Where would your local marketing campaigns be without compliance? No, really… Stop and think about it.
Old logos in new campaigns. Unapproved ad copy. Not to mention the legal risks.
Without marketing compliance, you’d likely have a hard time recognizing your own brand.
And no one wants an identity crisis.
Asset management compliance ensures your marketing assets adhere to all brand and legal compliance standards. This is especially important for channel marketers with hundreds (or thousands) of local affiliates marketing on their brands’ behalf. Without partner compliance, you risk sending rogue materials into the marketplace and suffering serious repercussions for your brand.
Here’s what you need to know about the importance of affiliate marketing compliance.
8 Benefits of Partner Compliance
What’s the big deal if a few noncompliant campaigns make it through the gate?
Marketing compliance is as much about mitigating risks as it is about reaping rewards. When your affiliates adhere to asset compliance measures, you can expect many advantages for your brand.
1. Boosting Marketing Performance
More than anything, brand- and legally compliant marketing materials make your local marketing more effective. They allow you to deliver lawful, on-brand messages to your audience at the hyper-local level.
Asset management compliance processes maintain harmony between your campaign messaging, design, and voice. That means the more you prioritize compliance, the stronger and more unified your marketing message will be. As a result, you can expect to better reach and convert local consumers.
2. Increasing Brand Awareness
Partner compliance plays a key role in brand awareness. When your local marketing materials feature consistent imagery, such as colors, graphics, logos, and fonts, your brand becomes more recognizable to your target audience.
On the other hand, if your brand imagery is not compliant, you might end up with a mixed bag of visual attributes. In this case, customers will be less likely to recognize your brand despite being continuously exposed to it.
3. Ensuring Customer Satisfaction
Have you ever purchased a product that wasn’t quite what you expected it to be? Maybe the item looked different in person than it did online, or its capabilities fell short of what was promised. Needless to say, it’s a disappointing experience.
But this is an all-too-common consequence of marketing noncompliance. When your marketing assets don’t accurately reflect your products or service offerings, you set your customers up for disappointment.
Compliant materials paint an accurate picture of your offerings, leading to more realistic customer expectations and higher customer satisfaction. It’s all about expectations vs. reality. And the happier your customers are with your products, the more likely they are to come back for more!
4. Maintaining Consumer Trust
If your customers consume marketing materials that don’t accurately represent your products or services, they’ll lose trust in your brand. And let’s face it; nobody wants to buy from a brand they can’t rely on.
It’s like receiving the wrong takeout order at a restaurant. When you get home and discover that you didn’t get what you ordered, you feel disappointed and probably a little frustrated. Then the next time you’re in the mood for Chinese, you go somewhere else. Why? Because in giving you the wrong order, that restaurant lost your trust and, worse, your business.
Ensuring that your partners exercise asset management compliance helps you maintain your target market’s trust and, subsequently, their business.
5. Mitigating Legal Risks
Asset compliance isn’t just a matter of how consumers perceive your brand (though that’s undoubtedly important) — it also protects you from legal risks.
If your affiliates deliver marketing materials that go against industry, state, or federal compliance laws, you could find yourself with a big ol’ fine, lawsuit, or even jail time on your hands.
In other words, compliance management keeps your nose clean.
6. Protecting Your Reputation
Let’s face it; branding inconsistencies and inaccurate marketing assets aren’t a good look for your brand. That’s why noncompliant assets can damage your reputation, making your brand appear careless or even deceptive. Affiliate compliance management prevents messy or misleading materials from entering the marketplace, protecting your brand image and ensuring your reputation goes untarnished.
7. Preventing Downtime
If you verify that your marketing materials are compliant before sending them out into the world, you’ll save yourself a lot of time. When these assets are right the first time, you won’t have to spend time and money trying to intercept noncompliant materials from the marketplace. After all, removing your digital assets from the internet is one thing, but reclaiming all your physical assets is quite another.
8. Ensuring Marketing Reimbursement
Maintaining compliant marketing materials isn’t just in your best interest — it impacts your affiliates, too. When they push brand-compliant materials, they’re able to receive a co-op reimbursement from your brand.
However, if your partners release noncompliant campaigns, they’ll lose this reimbursement, and their budgets will take a hit. To get partners to actually use your co-op funds, give them compliant brand materials from the jump.
Reduce Risks With a Trusted Affiliate Marketing Compliance Partner
The first step to achieving partner compliance is finding a trusted compliance partner.
At BrandMuscle, our brand management solution makes creating and executing legal- and brand-compliant marketing materials simple. With easily customizable templates, individualized approval loops, and custom creative services, you can feel confident your marketing assets will hit all the right marks.
Book a demo to see our compliance-first local marketing solution in action.