How to Protect Yourself from the Pitfalls of Data Legality & Governance

When it comes to keeping in line with relevant legislation, it can feel like you’re walking along a tightrope made of melting butter. It’s a slippery balancing act that can really land you in the lions den if you make the slightest wrong move.

Now, if your legal department has ever irritated you with terms like “Safe Harbour”, “Third Party Marketing Consent” and “GDPR”, then you’ll know only too well about the time-draining toll legislation can take on your business – and it really sucks. But why have all these rules and regulations come into existence, and what can you do to ease the pressure?

Well, over the last few years, lead generation has really been thrown into the legal spotlight, thanks to the amount of people who misuse and miss-sell certain kinds of data. In some cases, this is the simple result of naivety and ignorance. But in many cases, data has been abused by people with full knowledge of what they are doing.

As a result, legislation has become a lot stricter, and it is now a lot easier to accidentally break the rules. But you can go a long way to protect yourself, by simply making sure you have access to two simple things: data logs and lead history.

Here are some things to help you wade through the legal waters and miss any rocky shores

Data Logs

By having technology to create accurate data logs it gives you hard evidence of exactly what you have done with the leads you’ve received. It gives you the answers you need should questions get asked, and protects you against false accusations.

Data logs are what bring clarity and transparency to your marketing funnel.

Lead History

This applies to your data right the way back to the source it originally came from, and it important information to have. The history of how leads have come to arrive at your business can sometimes be a little murky, and if you read our popular post on blind networks, you will notice that it is really easy for fraudulent leads to enter your marketing funnel. Networks have a lot of perverse incentives to hide the origins of where a lead has come from.

Having a place where the lead history can be logged will really help you avoid legislative toothaches further on down the line – especially when you’re storing data for a while for fast access in future.

Keeping Up-To-Date with Legislation

ICO is the governing body for UK Data and Advertising, and is the body that gets called upon to resolve issues. Any change in regulatory legislation happens largely under their influence, and so it makes sense to stay on top of what they’re doing.

If you sign up to their newsletter they are usually the first to hint at where the latest changes and forthcoming adjustments that could affect how you handle your data will be coming form.

Supplier Vigilance

Charlie Munger famously said that “a lot of games you win if you don’t play”. Similarly, a lot of problems can be skipped by simply working with the right companies. Taking care and performing a little extra due diligence at the start when buying traffic can save you huge problems months down the line.

Gary Vaynerchuk has a theory that Marketers ruin everything. A large part of the laws and changes that come into effect in the lead generation industry are put there to protect consumers, but they also stop channels becoming saturated and ruined by marketers. That’s why as a pro tip when you are ahead of the trend there is a lot less to worry about from technical literature, until the rest of the market catches up.

How do you currently handle your data and do you have automatic systems and internal rules in place to be fully compliant. If you would like any help with points brought up in this article be sure to get in touch with our team.