Whether you work in insurance, health care, education, or retail, there are compliance issues that you have to deal with in your day-to-day marketing activities.

If you work in a large, distributed marketing organization, with multiple communications channels, and many links in the marketing and sales chain, the process of making sure that every message delivered in every media complies with brand, corporate and regulatory standards can seem daunting.

But it doesn’t have to be.  A well-designed distributed marketing automation solution can streamline and automate many of the compliance headaches that we all face.  Here’s a list of five best practices that will help.

1. Audit Current Processes – How many steps are there in your current compliance and approval process?  Which of these will continue to be crucial once you have a well-organized distributed marketing system in place?  How can your distributed marketing platform streamline the process?
2. Identify Compliance Control Points – Compliance control points are the places where no flexibility is available.  The opt-out notice on email is one such example.  A distributed marketing system can ensure that those control points can’t be modified, changed or removed. 
3. Review Marketing Assets – What assets will be shared through your system? Double-check compliance BEFORE loading the asset into the system, so that non-compliant materials are identified and corrected before they are shared or stored in the system. 
4. Rethink Push vs. Pull – Push asset distribution requires that corporate marketing pro-actively send marketing assets into the field.  Usage is uncertain, and it’s hard to get accurate reports on which assets are used or how successful they were.  A distributed marketing platform creates a pull process where assets are available when and where they are needed – and reporting and tracking should be built into the marketing automation management (MAM) module of the system.
5. Recruit, Train, Empower – Ongoing communication is required to use a technology solution system to its full potential.  At first, recruiting and training will be the focus of the communication effort.  But as all of the groups within the organization discover the power of the system, a dialog about tools, new assets, and options will add value to the system.