-check for compliance before clicking “post.”
How you can ensure marketing compliance
Now that we’ve covered the regulations you need to be aware of, here’s an action plan for meeting compliance.
Conduct regular audits
Conducting regular audits helps you identify any compliance issues before they escalate, ensuring that your content remains aligned with regulations.
For simplicity, turn your audit into an internal policy checklist that your team can easily tick off, including the following:
For social media
- Review sponsored content on social media: Ensure you clearly mark all sponsored posts with appropriate hashtags (#ad, #sponsored).
- Verify social media platform policies: Double-check that your content meets the specific guidelines of each platform.
- Check for copyright issues: Verify that all images, music, and videos you use are properly licensed or credited.
For email marketing
- Ensure all email marketing campaigns comply with regulations like the CAN-SPAM Act and GDPR.
- Review whether all marketing emails include an easy-to-find unsubscribe link and that you promptly honor requests to unsubscribe.
- Check that you built your email lists with proper consent and that all recipients have opted in to receive communications.
Remember, too, that regulatory compliance is in a constant state of change. Keep on top of changing guidelines and regulations by subscribing to industry newsletters and joining online forums dedicated to marketing and compliance.
Train and educate your team
A compliance strategy is all well and good, but it doesn’t mean a thing unless your team members follow it to the letter. That’s why regular training sessions are so important to achieving marketing compliance.
You could, for example, host a quarterly “lunch and learn,” where your marketing team discusses the latest updates in the compliance space, or sign your team members up for regular compliance webinars and conferences as part of their professional goals.
If you’re not sure where to start, the FTC’s Business Guidance site has a wealth of excellent free resources—including ebooks, guidelines, and webinars—that assist businesses in complying with advertising laws.
Private companies like the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics (SCCE) and DigiMarCon also host regular events on compliance requirements and compliance standards throughout the year.
Implement compliance tools
Compliance can easily become a time-consuming, labor-intensive endeavor, but with the help of a marketing automation workflow and marketing compliance software tools, you can make the compliance process hands-free.
Here’s an overview of some of the best tools out there:
- Email marketing software: Many email marketing software platforms, such as MailChimp and HubSpot, enable you to automate the process of unsubscribing contacts so you don’t have to worry about manually removing user data.
- Social listening tools: Tools like Hootsuite and Sprout Social are invaluable for compliant social media marketing. With the right controls setup, every post you schedule will automatically be scanned for policy violations before going live.
- Project management tools: Project management tools like Asana and Ziflow bring granular control to the process of creating and approving pieces of marketing collateral. By assigning individuals to specific roles and building a workflow, you can ensure that the right people review each piece before it’s published.
Safeguard your marketing materials and efforts with Bitly’s tools
To avoid lawsuits, fines, and loss of consumer trust, taking marketing compliance seriously is a must. Keep an eye on the regulations that affect your industry. Though it may feel daunting to stay on top of all these compliance requirements on your own, know that you don’t have to! The right tools and integrations will help you automate and simplify the compliance process, making it one less thing you need to worry about.
When you incorporate the Bitly Connections Platform into your marketing stack, you can rest assured that your—and your customers’—data is safe. Our Trust & Safety Team works hard to ensure that all Bitly Links and Bity Codes are encrypted with HTTPS protocol for greater security. Further, your customers can use our free Link Checker Tool to preview and verify any Bitly link before engaging with it.
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