There are lots of opportunities for things to go wrong in the marketing world. We’ve seen digital marketers:
- set up the wrong audience for their client’s ads to be targeted to
- breach GDPR
- accidentally overspend on ads
- fail to deliver a marketing campaign
Some of these are mistakes on the freelancer’s part, like a breach of personally identifiable information or targeting the wrong audience. But other problems stem from project management issues, such as failing to launch an ad campaign on time.
Perhaps there’s a launch date looming and you’re responsible for the marketing campaign leading up to that, but you haven’t received the deliverables on time or the client hasn’t signed off on your copy.
If anything leads to a client claiming monetary damages from you, or threatening legal action, you’ll want to have professional indemnity in place. This will help you defend your corner and minimise the financial and reputational impact that you could suffer.
Let’s look at the features of the professional indemnity policy that marketers are commonly supported by.
Negligence
The negligence clause in your professional indemnity policy is intentionally broad so that it captures lots of situations. The gist is; if you make a mistake in your work and your client tries to recover damages from you, your insurance can help. For example, if you set up an ad campaign but accidentally blow the budget on targeting the wrong audience, your client can look to recover the costs of this from you.
Emergency correction problems
This feature is ideal for marketers who write a lot of copy for physical material like flyers and brochures. The insurer will pay the reasonable costs in correcting mistakes in advertising or marketing material to enable the content to be published inline with the client’s original expectations.
Unintentional copyright infringement
Some marketers have responsibility for sourcing third-party assets for clients, like images or video. This means you need a good understanding of copyright law. We’ve covered the misuse of third-party assets in great detail and the claims we’ve encountered as a result. If you find yourself in a situation where you’re pursued for copyright infringement damages, your professional indemnity insurance can assist.
Data breach
The professional indemnity policy we arrange includes third-party cyber liability by default. This means if you accidentally disclose personally identifiable information and your client seeks damages from you, cover is already included instead of buying separate cyber insurance. This is especially useful for marketers working with personally identifiable information like email lists.
Breach of contract
If you breach any terms in your contract and the client suffers a loss as a result, they could look to recover the cost from you. One of our customers was hired to provide marketing services for a client’s new website, but the client claimed the work in the contract hadn’t been completed to spec and they threatened to “recover a loss” due to it not being completed. Having a contract is useful for outlining the boundaries between both parties, but you can unintentionally breach it which leaves you vulnerable to accusations of breach of contract.
One of our customers was hired to handle the marketing for a new skatepark. This included:
- building and maintaining an email marketing list
- creating ads to be boosted across social media
- improving the website’s rankings with content and SEO
The client seemed happy with progress as bookings and brand awareness increased, but mid-way through the contract they ghosted the freelancer.
Ghosting is common behaviour with clients. Despite it not being the freelancer’s fault, it can derail a project and the blame can be shifted onto the freelancer. There are measures we suggest putting in place to deter ghosting, but in this instance work on the skatepark’s marketing ground to a halt.
Since the marketer was dependent on receiving sign-off and deliverables from the client, several weeks passed with little to no progress.
No ads were published because the client hadn’t provided the deliverables.
No emails were delivered because the client hadn’t signed off on the content.
Over a month passed before the client reappeared, stating they hadn’t received what they’d been paying for and that bookings had been affected. They wanted to recover this loss from the freelancer.
When a client tries recovering monetary damages from you, your professional indemnity insurance can assist by negotiating damages with the client (and covering them), or defending you legally. Sometimes it might involve a bit of both.
In this instance, the marketer had terms outlined in their contract about the client signing off and providing deliverables in a timely manner. If they were unable to do so, work would cease. This made the insurer’s job easier in removing blame from the freelancer and arguing that no damages were owed.
By now you should have a better understanding of what insurance is and how it can help you, but how much is it going to cost?
With Jack can arrange £1,000,000 of professional indemnity insurance for marketers from £168 per year. Payments are interest free so this works out to just £14 per month.
This includes cover for emergency correction problems, defending you if you’re accused of breaching your contract, copyright infringement cover and more.
As a freelance marketer your reputation is everything and is the key to booking your next project. Out of all of the industries we provide insurance for, marketers definitely provide the widest range of services which can leave you more vulnerable. You’re responsible for
- delivering work on time
- meeting client expectations
- targeting the correct audiences
- handling personally identifiable information securely
- sourcing third-party assets like images inline with copyright law
- working within an advertising budget
Being insured not only puts you in a better position to fix a wrong, but it gives clients confidence that they’re working with a trusted professional.
We’ve talked about what features insurance has that can help you, real stories from marketers that have had to use their insurance and how much it costs. You can take the next step and get a quote.
