If your digital marketing efforts span the entire internet, from your corporate website to social media channels, and involve dynamic, interactive, or personalized content, you need to ensure that your web archiving capabilities can keep up.

This requires good communication across all stakeholders, including marketing, web development, IT, legal, and compliance departments.

Here are four ways to align marketing and compliance teams when creating content.

1. Know Your Responsibilities

Remember those old GI Joe cartoons in the ’80s? Now you know, and knowing is half the battle. The same applies to developing good compliance processes. Your marketing team needs to get a basic understanding of the regulations your organization is subject to, why those regulations matter, and what they mean for your marketing approaches.

• Find out who manages compliance in your organization and establish clear lines of communication.
• Get clear guidelines for specific language to use and to avoid, required information or contact buttons, and where any disclaimers need to be on web pages and social media
• Work with your compliance or legal staff to set up approval workflows, as well as a recurring schedule to review any regulatory updates or changes.

2. Archive What You Create

Your archiving solution should capture everything you say to customers online—no matter where or how you’re sharing your message: websites and social media channels; text, images, and video.

While historically, a PDF or screenshot was sufficient to meet regulatory expectations, the increasingly interactive, personalized, and dynamic landscape of the modern web requires an accurate archived version of communications and content in their native format. Be sure to think toward the future when it comes to archiving capabilities.

3. Verify Regulatory and Legal Obligations

Think like a customer. Look over your design or your social media campaign and really put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Does it sound like you’re making a promise? If so, is it a promise that you’re fully prepared to keep? Is your message clear and unambiguous? Does it leave room for interpretation? Will those who aren’t tech-savvy get it? Is your content accessible and honest?

Complete all approval workflows and verify any new website and social media content has all required disclaimers. Maintain a digital audit trail to demonstrate compliance. A clear audit trail shows reasonable steps were taken should you ever face a regulatory inquiry or a complaint.

4. QA Everything After It Goes Live

Post your content. This is the moment of truth, because you not only want to make sure the content went live, but you also want to verify that it’s being archived properly.

This is where an archiving solution that can generate reports and audit logs during or after a review showing which pages have passed or failed (including reviewers’ annotations) is a great help with the QA process. You can also set up proactive alerts to identify risks and non-compliant material on your site, empowering rapid remediation.

Your marketing team works hard to disseminate your message across the internet, from your own webpage to various social media channels. Don’t let your archiving solution hold back your creative marketing efforts.

Does your marketing team have questions about website & social media compliance?

Download The Guide to Compliance Archiving for Digital Marketers!

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