Guide
As a digital marketer, your job is to understand your organization’s customers and prospective customers. You need to know where they are on the internet and what they’re interested in. What social media do they use? How often do they visit your website? Once you’ve found them, you need to know—or figure out—what moves them to act. What convinces them? Which messages ring true as authentic communications, and which sound cheap or phony? Only when you deeply understand your target audience can you start to build brand loyalty and trust.
But—challenging as all of that is—that’s not the end of your job.
If you’re not being mindful of digital marketing compliance, you’re selling your company short. What does compliance mean in this context? Compliance is about protecting customers, being honest and forthright in your messaging, ensuring that people of all abilities can access your online content, and maintaining data privacy and security for your customers and prospective customers. It also involves the need to maintain copies of your public communications. But archiving what you say online—everywhere that you might say it—is about more than just meeting minimum compliance requirements.
Think about it: if you can’t demonstrate, through your archives, what you did or said in public communication, how can you defend against any regulatory inquiry or customer complaint? That’s why it’s critical that you monitor, capture, and archive everything you say about your business to the public, everywhere you are online, even when you’re sending highly personalized, targeted messages on your website or on social media. This Guide briefly reviews where organizations communicate with the public and what regulations you might need to understand. It then explores what
goes wrong with traditional web archiving approaches and what you, as a digital marketer, should be mindful of when working with an archiving solution. Finally, the Guide wraps up with some best practices for online archiving.
Obviously, the most brilliant marketing campaign in the world won’t work if no one sees it. That’s why you have to go wherever your customers are. And once you’re there, they want to know that you see them as individuals rather than a generic, faceless crowd.
Marketing Needs to Reach Customers…Wherever They Are
Where are you directing your organization’s message? For most digital marketers, the key focus is on the organization’s website, which may or may not include a blog. But you’re almost certainly on social media as well, because that’s where your customers In fact, around three-quarters of U.S. adults use at least one social platform these days. YouTube leads the pack (~83%), followed by Facebook (~68%), Instagram (~47%), and TikTok (~33%).
More so, as of mid-2025, over 96% of small businesses in the US use social media as part of their marketing strategy.
While many companies had moved away from platforms like Pinterest and Snapchat, the overwhelming majority used more mainstream social media channels, such as:
Again, your job is to reach your customers and prospective customers, both literally and metaphorically. You have to follow their journey and adapt your message to meet them where they are, communicating what they need to hear when they need to hear it. This isn’t to say that you’re a passive follower. Chances are good that you’re subtly (okay, sometimes not so subtly) guiding prospective customers to your website and encouraging current customers to return.
But, of course, it’s not enough to find customers and woo them into visiting your site or your social media page. You need to tailor your message to suit your specific target audience.
You’re no doubt aware that customers tend to prefer brands that personalize their content; research from Accenture has shown that “91 percent of consumers are more likely to shop with brands [that] recognize, remember, and provide [them with] relevant offers and recommendations” than with brands that treat them uniformly, as generic shoppers rather than individuals.
To that end, you may be using a complex content management system (CMS) to help you coordinate your online marketing efforts and to organize your website. By using products like Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore Experience Manager, and the open-source alternative Drupal, companies can create engaging, user friendly, dynamic, interactive websites that are personalized to their customers’ unique needs and specific to their individual journey. These webpages increasingly function as dynamic web applications rather than as static pages of text.
Just as importantly, complex CMSs allow companies to track users, revealing how they reach a site, where they interact, and where they click away. They also simplify A/B testing so marketers can compare the conversion performance of different page options and collect metrics about how customers respond to them. This data, along with general user tracking information, helps marketers and developers build the best and most compelling websites possible, informed by real customer experiences and data.
So, if your marketing efforts span the internet, it’s obvious that your digital marketing compliance efforts must go everywhere your message goes. And if your marketing is personalized, you must take all of your varied messages into account when measuring your compliance.
And that can be a challenge, especially for creative, outside-the-box marketing efforts. To understand why, let’s look at what compliance requires of marketers.
Some rules were made to be broken. Compliance rules are not those rules.
But while laws and regulations demand stringent compliance efforts, they don’t require a wholesale sacrifice of your creative marketing chops. The key is to start by understanding exactly what your particular organization needs to do to maintain compliance. (We’ve mentioned several throughout this Guide, but these highlights are by no means comprehensive. Check with your legal and compliance leaders for your specific requirements.) Once you know that, you can flex your creative muscles without stepping outside the lines of legal and regulatory compliance.
For most compliance requirements, the principle remains simple: be clear, accurate, and forthright with your customers and prospective customers. Ask yourself: would a reasonable consumer understand your message, or could it be misleading? Are disclaimers obvious and accessible, or are they buried in fine print?
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) now extends these principles into AI-generated content and influencer marketing. Its 2023 guidance requires advertisers to disclose when generative AI has been used to create endorsements, images, or customer interactions. The FTC has also stepped up enforcement on social media financial promotions, especially on TikTok and Instagram, where influencers must clearly state when content is sponsored or promotional. The standard hasn’t changed—advertisements must be truthful, not misleading, and backed by evidence—but the scope of what counts as an “advertisement” has expanded.
But there are, of course, other compliance requirements. As a public accommodation, your website may need to comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act. Could a visually impaired visitor meaningfully access your site? How about a hearing-impaired visitor? While many sites incorporate accessibility features, it’s easy for a newly added page to inadvertently exclude them, cutting off a segment of the customer base and introducing a compliance issue.
Privacy regulations have multiplied in recent years. Beyond the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s CCPA, marketers must now account for:
For financial services organizations, archiving is a regulatory necessity. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) both require firms to maintain detailed records of public communications, whether those take place on a corporate website, via email, in mobile apps, or across social media. These rules are designed to protect investors, ensure transparency, and maintain trust in the financial system.
Importantly, these requirements apply regardless of the platform or technology used. Whether a message is published in a LinkedIn post, a TikTok video, a WhatsApp group chat, or through a chatbot interaction on your website, regulators expect it to be treated as a business communication subject to retention and supervision.
FINRA Notice 11-39 made clear that the medium doesn’t matter—what matters is the substance of the message.
In recent years, enforcement has widened. FINRA Notice 23-06 (2023) warns firms about using influencers or “finfluencers”—any sponsored post must be supervised and archived. If they promote your brand, you’re accountable.
The SEC is also targeting high-risk areas:
Bottom line: in 2025, regulators treat every public statement as permanent. If you can’t prove what was said, when, and how it appeared, you risk fines and reputational damage.
Even if you’re not in a heavily regulated industry like banking or finance that mandates archiving, we think maintaining a dynamic, interactive online archive is still a smart business practice. Why?
Simple: compliance with laws and regulations is only ever as good as the proof of that compliance. Say you advertise honestly and communicate fairly and openly. You provide all the right disclaimers and disclosures and make well-researched, scientifically sound, specific recommendations that are suitable to your customers.
You follow every regulatory requirement, law, and rule, and you throw in some common courtesy for good luck.
But if you don’t have archives that can establish that you took all those actions, someone could claim that you didn’t—and you might be left with no way to prove that you did everything right.
The bottom line is simple: if you want to be able to prove exactly what you’ve done and said in your business communications with the public, you need to have a record of everything you’ve said everywhere on the internet. That doesn’t just mean what you’ve said on your website—it means everything you’ve posted on social media and elsewhere on the web too. To be complete, your archives must go everywhere and capture everything you say.
Unfortunately, legacy archiving solutions fall short in that mission. Here’s why.
For years, organizations have relied on screenshot captures or PDFs to archive online content. These methods create flat, static images of a single moment in time. While that may suffice for basic recordkeeping, it’s no longer enough in today’s fast-moving digital landscape.
First, static screenshots can’t capture dynamic or interactive features—like carousels, dropdown menus, videos, or hover-over disclosures—that shape a customer’s real experience. A single frozen frame doesn’t reflect what the user actually saw or heard.
Second, traditional archives fail to preserve ephemeral content. Stories, disappearing messages, and short-lived posts on platforms such as Instagram, WhatsApp, and Signal may vanish from view within hours, yet regulators treat them as business communications. Without the ability to capture these fleeting interactions, firms face major gaps in compliance.
Third, as marketing increasingly incorporates AI-driven personalization, legacy archiving falls short. Chatbots, recommendation engines, and generative AI campaigns deliver different versions of content to each user. If your archives don’t capture those variations, you can’t prove what any given customer was shown.
Finally, regulators are beginning to require synthetic media disclosures—labels that indicate when content is AI-generated or digitally altered. A static image may capture the creative, but not the disclosure, leaving you exposed to compliance risk.
Simply put, screenshots and static PDFs can’t keep pace with the complexity of 2025 digital marketing. To defend your brand and meet regulatory obligations, you need archiving that captures every interactive element, every AI-driven variant, and even the content designed to disappear.
Dynamic content is everywhere in digital marketing—whether it’s a rotating carousel on a homepage, an auto-playing video, or an animated infographic. These elements update automatically without user interaction, shaping the customer’s experience in real time.
But here’s the problem: a static screenshot only captures one frame, leaving out the rest of the story. Did your carousel display a disclaimer on the second slide? Did your video include important disclosures at the halfway mark? If your archive only holds a single still image, you have no proof.
This issue is even more pronounced on video-heavy platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram Reels, where the content is entirely dynamic. Capturing a single frame of a TikTok reel is as useless as archiving one still from a movie—you miss the substance, the context, and the message regulators care about.
Interactive features are now standard in both websites and apps. Dropdown menus, hover-over text, expandable FAQs, embedded calculators, and customizable graphs all require user action to be revealed. If your archiving tool can’t engage with these features, critical disclosures vanish from your records.
Consider a financial services firm using interactive charts to show fund performance over time. The chart may reveal different disclaimers depending on what the user clicks. If your archive only preserves the “default view,” you can’t demonstrate that the disclaimer was visible in the live experience.
The challenge extends to conversational interfaces and chatbots. AI-driven assistants increasingly guide customers through product information and even financial decisions. Each interaction may be unique, shaped by the customer’s questions and the AI’s responses. Without a way to capture and replay those journeys, firms cannot prove what guidance or recommendations were given.
A bonus problem!
In 2025, there’s no such thing as a single “typical” website experience. Advanced CMS platforms, AI-driven recommendation engines, and generative chatbots all create highly individualized customer journeys. What one visitor sees can differ dramatically from what another sees—based on location, browsing history, expressed preferences, or even real- time interactions with an AI assistant.
Traditional archiving solutions can’t keep pace. Capturing one static version of a page misses the dozens—or hundreds—of possible variations. For example:
From a compliance perspective, every one of these variations matters. Regulators will want to know exactly what was shown or said to a given customer at a given time. If you can’t produce that version, you can’t prove compliance.
That means modern archives must go beyond capturing a “master” version of your site. They need to account for all major choice points, AI-driven responses, and personalization branches. This often requires automated crawls that test multiple inputs, simulate different user profiles, and capture both web-based and conversational outputs.
Simply put: if you want to demonstrate compliance in 2025, your archives must mirror reality—not just for one user, but for every possible customer journey.
On the web, context is everything. A user doesn’t just see a single page or post in isolation—they experience the way content links together, how it is displayed in feeds, and how other users interact with it. If your archives don’t capture this context, you’re missing the full story.
This is especially critical on social media platforms, where content constantly shifts and expands. A static screenshot won’t show which comments were visible at the time, what replies your brand made to a customer complaint, or how many likes and shares a post received before it disappeared into the algorithm. On platforms like TikTok and Instagram, where content is short-lived and engagement is layered into the viewing experience, failing to capture this context leaves major compliance gaps.
The risks are real. Regulators have already acted against companies and executives for misleading or undisclosed social media statements. The SEC’s enforcement actions around crypto promotions, ESG claims, and celebrity endorsements are reminders that anything posted online can become evidence. In 2025, that scope extends further—covering AI-generated influencer content, disappearing comments in messaging apps, and algorithm-driven feeds that shape how content is consumed.
Without this level of context, you can’t prove how your audience actually experienced your message—or how your brand responded.
In today’s landscape, compliance demands more than screenshots or static PDFs. To truly protect your organization, you need an archiving solution that can capture the full, functional experience of your digital content—exactly as customers saw it, wherever it appeared. That means creating navigable, dynamic archives of your website, social media, and app-based content, including:
The most reliable way to achieve this is with archives built in the WARC (Web ARChive) file format. Unlike flat screenshots, WARC preserves the full functionality of web content—allowing regulators, auditors, and internal teams to interact with your archive the same way a customer interacted with your live site. With WARC, you can scroll, click, expand, and even replay video or chatbot conversations, making it clear what was said, when, and how.
Equally important, archives must be stored in secure, SEC-compliant WORM storage to ensure they remain tamper-proof and audit-ready. Coupled with advanced crawling technology and ongoing human QA, this approach provides a defensible record across all digital channels— whether your message lived on LinkedIn, TikTok, Discord, or in a metaverse activation.
The bottom line: in 2025, only a fully functional, context-rich archive can give compliance teams the confidence to keep pace with modern marketing innovation while meeting regulatory expectations.
Personalization is no longer limited to A/B testing or location-based content. In 2025, websites, apps, and chat platforms deliver highly individualized experiences shaped by AI, customer data, and real-time behavior. That means there is no single “typical” version of your site— every visitor may see something different.
For example:
From a compliance standpoint, every one of these variations matters. Regulators want to see not just the “default” experience but the exact information, offers, and disclaimers a given customer encountered.
To achieve this, archiving solutions must go beyond one-off static captures. They should:
In short: if you want to prove compliance in a world of personalization and AI, your archives must reflect all the possible journeys, not just one.
Compliance archiving is also about protecting your brand. In 2025, brand reputation can shift in minutes, especially across social media platforms where viral amplification, AI impersonations, and synthetic media are everyday risks.
Marketers now face challenges that go beyond tone and messaging. Deepfakes, AI-generated endorsements, and manipulated content can distort your brand’s voice or misrepresent your products. Without reliable archives, it can be nearly impossible to prove what was authentic and what wasn’t.
Robust archiving gives brand leaders the ability to:
The good news: archives built to meet regulatory standards also serve as powerful brand-protection tools. By capturing dynamic, interactive, and AI-generated content in full context, organizations can safeguard not just compliance, but also the trust and credibility that define their brand.
Modern archiving solutions can automatically crawl new content, detect changes, and even flag missing disclaimers in real time. That saves enormous time and reduces risk.
But regulators are clear: automation alone is not enough. FINRA and the SEC expect firms to demonstrate active supervision, not blind reliance on technology. If something goes wrong—like a missing disclosure on TikTok or an AI chatbot making an unauthorized statement—you need to show that someone was monitoring, reviewing, and correcting those issues.
That’s why the best archiving solutions combine advanced automation with human QA. AI can flag anomalies across massive volumes of content, while skilled compliance teams (or vendor QA specialists) verify captures, test functionality, and run spot checks. Together, this hybrid approach ensures:
Automation saves time, but human oversight keeps your compliance program defensible. In short: don’t just “set it and forget it”—set it, monitor it, and prove it.
Modern archiving solutions now include customized alerts and AI- driven monitoring that help compliance teams act before issues escalate.
For example, you may need alerts when:
Smart systems go further by using AI to detect anomalies. For instance, if a TikTok campaign receives unusually high engagement but lacks a sponsored content tag, or if an influencer’s post drops a disclaimer, the system can automatically notify your compliance team.
Instead of manually checking every page or post, alerts give you continuous oversight at scale. With real-time notifications, compliance and marketing can fix issues quickly—before customers, competitors, or regulators spot them.
Archiving isn’t complete until your records are protected. Your captures must be stored in tamper-proof,
write-once-read-many (WORM) storage to satisfy SEC Rule 17a-4 and similar regulations. This ensures every communication—from social posts to AI chatbot interactions—remains immutable and defensible.
Security standards have also advanced. Look for vendors that provide:
By combining compliant storage formats like WARC with enterprise-grade security, organizations not only meet regulatory demands but also safeguard their most sensitive digital evidence against cyber risk.
If your digital marketing efforts span the entire internet, from your corporate website to social media channels, and involve
dynamic, interactive, or personalized content, you need to ensure that your web archiving capabilities can keep up. That calls for good communications across several teams, from marketing, web communications, and IT through your compliance and
legal staff. You’ll want to effectively “triangulate” your efforts so that marketing can invent content that compliance and legal approves and the web or IT staff executes.
Here’s how to get your marketing and compliance teams on the same page.
Start with clarity. Work with your legal and compliance teams to understand which regulations apply to your organization—whether that’s SEC and FINRA rules, GDPR, CPRA, the EU Digital Services Act, or accessibility standards like WCAG 2.2. Establish clear internal guidelines:
Create documented workflows for review and approval, and make sure every stakeholder—from designers to copywriters—knows how to escalate questions.
Compliance doesn’t mean bland marketing. Use your campaign data, test new formats, and experiment with fresh channels— whether that’s TikTok videos, influencer partnerships, or AI-driven chat experiences. The key is making sure your archiving system can capture everything you publish, from a disappearing Instagram Story to an interactive financial calculator. If your team can create it, your archive should be able to preserve it.
Before going live, look at your content as a regulator—or as a customer—would. Is the message clear, accurate, and accessible? Are disclaimers and opt-out buttons present and visible? Does a chatbot or AI-generated interaction produce disclosures where required?
Automated tools can scan campaigns for missing language or compliance risks, but human review remains essential. Always maintain an audit trail of approvals so you can show how content was reviewed and adjusted before publication.
Launching a campaign is the moment of truth—your message is out in the world, reaching customers, regulators, and competitors at the same time. But success doesn’t stop at publishing. To stay compliant, you need to confirm that your archives are capturing every version of your content, including interactive features, personalization paths, and social engagement.
Automated crawlers and AI alerts make it easier to monitor campaigns in real time, but human oversight remains essential. Periodic QA checks ensure your records reflect the live customer experience—not just a static snapshot. With fully functional WARC- based archives preserved in tamper-proof WORM storage, you’ll always have defensible proof of what was said and how it appeared.
Finally, remember that compliance is a shared responsibility. When marketing, legal, and compliance teams work together, compliance becomes part of the culture. That mindset frees your team to experiment with new channels, formats, and AI-driven tools, knowing that every message can be both creative and compliant.
Learn more about Hanzo’s enterprise archiving and compliance solutions. Visit us at www.hanzo.co.
