Smart Compliance: the smart way to ensure brand protection

You’ve worked hard to build up your brand — expanding your marketing outreach and experimenting with new channels to engage with your audience and boost brand recognition and awareness.

But, it’s important for brand teams to remember: if your messaging isn’t following your brand compliance guidelines, it can do more harm than good. Don’t let all of your hard-won creatives go to waste because of a costly, easily preventable mistake.

That’s why a brand protection strategy is essential to building a healthy foundation for your social and digital marketing campaigns. It’s mission critical to maintain brand compliance requirements and avoid damaging posts that can, at best, throw your brand voice off and leave customers confused. Or, at worst, potentially alienate them if your content completely misses the mark.

Developing a cohesive marketing strategy for a particular targeted audience (whether that focuses on key goals, channels, or demos) needs content that resonates with the audience, but stays precisely on brand. In today’s dynamic digital landscape, it’s all too easy to cause an accidental uproar with an ill-timed or poorly thought out post, even when you have the best intentions.

What’s at risk for your brand?

Engaging on social and other modern channels is always a tricky balancing act. On the one hand, you want to maintain an authentic voice with messaging that is relevant to your business. But you also want to recognize any emerging trends or noteworthy events that you can leverage to further jumpstart conversations — all while adhering to brand guidelines and restrictions.

We’ve all heard the horror stories of a company that put out the wrong message to the world. The theme is off, messaging is inconsistent, or the tone doesn’t quite work. These stories seem to be coming to light more and more, and audiences are either simply abandoning the brand or rushing to social media platforms to amplify their displeasure — underscoring the necessity of strengthening your brand protection strategy.

It’s vital to remain alert and on the lookout for any foreseeable problems — ideally before they arise. Be on the offensive, not the defensive when it comes to brand protection strategy. Consider potential problem areas and evaluate them before the issue can morph and grow.

Off-brand and unauthorized marketing activity puts your reputation at risk. Trust is earned slowly but lost quickly — and then it’s hard to get back. It can take days, months, or years before the full impact is even known. By then, it’s too late.

You don’t want to resort to damage control after the fact. Protect yourself before any unnecessary compliance collision with technology and tools that will help you meet challenges head on.

How can you best protect and enhance your brand?

Audiences are looking for on-brand and consistent messaging across all channels where they interact with your brand. When content goes rogue, the messaging becomes off-kilter and detracts. For brands, unrestricted access to content and budgets can lead to advertising or social posts going live before they’re ready, or going out to the wrong audiences. Here are some tips you can use to help you protect your brand.

Tip #1: Secure access to your creatives

Keep access to content assets and accounts secure so they can’t be accidentally shared before they’ve gone through the necessary approval chains. A global compliance framework protects your brand with standardized briefs, content templates, governance rules and a regulated approval process.

Tip #2: Use AI technology to augment your strategy

By defining content strategy, brand, and creative campaign guidelines, you can set AI-powered technology guidelines that will alert you before an issue arises. This will help you to produce content that better performs, based on past performance within the company as well as the industry at large.

AI can generate a compliance score for your content with a detailed list of which parameters are met… and which aren’t. Achieving the right compliance score is a helpful indicator of how your needs are being met.

And this technology isn’t only for text alone. After all, we tell our brand’s stories in all different ways. Use these tools to verify your content that you share through imagery, videos, infographics, and animated GIFs.

Tip #3: Make sure your compliance solution is flexible

What guidelines does your brand need? You should be able to create parameters for anything you want. Keep your voice targeted to Gen Z or Boomers. Or set guidelines entirely around thought leadership pieces. Content that doesn’t meet these guidelines will then alert you with a lower compliance score.

Some other guidelines you can consider:

• Content themes

• Content format

• Content tones

• Brand logos

• Brand colors

• Personality

• Customer journey stages

• and more...

Building out brand-specific guidelines will help ensure your brand is well-protected from any compliance or potentially damaging PR issue. With the right tools, powered by AI-technology, you can spend your time focusing on building your content needs and streamlining workflows, for both internal teams and external agency partners.

How can Sprinklr’s Smart Compliance help?

With Sprinklr’s AI-driven Smart Compliance feature, the platform automatically flags off-brand content that is about to be published based on objectives, theme, tone, audience, and imagery. You can promote cohesive and consistent communications while ensuring on-brand messaging — all with just a few clicks.

In this unpredictable and challenging atmosphere, brands must be aware of how their content is reaching audiences, as well as relevant world events. And whenever necessary, they need to take action quickly. Timing is everything during a crisis — a brand’s short-term response on social media can potentially damage its long-term reputation. Avert any PR crisis before it happens, and bring new audiences in, rather than push them away.

Learn more about how brand protection and other features will help you deliver consistent messaging by downloading our latest ebook, Transforming Your Omni-Channel Strategy in 2021: 17 Essential Capabilities to Drive Growth.

Learn more about Sprinklr’s Sprinklr Marketing.