Help for financial advisors whose compliance officers are driving them nuts!

Sign Up For Daily Newsletter: Receive one actionable marketing tip each DAY!

Question from a subscriber: “Compliance is impossible to get my content through. My financial advisor compliance department take forever and nitpick every little thing!”

Whoa….okay okay…take a deep breath.

If you steer clear of the obvious violations, it’s actually pretty easy to get your content approved by your compliance officer.

  • Don’t talk about products
  • Don’t talk about performance
  • Don’t talk about awards you got
  • Don’t talk about hero stories where you saved the client with some magic trick
  • Don’t use the following words:
  • Unique
  • Best (better)
  • Performed
  • Guarantee
  • Always
  • Will (as a verb, example: you WILL retire on time if you buy this annuity)

Tips for navigating through compliance as a financial advisor

Now, what should you actually do?

  • Use words like these before verbs:
  • Likely
  • Possibly
  • Potentially
  • In some cases
  • Use selfie photos with emotional value. Compliance will have little to say about a picture of you and your spouse’s wedding, talking about how little you knew about buying your first home. This goes further than boring, dry technical content anyways.
  • Focus more on engaging with other people’s content on social media than with producing your own. Follow your prospects’ posts and ask great questions on what they post about to further the discussion. You’ll get a ton of attention and compliance will have little to say about questions you are asking, as long as you stay in bounds.
  • Keep content brief. It’ll shorten up the compliance cycle and reduce the chance that you’ll violate the guidelines. People like shorter stuff anyways especially when it comes to dry, boring financial advisor content.
  • First of all, give compliance a long lead time when you first start to work together. Don’t make your first submission be about an event happening a week from now. Give them a ridiculous amount of lead time, as much as you can.
  • Give them a heads up. Either meet with them in person or have a phone conversation about what you want to write about, and be clear. Ask for their advice about what would make it easy to get it approved. Maybe even submit an outline of the posting before you write the content so that you don’t waste time writing on something they have to ding.
  • Make the content appealing and entertaining to read. Keep in mind they have to read a million dry, boring financial advisor blogs all day long. Using humor and other techniques that I’ll discuss later in this article might just make them enjoy reading what you write and let’s be honest that makes them feel more inclined to support what you’re trying to do.

This should help you breeze through getting your financial advisor content compliance-approved.

But what about getting live interviews compliance approved?

Question from a subscriber: I’m very curious how you get podcasts and live interviews past compliance, especially since you can’t control what others say.”

  • If you are the interviewer, you should prep the guest beforehand and give them a list of topics to avoid discussing (products, performance, guarantees, etc.)
  • Always put a disclaimer at the very end, embedded directly in the video. Here’s an example.
  • The best thing to do is have a script, that both you and the other person agree upon, for how the interview is going to go. This will help you steer clear of compliance-sensitive topics.
  • When somebody says something that is out of bounds, have a signal word so that you don’t miss it when editing. Say “CUT, we’ll have to cut that out later” immediately so that it is “marking” the video spot.

Sara’s upshot

Alright that’s all for now. I hope you enjoyed this analysis of how financial advisors can cope with compliance when they are being difficult.

Did you sign up for my daily newsletter?

Or if you want more…

Learn what to say to prospects on social media messenger apps without sounding like a washing machine salesperson. This e-book contains 47 financial advisor LinkedIn messages, sequences, and scripts, and they are all two sentences or less.

This is a book about financial advisor LinkedIn messages which contains scripts you can use to get new prospects.

You could also consider this LinkedIn training program which teaches financial advisors how to get new clients and leads from LinkedIn.

The Sara Grillo membership is a social media program for financial advisors - but only the cool ones.

Thanks for reading. See you in the next one!

-Sara G

Any questions? Send 'em in!

RELATED POSTS

Sara Grillo - Messy Paint - Marketing Strategy
Financial Advisor Marketing

From Chaotic Picasso to Marketing Masterpiece

His works were beautiful collages, so powerful that they brought to life an entire genre, a new idea that hadn’t existed in the world as a real concept until he made it so. While Picasso didn’t attend marketing conferences with titles such as “Brand Ambassador” on his name tag, we can all take a lesson from his success in marketing his product.

Read More »
Marketing for financial advisors is soooo hard!
Financial Advisor Marketing

Marketing for financial advisors is hard!

With a little bit of creativity, which to be blunt is the last thing on any financial advisor’s mind given all the stress they’re under, you can refocus the lens through which the world sees you. Here are some market-beating social media strategies that are a core holding for all financial advisor and financial planner marketing portfolios.

Read More »