Marketing compliance: A complete guide

Data is worth more than its weight in gold to marketers. However, the ever-increasing number of stringent data privacy laws around the world can make it challenging for marketing teams to confidently mine this precious resource.

As privacy-led marketing becomes the norm and the industry moves away from reliance on third-party cookies, understanding and implementing robust compliance measures in all marketing activities is not just advisable, it’s essential. 

Today and in the future, marketers need to understand the various data privacy laws that apply to their business and customer base in order to ensure that their strategies and  campaigns respect privacy laws and stay in line with evolving customer expectations.

What is data privacy compliance for marketing?

To keep your marketing efforts compliant, you need to adhere to regulatory requirements and other policies and guidelines that govern how businesses collect, use, and store consumer data for marketing and advertising purposes. 

That means you need to stay informed about evolving regulations and keep your practices aligned with their requirements, like the GDPR. These laws require you to be transparent about how you collect and use data, and many mandate you to obtain informed, explicit consent from your customers prior to accessing it.

As we transition towards a cookieless world, it’s becoming more and more essential for businesses to adopt privacy-led marketing strategies. In addition to enabling privacy compliance in marketing, this approach can help you to build trust with your customers.

The importance of privacy compliance in marketing campaigns

Data privacy compliance isn’t just a legal obligation; it’s a cornerstone of ethical marketing practices. Meeting compliance standards is necessary for avoiding legal penalties as well as maintaining customer trust and safeguarding your business’s reputation.

The implementation of proper data collection and handling processes within your business extends beyond marketing. Due to the close link between marketing and advertising, you must also ensure that your business’s online advertising efforts align with privacy compliance best practices. 

This has become increasingly important as major tech platforms like Google have levied additional privacy requirements on their customers to maintain access to services and features like those for retargeting and personalization.

Advertising compliance introduces legal requirements and ethical standards that you must adhere to. These include requirements that ads must be appropriate for their target audience and compliant with specific rules around disclosures and privacy notices.

As a result, marketing and advertising compliance impacts how and when you must obtain consent if you want to send marketing emails or display personalized ads to users who have previously visited your website or used your mobile app. 

Build trust with customers

Marketing compliance plays a critical role in building trust with your customers. Adhering to data privacy laws and industry best practices demonstrates respect for customers and their rights, which reassures them that you’ll keep their personal information safe and handle it responsibly.

The trust that this builds is essential for cultivating long-term relationships with your customers and growing engagement — major benefits when considering their potential lifetime value. 

What’s more, being transparent and building a reputation for integrity can enhance your brand’s credibility and give you an edge in the market, helping you attract new customers and develop your relationships with existing ones.

Keep competition fair

Many data privacy laws are designed to level the playing field among businesses. Though it’s not a guarantee, compliance helps to ensure that all players in the market are held to the same standards of transparency and fairness.

This is intended to foster an environment where competition is based on the quality of products and services rather than on unequal access to audiences and/or customer data. This not only helps protect consumers but also promotes healthy, fair competition among businesses.

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is one law that’s particularly focused on preventing businesses from gaining an unfair advantage thanks to the size of their operations and the influence of the platforms they oversee. 

The DMA has designated “gatekeepers” such as Meta (Facebook) and Alphabet (Google). This affects their suite of marketing tools and thus the millions of businesses that use them. It requires these tech giants to make the data insights to which they have access transparent and available, including details about how their algorithms work. A major pillar of the DMA is preventing preferential business practices. 

Protect customer data

Keeping customer data secure is a fundamental component of most marketing compliance regulations. Data security entails confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Plus, how you store customer data will influence how safe it is. 

In addition to helping your business achieve compliance with these laws, storing customer data securely minimizes the risk of data breaches and therefore helps protect customer trust and brand reputation.

Adhering to standards like the Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF) v2.2 can help businesses establish more transparent data collection practices while obtaining informed consent. Similarly, integrating Google Consent Mode v2 will enable you to adjust your data processing practices with Google Services based on user consent settings. 

Marketing compliance risks 

Failing to comply with data privacy laws can have serious and lasting consequences for businesses. Take a look at the key risks of noncompliance so you can spot them in your business, understand the potential impact, and implement effective long-term fixes.

Loss of consumer trust

Noncompliance with data privacy laws can seriously damage your business’s reputation and erode customer trust. When you fail to adhere to these regulations as well as ethical marketing standards, you risk consumers perceiving you as negligent or deceptive. 

This can cause customers to lose confidence in your brand, which will likely affect loyalty. Customers increasingly prefer to engage only with brands that show integrity and respect for user privacy. What’s more, this reputational damage can impact your ability to attract new customers.

Damage to business reputation

Customer trust and reputational damage are closely intertwined. When a business intentionally or inadvertently fails to comply with data privacy regulations, it not only risks losing customer trust but also developing a poor reputation, which can have far-reaching and lasting consequences.

Negative public sentiment can hinder potential business partnerships, discourage investors, and make advertisers reluctant to associate with your brand. This can cause severe damage in the long term and could prevent growth or even result in business failure.

Legal issues

Failing to comply with data privacy laws can also expose your business to lawsuits, fines, and regulatory actions. These legal actions are not only expensive to address — causing you to divert resources from business growth to damage control — but also time-consuming, like repeated audits or data protection impact assessments. Your business could also be required to delete data, which can hamstring marketing efforts.

For example, the GDPR specifies that serious infringements can attract fines of up to 4 percent of annual global turnover or EUR 20 million, whichever is higher. Enforcement of this privacy law has been rigorous and appears to be trending upwards the longer the regulation is in force.

In 2023 alone, courts across Europe handed out fines to more than 520 businesses that did not meet the GDPR’s data processing and security requirements, did not fulfill data subject requests, or failed to meet various other requirements.

Financial penalties 

Like the GDPR, many other data privacy laws include provisions for fines and penalties. On top of this, legal actions can require court appearances, which can be extremely expensive, in addition to further legal consultancy to repair damage and achieve compliance.

Maintaining compliant marketing practices is essential not only to avoid direct fines and penalties for your business, but also to sustain long-term profitability and market presence.

Important compliance regulations and guidelines

With so many data privacy laws in action around the world, it’s important to identify which apply to your business and to understand how they function, e.g. if you should be focusing on consent-based marketing or opt-out frameworks, to safeguard your business against noncompliance risks.

Take a closer look at these regulations and guidelines and what they mean for marketers. 

Digital Markets Act (DMA)

The DMA targets currently seven major online platforms, known as gatekeepers, that significantly influence market conditions in the digital sector. 

While it technically only applies to the gatekeepers identified in the Act (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Booking.com, Meta, and Microsoft), these companies pass on certain obligations to the businesses that use their services, else they risk losing access to them. The list of gatekeepers has already been expanded once, and is likely to continue to change over time.

As noted, while the DMA’s compliance requirements only directly affect gatekeepers, to enable and ensure full privacy compliance within their platform, these companies need to levy requirements on their customers. These customers rely on their platforms for advertising, audience access, analytics, and more, thus effectively making the DMA apply to millions of smaller companies.

Compliance obligations under the DMA

• Transparency: Gatekeepers must provide clear disclosures about data collection, advertising practices, and algorithms used to rank content and products. 
• Data portability: Gatekeepers must provide mechanisms that enable end users to move their data to different services easily.
• Fair access to services: Gatekeepers must ensure fair and nondiscriminatory conditions for business users, promoting equal opportunities in the digital market.
• Interoperability: Gatekeepers are required to maintain interoperability of their core platform services with those of competitors.
• Prohibition of self-preferencing: Gatekeepers may not favor their own services over those of competitors (including their customers) on their platforms.

Google Consent Mode

Google Consent Mode is designed to help websites manage user consent for the use of cookies and other functions of Google Services that collect personal data. It integrates with tools like consent management platforms (CMP), where user consent is obtained. 

Consent Mode then signals that consent information to services like Google Ads and Analytics, which are controlled based on what the user has consented to. It’s also a key mechanism used by Google to enable its own compliance with the DMA.

The need to use this tool applies to website owners that process the personal data of individuals in the EU, and that use Google services.

It’s best to use a consent management platform (CMP) to seamlessly integrate Google Consent Mode into your website, collect valid user consent from EEA users, and adhere to Google’s EU user consent policy.

Compliance obligations under Google Consent Mode

• Consent handling: Correctly implement consent mechanisms to toggle Google services on or off based on user choices.
• Data collection adjustments: Adjust the behavior of Google tags and cookies according to the consent status of users.
• Privacy documentation: Maintain clear documentation of consent practices and modifications.
• User transparency: Provide transparent information to users about what data is collected and how it’s used.
• Regular updates: Keep the consent framework updated in line with changes in privacy laws and Google’s requirements.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

The GDPR is one of the most stringent data protection laws currently in force. It applies to all organizations, anywhere in the world, that process the personal data of EU residents. It aims to give individuals control over their personal data and to simplify the regulatory environment for international business.

Compliance obligations under the GDPR

• Data minimization: Limit the collection of personal information to what is directly relevant and necessary to accomplish a specified purpose.
• Data protection: Adhere to principles such as data minimization, accuracy, storage limitation, and integrity and confidentiality.
• Rights of individuals: Uphold individuals’ rights, including access, correction, deletion, and portability of their data.
• Consent management: Obtain clear, explicit, and informed consent for processing personal data.
• Data breach notifications: Notify relevant authorities and affected individuals promptly in case of a data breach.

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)/California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA)

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) enhance privacy rights and consumer protection for residents of California. These regulations apply to any for-profit entity that does business in California and meets specific criteria related to revenue, data processing, or sale of consumer data.

Compliance obligations under the CCPA/CPRA

• Data minimization: Collect only the data necessary for the stated purpose.
• Transparency: Clearly disclose data collection, usage, and sharing practices.
• Consumer rights: Enable consumers to access, delete, and opt out of the sale or sharing of their personal information, or its use for profiling or targeted advertising.
• Risk assessments: Conduct regular assessments and audits to enable ongoing  compliance and address risks.
• Service provider contracts: Ensure contracts with service providers and third parties meet CCPA/CPRA requirements regarding data handling and confidentiality.

Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act (VCDPA)

The Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act (VCDPA) establishes data protection standards and rights for residents of Virginia. The obligations it places on businesses are not as stringent as some other data protection laws outside of the United States.

It applies to businesses that operate in Virginia and either process the personal data of 100,000 consumers or more annually, or derive over 50 percent of their gross revenue from the sale of personal data and process the data of at least 25,000 consumers.

Compliance obligations under the VCDPA

• Data rights: Honor consumers’ rights to access, correct, delete, and obtain a copy of their personal data.
• Data protection assessments: Conduct assessments for activities involving personal data to evaluate and mitigate any risks identified.
• Opt-out rights: Enable consumers to opt out of the processing of personal data for targeted advertising, profiling, or the sale of personal data.
• Transparency: Provide clear privacy notices detailing the purpose of data collection and the categories of shared data.
• Security: Implement reasonable administrative, technical, and physical data security practices to protect personal data.

Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF) v2.2

The TCF v2.2 is a protocol designed to help publishers, advertisers, and tech companies comply with the EU’s data protection regulations. It applies to entities involved in digital advertising that want to process user data while enabling transparency and obtaining user consent.

Compliance obligations under TCF v2.2

• Consent management: Implement mechanisms to explicitly obtain and store user consent for data processing.
• Transparency: Provide clear and accessible information about data collection, use, and sharing practices.
• Vendor restrictions: Control and document the purposes for which vendors can process user data based on obtained consents.
• Record keeping: Maintain detailed records of consent transactions over time to enable accountability and compliance.
• Integration of CMPs: Use a robust CMP to streamline consent collection and management.

Who’s responsible for marketing compliance monitoring?

The task of monitoring marketing practices to maintain compliance will fall on different individuals or teams, depending on the size and structure of your organization. While specific roles may differ, achieving and maintaining privacy compliance is a collective effort that requires the involvement of multiple departments.

Legal and compliance teams

Legal and compliance teams play a crucial role in overseeing and maintaining data privacy compliance. Their work is vital in safeguarding your organization against legal repercussions and maintaining ethical marketing practices.

These professionals are responsible for developing policies for marketing activities to follow, identifying legal risks associated with data collection and processing related to marketing strategies, and checking that all campaigns comply with data privacy laws. They also conduct regular internal audits to ensure ongoing compliance — including both activities and the data stored — and provide training to staff to maintain awareness about legal obligations.

Marketing teams

Compliance is a major responsibility of marketing teams. They’re tasked with ensuring that their strategies, campaign executions, and data analysis meet the requirements of the various data privacy laws and business requirements applicable to your organization.

Your marketing team must stay informed about the latest privacy regulations affecting advertising, email, and social media campaigns, including consent requirements before starting any such activities. 

They should also collaborate with your legal and compliance teams to verify that data collection mechanisms, including newsletter signups, checkout processes, and web forms, meet compliance requirements to inform customers, offer valid consent options, and enable opt out, among other privacy functions.

6 best practices for the marketing compliance processes 

You need to employ compliance best practices in your marketing strategies to safeguard your operations and maintain customer trust. Here are six tips to help ensure your marketing activities align with major data privacy regulations.

1. Keep up with ever-changing regulations

Data privacy regulations frequently evolve and new laws and business requirements emerge. Businesses like yours need to stay aware of these changes and incorporate regular reviews and updates into your compliance processes.

This is important for ensuring that your marketing strategies always comply with legal requirements, especially as your marketing activities and technologies in use also change. This not only helps you to mitigate risks associated with noncompliance and safeguards your operations, but also reinforces your commitment to ethical marketing and data handling practices.

2. Maintain data privacy and security

Stringent data privacy and security measures protect consumer and company data from unauthorized access and breaches. 

Therefore, access to sensitive information should be strictly limited to personnel who require it for their roles, and you should implement robust authentication processes for accessing this data, among other best practices. 

Regular audits and updates to security measures will bolster these safeguards, helping to ensure compliance with privacy laws, and build trust with your customers.

3. Set and follow internal policies and procedures

Having clear internal policies and procedures for privacy compliance and data protection are crucial for maintaining smooth and efficient marketing processes. These guidelines help ensure that all team members understand their roles and responsibilities when it comes to upholding compliance standards. 

By standardizing practices across your organization, you can quickly address potential issues and reduce the risk of noncompliance. Well-defined procedures also simplify training and onboarding, and help ensure everyone is aligned and accountable from day one.

4. Train staff on compliance regulations

Educating staff about compliance regulations empowers them to identify and address potential issues in both current and future processes. This helps to ensure that everyone does their part to adhere to legal and ethical standards.

Regular training helps to ensure that team members are always up to date with the latest company and compliance standards and understand how these rules apply to their specific roles. Adopt a proactive approach to mitigate risks and foster a culture of accountability within your organization. 

5. Regularly audit your processes

Regularly reviewing your data privacy compliance processes is critical for ensuring that you continue to meet regulatory standards and are aware when technologies and data processing purposes change. These audits help you identify vulnerabilities or areas of noncompliance.  

By constantly refining these processes and adapting to changes in regulatory landscapes, you can better protect customer data, uphold your reputation, and avoid fines and legal penalties. 

6. Use consent management software

CMPs can significantly streamline compliance efforts in marketing. CMPs like Usercentrics CMP automate the collection, storage, and management of user consent data, helping ensure that data handling practices align with legal requirements. 

By integrating this software into your tech stack, it’s easier to adapt to changing regulations, reduce human error, and maintain transparency with your customers — all while enhancing overall business efficiency and trustworthiness.

Usercentrics does not provide legal advice, and information is provided for educational purposes only. We always recommend engaging qualified legal counsel or privacy specialists regarding data privacy and protection issues and operations.

Follow regulations and protect consumer data to achieve compliant marketing efforts

Maintaining compliant marketing practices is essential for safeguarding consumer data and maintaining your brand’s integrity. It also enables you to navigate and implement the complex requirements set out by data privacy regulations — which can be a huge drain on your business’s resources. 

Usercentrics CMP is designed to simplify the complexities of marketing compliance, by offering powerful consent management tools that ensure your marketing efforts align with legal requirements. 

By integrating Usercentrics CMP into your tech stack, you can seamlessly manage user consent, protect consumer data, and stay ahead of regulatory changes. Take the hassle out of consented data and empower your team to focus on what they do best: innovative marketing.