Someone’s been recommended to you by a friend at work. Before they email, they look you up. They read your website on their phone on the train home, click through to the team page, see a stock photo of a handshake and three paragraphs about being “client focused” and decide to think about it.
Digital marketing for financial advisers starts there, with the first look a prospect takes at you before they’ve said a word. A lot of advice firms grew on referrals and never needed much more than a tidy website. That’s changing, because even the warmest referral now checks you out online first.
Here’s what to put in place for 2027, in the order we’d do it.
Your website has to do the first meeting
Your website is often where a prospect decides whether to book the call. It needs to answer the questions they’d ask in a first meeting: who you help, what you help them with, how you charge in general terms and who they’ll be speaking to.
That last one matters more than firms tend to expect. People are choosing a person to trust with their pension, so a real photo and a few lines from each adviser in their own words do more than any amount of polished brand copy.
Make the next step obvious too. One clear way to book an initial conversation, on every page, beats a contact form buried in the footer.
Write about the questions your clients ask
Content marketing for financial advisers is simpler than it sounds. Your clients already ask you the same questions every week, about pensions, inheritance tax, what happens when they sell the business or whether they can afford to retire at 60. Each of those is an article. Keep a running list of every question clients ask in meetings and you won’t run short of topics.
Write them the way you’d answer them across the desk, in plain English, for the person who’s asking. That’s what gets found in search and in AI answers. It’s also what makes a prospect feel they already know how you think before they meet you.
A few rules keep it useful:
- One question per article
- The answer in the first paragraph
- A named adviser as the author
- A clear next step at the end
If writing isn’t something anyone in the firm has time for, that’s normal. It’s also where a content writing partner who knows financial services earns their keep.
Pick one or two channels and do them well
You don’t need to be everywhere. For most advice firms, LinkedIn and an email newsletter cover it.
LinkedIn works because your clients’ peers, accountants and solicitors are all there. A post from a named adviser travels further than one from a company page, so one or two a week from a single adviser is plenty to start with. Email works because it keeps you in front of existing clients and the people who’ve signed up but aren’t ready yet. We wrote about fintech email marketing that people open and most of it applies to advice firms too.
Here’s the thing. A newsletter that goes out every single month will do more for you than three channels that go quiet after a few weeks.
Show the people behind the advice
Advice is personal and prospects want to know who they’ll be dealing with. Short videos of your advisers answering one common question each are one of the easiest ways to show that. Good sound, decent light and someone who knows the subject are all they need.
Video also gives you a lot to reuse. One recording can become a LinkedIn post, a clip for the website and a paragraph in the newsletter. Our video and social media team makes these for financial services firms.
Keep compliance in the process from the start
Every post that promotes your services is a financial promotion, including the ones on social media. The FCA’s finalised guidance on financial promotions on social media, published in March 2024, says each promotion has to be “standalone compliant”, so a LinkedIn post has to meet the rules on its own and can’t lean on a link to cover what it leaves out.
That catches a lot of firms out, because social posts get written quickly and signed off in a hurry. Build a simple approval step into how you plan content, keep a list of claims and wording that compliance has already approved and write with the rules in mind from the first draft. It saves weeks of back and forth.
Measure the enquiries
Likes and followers are nice to see. What matters for an advice firm is how many people booked a first conversation and where they came from.
Ask every new enquiry how they found you and keep a note. After six months you’ll know which articles, posts and channels are bringing in clients and you can do more of those. Look at your website analytics once a month as well, so you can see which articles people read before they got in touch.
Want help with digital marketing for your advice firm?
We’ve been writing for fintech and financial services firms since 2020. We can plan your content, write the articles and newsletters in your advisers’ voices, make the videos and get it all through compliance.
If you’d like a hand making your website and content do more of the first meeting for you, Book a call.