8. Ensure compliance when doing influencer marketing
8. Ensure compliance when doing influencer marketing
1. Reserve a budget to retain a lawyer who has experience working with social media in your jurisdiction.
Nothing can replace advice from a legal professional. In most cases, you do not need to hire a lawyer for every campaign, but once to review the initial process and then whenever an issue arises.
2. Work with your legal advisor on a Master Service Agreement (MSA) and a Scope of Work (SOW) template you can use for all of your upcoming influencer marketing campaigns.
Sign an MSA once per influencer, and a separate SOW for every campaign you work with. You can also find templates online, but keep in mind that none of them are developed with your brand and business in mind, so use them at your own risk. CXL’s Data-Driven Influencer Marketing course also includes both of these templates for the brand marketer to use. This option will work for you well if your influencer campaigns are still small. However, once you start scaling beyond your marketing team’s capability, consider using a SaaS platform like NeoReach to automatically manage your content rights and disclosures.
3. Include a mandatory disclosure paragraph for your partnership in your marketing brief before sending it to influencers.
Note that the requirement to disclose the partnership clearly is for both monetary and non-monetary (including giving gifts to influencers) partnerships alike. If the posts are organic, then the influencer should either use built-in platform features (such as by ticking Includes paid promotion when uploading a video to YouTube) or add a hashtag like #ad, #advertisement or #sponsored. Modified versions such as #spon are generally not accepted as a clear disclosure by the regulators. If you decide to use the organic posts in your paid Facebook or Instagram marketing campaigns, then the Sponsored by tag will automatically appear on the post and no extra steps are necessary.
4. Have a joint briefing session for all your influencers where you can emphasize the need for clarity, and they can ask questions about disclosures.
5. Monitor your influencers during the campaign for accurate disclosures on every piece of published content.
Think like a consumer, is this post unclear? Once you start scaling beyond your marketing team’s capability, consider subscribing to a SaaS solution, like Modash, that provides an automatic Missing Hashtag feature.
6. Immediately contact any influencers to amend any posts containing inaccurate disclosures.
The first liability lies with the brand and marketer if a regulator catches an inadequately tagged post. Only in some instances have the regulators also fined influencers with repeat offenses. Consult your lawyer if the influencer refuses to comply.