Professional / Finance
Financial marketing where the copy is a compliance artefact.
In most industries compliance reviews the marketing. In financial services the marketing is a regulated communication from the moment it is written, and the review is not a formality at the end of the process.
What are the rules for marketing financial services?
Financial marketing is governed at several levels at once. Registered investment advisers operate under the SEC marketing rule, which since its compliance date of 4 November 2022 permits testimonials and endorsements but only with specific disclosures, including whether the person is a client and whether they were compensated.
Advertising platforms add their own requirements. Google's financial products and services policy requires the physical address of the business and all associated fees to be visible on the ad's destination without a click or a hover, requires verification in some locations, and does not allow ads in the United States for personal loans with an APR of 36 percent or above.
The practical consequence is that a financial firm needs a marketing process with compliance built into it rather than bolted on, because almost every asset is a regulated communication and the review has to happen before publication rather than after.
Testimonials are permitted, and the conditions are the point.
Since the SEC marketing rule's compliance date of 4 November 2022, a registered investment adviser may use testimonials and endorsements, but only with the disclosures the rule requires, including whether the person is a client and whether they were compensated. An adviser's marketing is a compliance artefact before it is a creative one.
Before that rule, testimonials were effectively unavailable to registered advisers, which shaped how the whole category marketed itself. Their availability now is a genuine opportunity and it comes with conditions that are not optional.
Read the full breakdown: Testimonials are permitted, and the conditions are the point.Hide the full breakdown: Testimonials are permitted, and the conditions are the point.
The disclosures required include whether the person giving the testimonial is a client, whether they were compensated, and any material conflicts of interest. Those have to be presented clearly and prominently rather than in a footnote, and the adviser retains responsibility for the content.
There are also disqualification provisions covering compensated testimonials from people subject to certain regulatory actions, with a defined exception where the order was the only disqualifying factor, the person complies with its terms, and the advertisement discloses the order and links to it for ten years.
The practical answer is a process rather than a judgement call: a documented review, retained records, and a clear internal rule that no client quotation is published without the disclosure set attached to it. Results vary by market, budget, competition and other factors. Nothing here is a guarantee of a ranking, a lead volume or a revenue outcome.
What the advertising platforms require.
These sit on top of the regulatory position and are enforced independently of it.
- Google's financial products and services policy requires the physical address of the business and all associated fees to be visible on the ad's destination without a click or a hover, requires verification in some locations, and does not allow ads in the United States for personal loans with an APR of 36 percent or above.
- Verification requirements apply in several locations and typically involve providing business licences, registration numbers and service details before ads can run.
- Complex or speculative products carry additional conditions, including that the advertiser is a licensed provider and that the account has been approved to run that category.
- Any material connection between you and someone endorsing you has to be disclosed clearly and close to the endorsement. Paying, gifting, discounting or employing someone all count as material connections.
- The FTC's rule on fake reviews and testimonials took effect on 21 October 2024. It covers buying reviews, writing your own, and suppressing negative ones. Every review we help collect is first party, requested from a real customer, and never gated on the rating they intend to leave.
- Email and phone follow up carry their own rules. CAN-SPAM requires accurate headers, a physical postal address and a working opt out honoured promptly, and calls and texts to consumers sit under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Follow up sequences get built to those rules rather than retrofitted to them.
The recurring practical failure is a landing page that does not carry the required fee and address information, which produces disapprovals that look like a technical problem and are a disclosure problem.
Financial questions are exactly what assistants are asked.
This category generates enormous informational search volume and an increasing share of it never produces a click.
People research financial decisions privately and extensively, and the questions are stable, factual and repeatedly asked, which is precisely the profile an assistant answers most confidently.
For a financial firm that creates two obligations. The first is to be an accurate source, because an error in a summarised answer about somebody's money is consequential rather than embarrassing. The second is to accept that a large share of the value of this content is being the named source rather than receiving the visit.
Read the full breakdown: Financial questions are exactly what assistants are asked.Hide the full breakdown: Financial questions are exactly what assistants are asked.
It also raises a regulatory question most firms have not considered. Educational content published by a regulated firm is still a communication, and content that drifts from explaining a concept into recommending a course of action has changed category.
The safe and generally more useful position is to explain how something works, what the trade offs are and what questions somebody should ask, without recommending what they should do. That is genuinely helpful, it is defensible, and it is what an assistant can summarise without turning it into advice.
Consumers are asking assistants about local providers.
BrightLocal's 2026 consumer survey of 1,002 US adults measures use of generative tools for local business recommendations across categories.
SourceBrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey, 2026, base 1,002 US consumers
This is general consumer research rather than financial services data. It is included because the direction is clear and because accuracy in what a machine can read about a regulated firm matters more here than in most categories.
Financial services covers very different businesses.
Each has a different regulator, a different buyer and a different set of things it may say.
| Segment | Who decides | The governing constraint |
|---|---|---|
| Registered investment advice | An individual or family | The SEC marketing rule |
| Broker dealer | An individual | Communications rules and review requirements |
| Lending | A borrower | Disclosure requirements and platform APR limits |
| Insurance | An individual or a business | State licensing and producer rules |
| Financial technology | A consumer or a business | Depends entirely on what is being offered |
| Corporate finance advisory | A company and its board | Confidentiality and professional standards |
Marketing advice written for one of these is frequently unusable in another, which is why generic financial marketing guidance is worth so little. Start from what your registration permits you to say.
In finance the credential is the product.
Somebody handing over responsibility for their money is making a decision they cannot evaluate technically. They fall back on proxies: registration status, how long the firm has operated, who else trusts it, how the fees work and whether the person in front of them explains things clearly.
Fee transparency is the most underused of those. A firm that explains its fee structure plainly, including what is charged, how it is calculated and what else the client will pay, differentiates itself immediately in a category where opacity is the norm and is widely resented.
Registration and disciplinary history are public, and prospective clients increasingly check them. A firm with a clean record should make verification easy rather than assuming nobody will look, and a firm with something in its history is better served addressing it than hoping.
The other proxy is clarity itself. A firm that explains a complex topic in plain language has demonstrated something about how it will communicate as an adviser, which is the actual product being bought.
Building marketing that survives a compliance review.
The firms that market effectively in this sector have a process rather than an argument.
Decide what you may say before writing
Registration, product set and jurisdiction determine the permissible claims. Establishing that first avoids producing material that cannot be used.
Build the disclosures into the template
Where a testimonial or a performance reference requires disclosure, the template should carry it rather than relying on somebody remembering.
Review before publication, every time
Including ad copy, landing page variants and social posts, which are the surfaces most likely to escape a review process aimed at the website.
See the remaining steps: Building marketing that survives a compliance review.Hide the remaining steps: Building marketing that survives a compliance review.
Retain records
Communications, approvals and the versions actually published. This is a regulatory expectation and it is also what makes a later question answerable.
Re-review on a schedule
Rules change, products change and pages go stale. A page approved three years ago is not approved today.
None of this slows a firm down once it exists. What slows firms down is discovering the requirement after a campaign has been built.
What a client is worth, and how to tell the marketing is wrong.
A financial services client is worth their revenue over a relationship that frequently lasts years or decades, which makes lifetime value the only sensible acquisition frame and a single engagement fee close to meaningless.
Define qualified around suitability rather than interest. Asset level, jurisdiction, the service you are registered to provide and whether the prospect is a genuine fit for how you work. An unsuitable enquiry is a compliance risk as well as a wasted meeting.
Read the full breakdown: What a client is worth, and how to tell the marketing is wrong.Hide the full breakdown: What a client is worth, and how to tell the marketing is wrong.
Measure qualified conversations, meetings held and clients onboarded, alongside where each relationship originated. In a category with long cycles and heavy referral, last click attribution describes almost nothing.
How you tell it is being done badly: performance or outcome language anywhere in the copy, testimonials without the required disclosures, ad copy that never went through review, a landing page missing fee and address information, and reporting that leads with form fills.
The vanity metric is website traffic. Financial content attracts enormous general readership, including people in other countries and other tax jurisdictions entirely, and none of them can become clients.
Assets under management or revenue per client belongs in the same view, because a firm adding clients while average relationship size falls is working harder for the same result, and a client count alone will call that growth.
What we would build.
SEO Content Strategy
Educational content that explains rather than recommends, and survives review.
Answer Engine Optimization
Being an accurate source when an assistant answers a question about money.
Web Design and Development
Pages that carry the required disclosures by design rather than by memory.
Google Ads Management
Campaigns built to clear financial products verification before they launch.
CRM Implementation
Pipeline, suitability and origin tracked across a relationship measured in years.
Your website works alongside the practice and ledger software you already run.
We do not replace your practice and ledger software, we do not migrate it, and we do not ask you to change it. The site links to it from the places a client is ready to act, and embeds the vendor's own widget where the vendor publishes one. Being plain about the mechanism: that is all it is. Nothing is synced, nothing we build reads or writes your records, and the names below are systems our clients run, not partners of ours. Compliance sits on top of every handoff here. What a form may ask, what a calendar confirmation may say and what has to be archived are all decided before a single field is drawn.
Ledger and bookkeeping
Client books stay where they are. Nothing on the website goes anywhere near a ledger, and no financial detail should ever travel through a marketing form. Naming the platforms you work in is useful to a prospect for a different reason: it tells them whether moving to you means moving their books.
- QuickBooks Online
- Xero
Practice management, proposals and client portals
Onboarding, document requests and engagement letters run through whichever of these you use. The site hands over at the point somebody has decided, and it is worth making that handover feel like the same firm rather than a sudden change of brand.
- Karbon
- Canopy
- Ignition
Signatures
Signing stays where it is. What the site can do is stop the enquiry that never gets far enough to sign, which in this category usually means answering the fee question honestly rather than leaving it to a call.
- Docusign
- Dropbox Sign
- Adobe Acrobat Sign
What we actually change
Not the system: the path to it. Where the button sits on the page, whether it says what happens when you press it, how many taps it takes from a phone, whether it appears again at the point a client has finished reading and decided, and whether somebody who is not ready yet has a second way to reach you. That path is ours, it is measurable, and in most firm audits it is the part doing the damage.
Where the handoff is only a link
Some vendors publish an embeddable widget and some publish nothing at all. Where there is nothing to embed and no deep link worth pointing at, the site sends the visitor to your booking page or your login and stops there. That is a perfectly good outcome and we would rather say so than describe a seam we cannot remove. What we can do is make the destination unsurprising, so nobody arrives wondering whether they are still dealing with you.
Get a financial marketing review.
We start with what your registration permits you to say, then look at whether your existing material would survive a careful read.
One caveat on all of that. These are descriptions of rules as they are published today, not legal advice about your situation. They differ by state and they change, sometimes quietly, so check the current wording with your own counsel or compliance officer before you rely on any of it. Where a rule touches your marketing we write to the stricter reading and send it to you for sign off before anything publishes.
Straight answers.
Can registered advisers use client testimonials?
Since the SEC marketing rule's compliance date of 4 November 2022, yes, with the disclosures the rule requires, including whether the person is a client and whether they were compensated, presented clearly and prominently.
There are also disqualification provisions covering compensated testimonials from people subject to certain regulatory actions, with a defined exception and a ten year disclosure obligation attached to it.
Why do our financial ads keep getting disapproved?
Most often because the landing page does not carry the information the policy requires visible without a click or a hover, specifically the physical address of the business and all associated fees.
Verification is the other common cause. Several locations require it before financial services ads will run, and it involves licences, registration numbers and service details.
Can we publish performance figures?
It depends entirely on your registration and on the specific presentation, and it is one of the most closely governed areas in financial marketing.
This is a question for your compliance function before anything is drafted, not a marketing decision. Building a campaign around performance and then seeking approval is how firms lose weeks.
Is educational content a compliance risk?
It is a communication, which means it is covered. The distinction that matters is between explaining how something works and recommending what somebody should do.
Explaining mechanics, trade offs and the questions somebody should ask is genuinely useful and defensible. Content that drifts into recommendation has changed category.
Should we make our fees public?
It is one of the strongest differentiators available in a category where opacity is the norm and is widely resented.
Google's financial products policy separately requires all associated fees to be visible on an ad's destination, so for anybody advertising it is not optional in that context.
How do we measure marketing with a relationship this long?
Qualified conversations, meetings held, clients onboarded and where each relationship originated, asked directly rather than inferred.
Website traffic is the vanity metric here and it is worse than usual, because financial content attracts readers in other countries and other tax jurisdictions entirely.
Segment every traffic figure by location before drawing a conclusion from it, and judge content on meetings booked rather than on sessions.
Platform eligibility belongs in the plan rather than in the post mortem. Social platforms operate their own financial product policies, separate from search and frequently stricter, with their own verification and restrictions on what may be promoted. Establishing eligibility for each channel before creative is produced avoids the most common wasted effort in this sector, which is building for a channel that will not approve the category.
Do we need a separate compliance review for ad copy?
Yes, and it is the surface most often missed. Firms review the website carefully and let ad headlines, landing page variants and social posts go live unreviewed.
Build the review into the publication process rather than running it annually, and retain the approved versions alongside what was actually published.
How long does financial services ad verification take?
Longer than an ordinary campaign setup, and it varies by location and product. It typically involves licences, registration numbers and details of the services offered.
Start it before building the campaign rather than after, because a completed account waiting on verification is an idle budget and an idle team.
Where this comes from.
Primary documentation and published research behind the guidance on this page.
- SEC: marketing rule frequently asked questions (opens in a new tab)When a registered adviser may use a testimonial, and what must be disclosed.
- FINRA: advertising regulation and communications with the public (opens in a new tab)
- Google Ads Help: financial products and services policy (opens in a new tab)
- FTC: endorsement guides, what people are asking (opens in a new tab)
- FTC: final rule banning fake reviews and testimonials (opens in a new tab)
- BrightLocal: local consumer review survey (opens in a new tab)
- FTC: CAN-SPAM Act compliance guide for business (opens in a new tab)
Talk to the team
A short call, a look at how the business currently shows up, and a straight answer on what we would do first.