Digital marketing is becoming a must have for a majority of businesses. For every eight companies, five of them use e-marketing to market and promote their brands.
However, this doesn’t mean your company is free to do anything while operating online.
Typically, there are different legal mistakes related to digital marketing.
If not taken into consideration, they may negatively affect your business operations.
Legal Mistakes to Avoid With Digital Marketing
In this post, we will identify and explain the five most common legal mistakes associated with online marketing.
1. Copyright Protection Mistakes
When you publish any information owned by another company, you are opening your business up to legal risk. In some instances, this type of mistake could even put the survival of your business itself at risk.
Although you may have unintentionally used copyrighted content, the other business party can still sue your business with ease. This applies to visual content such as images as well as written content suck as blog posts or guides.
Thankfully, there are plenty of royalty-free websites, many of which offer creative commons licensing to use their creative materials. Such websites are perfect for creating pages, blog posts, and other content on your business website.
2. Trademark Security Mistakes
When it comes to internet marketing, you need to get your trademark in place as soon as possible once you’ve opened the doors or website.
A trademark is the company’s badge and symbol. This is what will represent your business across all websites and news coverage. Therefore, it must be secured and protected from any attack by fraudsters.
If you don’t secure your trademark, you may soon realize that it is getting infringed. Cybercrime and other scam techniques are running rampant these days.
With so many hackers on the loose, there’s a good chance that your trademark might get misused. You need to have legal recourse to shut that behavior down.
Aside from being a legal mistake, trademark infringement can really damage your brand and public relations efforts. So take control of it before anyone has a chance to cause trouble for you.
3. Incorporation Mistakes
One of the most common mistakes we see among digital marketing-heavy companies is failing to incorporate or put some other legal business structure in place.
For one thing, most legal business structures prevent you as the owner from personal legal risk based on the actions of the company. This sets up the business as a separate entity.
If you want to avoid such legal mistakes, you will have to decide which business entity to adopt. Is it a limited liability company, C company, or S company?
This will determine the structure and form by which your business will get recognized on the internet. Be aware in advance, however, that forming a corporation may incur some taxes and fees, but it’s worth it for the legal protections.
Make sure to clearly delineate who are partners vs. shareholders, and that you all have a clear vision of the company mission.
In many cases, a shareholder’s agreement can help to align all of these concerns. It will aid in focusing on your shareholder’s relationship and determining long term plans for the business.
4. Privacy Policy Mistakes
When it comes to ecommerce marketing, the privacy policy is one of the most important legal items to have in place from day one.
While customers visit an ecommerce store, they are usually asked to share information with the business. They expect that the business will keep their information private and confidential.
A privacy policy is the place where you spell out in great detail how their private data will be used, especially if you intend to allow any third parties to market to or otherwise access that data.
Then customers can choose for themselves whether or not to trust you and proceed from there.
You never want to breach that trust and have their private data somehow leaked to the public or stolen. This could also put your business at risk, so be sure to have a solid cybersecurity structure in place on the back end of your website and other systems.
5. Transaction Mistakes
Each country around the world has regulations that govern all e-commerce transactions. They require all internet marketing businesses to disclose their financial transactions after a specific period, typically once per year.
So, if your business fails to abide by the rules and regulations, you may get fined for violating the law.
Always keep very clean and thorough records of all transactions. Be sure you have a log of products in your store, descriptions of these products, revenues collected, expenses, etc.
Summary
Digital marketing has grown into the most important and possibly easiest way to promote your business, grow your customer base, and push forward positive word of mouth.
Just be sure to cover all of your bases on the legal side to minimize the chances of putting your business at risk because of an honest error in the future.
Feature Image Credit: CC 0; Public Domain. Feature image sourced from pxfuel.com.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions stated in this post are that of the author, and Return On Now may or may not agree with any or all of the commentary.
This guest post brought to you courtesy of Return On Now, Professional Austin SEO and PPC Services Company.
Delan Cooper
Latest posts by Delan Cooper (see all)
- Digital Marketing: 5 Legal Mistakes to Avoid - February 9, 2021
