Harnessing Legal Solutions: A Marketer’s Guide to Commercial Legal Help Centers
Marketing and the Importance of Legal Advice
Marketing is a crucial part of any enterprise. When it comes down to the success or failure of a product, service, or brand, lot comes through in the marketing. That usually means that there’s a lot more variety within the toolbox for marketing than what merely applies to engineering or manufacturing needs.
Yet, in a lot of ways, the corporate mentality that’s applied to product design also applies to maintaining revenue streams. The desire to manage team resources as best possible leads to a lot of pressure to immediately respond to whatever is coming out of the market in front of you.
If your latest marketing campaign has you involved in a lot of volume sales through promotional emails, you might decide that the best thing to do is to just quickly churn them out and worry about optimization for a later iteration. However, once you’ve committed to that marketing automation strategy, you might find that you need to consider things like compliance with advertising and data protection laws. This is where legal advice is particularly important.
What Advertising Laws Must Be Followed in Marketing Campaigns?
Grabbing attention to your brand isn’t the problem. Legal compliance isn’t even the problem. The problem is that advertising is a space that has a lot of laws around it because it’s so effective at getting people’s attention.
One big example of this is how advertising is regulated for truth in commercial speech. If you’re leading customers to believe something like “guaranteed results” without being ready to back it up with data, you may have a big problem on your hands. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is one of the main agencies that regulates unfair and deceptive business practices, which includes advertising.
Why Legal Advice is Important
The process of coordinating a marketing campaign can be very similar to the process of conceiving and developing a new product. You need to have a clear plan with proper execution and steps in between. However, when you’re not properly anticipating legal needs, it can be easy to lose sight of the bigger context of the campaign.
Having an “in” with a legal help center commercial legal help center provider could be the smartest thing that a marketing professional can do. With these resources, you can verify that your advertising copy is following guidelines from regulatory organizations like the FTC, but there’s so much more.
Commercial legal help centers also offer a range of other services that are vital for a marketing team. They include things like:
- Legal reviews of marketing materials
- Guidance on compliance with advertising laws
- Support for data protection and privacy issues
In particular, if your lead management program is integrated into both marketing automation tools, you may want to conduct a legal review of the data, especially if you’re storing personally identifiable information (PII). PII is just as much a problem to store carelessly as credit card numbers. Even if you’re using the cloud, the data can still be vulnerable to all kinds of exploits, including brute force attacks and hacker get-togethers.
That’s just part of the reason why it’s so important to have a legal advisor. It’s a lot easier to take the time to make every marketing plan the best that it can be if you’re already working with someone who knows what the common pitfalls are.
A successful marketing team can be a lot like running the engineering office of a top technology company like Apple or Google. In a lot of cases, you’re looking for a way to get things to grow faster. At the same time, you’re also trying to reduce the opportunity cost of customer turnover which can be the worst thing that ever happens to a company.
By understanding where the law needs to factor into what you’re doing, you can avert disasters and get your new plans up quickly. That means that you can integrate legal advice into the whole marketing process right from the beginning.
So take the time to invest in commercial legal help. It would only make your marketing campaigns better.
Joe Gelata
Joe helps clients achieve maximum output from their revenue engine by leveraging best practice business processes and technology such as marketing automation, CRM, and analytics platforms. With experience in sales and marketing from an agency and client perspective Joe is well positioned to build new and streamline existing business processes, automate them, and identify further opportunities for revenue growth.