5 Hidden Benefits of Data Standards in Regulated Marketing
Most enterprise marketers are intimately familiar with the challenges of tagging, tracking, serving, and measuring content across its lifecycle. An all-too-recognizable maze of siloed teams, manual handoffs, and barely connected technologies prevents teams from capturing and interpreting consistent metadata — the critical details that describe and track every asset and campaign touchpoint.
These challenges are universal (and about to get a lot more thorny thanks to the forthcoming influx of AI-generated content). But marketers working in regulated industries — like healthcare, pharmaceuticals, insurance, and financial services — face even more complexity and higher-stakes consequences around poor metadata management.
HIPAA, SOX, and other regulatory frameworks demand that marketers in these sectors navigate a labyrinth of restrictions. Broadly speaking, they must ensure no personally identifiable information (PII) or protected health information (PHI) is used, adhere to strict audience targeting guidelines, maintain visibility into marketing messages and campaign activity, and provide robust audit trails. Failing to comply with these standards can lead to financial penalties, legal action, and loss of consumer trust.
So today, we want to take a deeper look at data standards. Across industries, enterprise teams are using data standards to dictate how marketing teams manage data — defining how metadata is formatted and structured, describing who can use it and when, and dictating how it should be integrated across systems.
For any company, data standards help calm the chaos of marketing data. But companies operating under regulatory scrutiny can unlock a host of hidden benefits by implementing a data standards strategy.
How data standards help marketers meet the moment
To understand how data standards drive additional value in regulated sectors, let’s explore five different scenarios at the intersection of creativity, technology, and compliance.
1. Streamline workflows while ensuring compliance
Balancing speed with regulatory requirements can feel like an impossible task — but data standards offer a solution that streamlines workflows without compromising on compliance.
For example, consider a multinational pharma company preparing for a global drug launch across markets. Its marketing teams need to create assets, secure approvals, activate campaigns, and measure performance — while accounting for varying regulatory requirements and dispersed teams working to execute across regions and channels. This kind of complex launch is ripe for compliance missteps or costly delays.
But with robust data standards in place, these marketers can:
- Create a single source of truth for all marketing assets and approvals. This centralized system can include metadata tags for regulatory approval status and target markets, ensuring teams always use the most current, compliant versions of assets.
- Ensure only approved, market-specific content is used in each region through automatic tagging and categorization.
- Provide real-time visibility into the status of all materials across multiple countries.
- Facilitate rapid updates if needed due to changes in regulatory requirements. If an asset or message falls out of compliance, teams can use automated tagging to quickly identify and adjust impacted campaigns.
- Enable comprehensive tracking and analytics across markets, making it possible to identify which assets and messages are resonating and optimize performance as the campaign progresses.
By implementing data standards, our pharma company can maintain compliance across every marketing asset — without slowing down a time-sensitive launch campaign.
2. Empower teams, maintain control, and manage change
Staying in control over marketing data, especially when sensitive consumer information is involved, often comes at the cost of flexibility and creativity. But data standards help teams stay empowered while ensuring compliance and leaving room for change management.
Let’s take a marketing team at a large financial services company, tasked with managing multi-state marketing campaigns. They need to run coherent national campaigns while maintaining state-specific regulatory compliance — and creating space for regional customization in imagery and messaging.
Data standards help marketers achieve this delicate balance between empowerment and oversight as they:
- Create master templates for each campaign type, such as retirement planning, investment products, or banking services. Standardized templates deliver brand consistency while meeting the regulatory requirements specific to each campaign.
- Establish group permissions across teams, making it possible to grant specific permissions to corporate, legal, and regional teams to edit, approve, or customize certain sections within approved parameters.
- Enable regional customization within guardrails, allowing teams to tailor campaigns to local needs and preferences without starting from scratch or risking non-compliance.
- Maintain corporate control over core elements, ensuring critical components like disclaimers, risk statements, and regulatory disclosures remain compliant across all variations of a campaign.
With this combination of flexibility and oversight, local teams can adapt campaigns to their markets without compromising overall compliance.
3. Enhance customer trust with data integrity
Current marketing best practices emphasize granular segmentation and highly personalized messaging — but in compliance-driven sectors, audience targeting is highly restricted. Using personally identifiable information (PII) or protected health information (PHI) to segment and target consumers is a minefield, and violating regulations can lead to legal and reputational consequences.
Let’s imagine a regional financial institution aiming to improve personalized marketing for its ranges of products, such as mortgages, personal loans, and investment services — without risking compliance violations.
Using standardized picklists in their data standards templates, these marketers can:
- Eliminate the possibility of including PII by categorizing assets based on general behaviors or broad product interest categories, rather than specific account details or financial situations.
- Ensure consistent and compliant customer targeting across all marketing initiatives by tagging and tracking legal approvals.
- Provide a clear audit trail, with all marketing activities tagged with standardized metadata, to demonstrate fair lending practices and regulatory compliance.
Standardized templates and picklists allow our fin-serv marketers to successfully personalize content and tailor outreach — without risking the inclusion of sensitive details like account balances or financial statuses in marketing segmentation.
4. Achieve precise — and compliant — campaign tracking
Detailed campaign tracking allows marketers to understand what content is working and what’s not, so they can optimize future performance. But in regulated industries like healthcare and pharma, teams have to be careful not to expose personal information or violate strict privacy requirements, including during the collection and analysis of campaign data.
Consider a healthcare provider implementing a comprehensive digital marketing strategy across multiple channels. They need to track campaign performance precisely and holistically, while ensuring strict adherence to HIPAA regulations.
Data standards protect consumer information and improve analytics by helping marketers to:
- Ensure compliance in URL structures, replacing potentially sensitive information (like the names of conditions or treatments) in tracking URLs with IDs and tracking codes.
- Streamline regulatory audits with clear, standardized tracking systems that easily demonstrate compliance, reducing stress and potential penalties during audits.
- Reduce time spent on compliance checks through automated, standardized tracking — allowing teams to focus more on strategy and optimization rather than conducting manual reviews to check for privacy violations.
With ironclad data protection and granular campaign tracking, healthcare marketers can continually improve campaign performance and safeguard patient privacy.
5. Improve agility with comprehensive visibility
Marketing teams often need to move fast to keep up with trending topics or timely opportunities — but agility can be elusive in highly regulated sectors.
Consider a pharmaceutical company that realizes a new global health initiative aligns perfectly with a key product in their portfolio. This creates a golden opportunity to showcase their commitment to global health and potentially expand their market reach — but the marketing team needs to swiftly adapt and activate campaign assets in order to meet the moment.
Data standards help these time-pressed marketers to:
- Conduct instant, omnichannel campaign audits by providing standardized data across all marketing channels and regions. This comprehensive visibility makes it possible for teams to immediately identify every active campaign, advertisement, and piece of content related to the relevant product.
- Create and secure approval of new assets through standardized workflows that ensure content moves quickly through necessary approval processes.
- Adjust campaigns rapidly across multiple platforms and regions, allowing the company to quickly align its messaging with the new initiative.
With granular oversight into campaign assets and the ability to surgically adjust messaging precisely where needed, our pharma marketers can respond quickly and position their brand as an active partner in the global health initiative.
How data standards are delivering better marketing outcomes to regulated companies
These theoretical scenarios bring the specific capabilities of data standards to life — but we can also see the proven, big-picture benefits The Data Standards Cloud® from Claravine delivers to compliance-driven marketing orgs.
Vanguard Group
Vanguard Group is the global leader in providing mutual funds, but manual campaign launch processes and siloed systems for creating and labeling data hindered its marketing efforts. By adopting automated data standards, Vanguard’s marketing org moved from divisional, channel-specific data governance to an enterprise-wide model. This allowed them to maintain control while empowering teams to work more efficiently within a standardized framework.
As one Vanguard project administrator noted, “Before [implementing data standards], people were doing things ten different ways. Now, people have gotten on the bus and are using one consistent approach.”
Bristol Myers Squibb
Bristol Myers Squibb, a global biopharmaceutical company, long relied on UTM codes to track marketing efforts — manually created, managed in Excel files, and repeatedly handed off across teams. This led to inconsistencies and quality control issues. But by centralizing their data input process through Claravine, the organization streamlined the UTM creation process and ensured compliance with data privacy regulations.
According to Bristol Myers Squibb Digital Media Operations Consultant Tim Scales, “We’ve been able to track all our links seamlessly, across all our digital marketing channels, and hit that ultimate goal of an omnichannel experience.”
Multinational healthcare company
One leading multinational healthcare company was investing billions of dollars annually on marketing, but a lack of standardization around campaign data management across disparate teams (including manual processes, inconsistent tagging attributes, and siloed data) interfered with their ability to produce actionable insights. But after implementing Claravine’s standardized templates and market-specific taxonomies, they established a unified, enterprise-wide model that created global consistency — across all regions, teams, agencies, and partners.
As a company representative noted, “Now, we can collectively optimize the customer experience rather than have siloed brand activities.”
Learn how data standards can pave the way for powerfully compliant marketing
Automating data standards helps marketers in any industry manage their marketing data more efficiently. But for teams working under strict regulations around data privacy and security, the benefits are particularly impactful. As we’ve seen, data standards can streamline workflows, enhance agility, and deliver more accurate and granular analytics — all while improving visibility and making compliance easier to maintain.
If you’d like to see The Data Standards Cloud® in action, check out our recent webinar on streamlining data inputs across teams. Or, schedule a demo with our team to see how we take the drama out of your marketing data.