Marketing for Financial Advisers: Growing Compliantly in Australia

Marketing for financial advisers works, but every ad, post and page sits under ASIC’s rules, and the standard applies whether you are a large licensee or a sole practitioner. Financial adviser marketing that succeeds leads with genuinely educational content, stays local and specific, and builds a compliance check into publishing so it creates trust rather than risk.

The Rules Come First

Not because rules are interesting, but because a marketing plan built without them produces material you cannot use.

Advertising financial products and services is covered by ASIC’s Regulatory Guide 234. This matters right now, because ASIC reissued RG 234 on 9 June 2026 after a consultation that ran from late November 2025, and folded the old RG 53 guidance on past performance into it. RG 53 has been withdrawn. If your licensee’s marketing checklist was written before the middle of this year, it is pointing at a superseded document.

The principles that catch advisers most often are consistent across versions. Messages must be balanced rather than promoting the upside while burying the qualifications. Risk disclosure must be prominent, not a footnote in six-point grey. Comparisons must be reasonable. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance, and presenting it as though it were is a recurring enforcement theme. Images and graphs are held to the same standard as the words, so a chart that flatters by starting its axis conveniently is a problem whatever the fine print says. Underneath all of it sits the general prohibition on misleading conduct.

The Word “Independent”

This one is specific, statutory, and routinely misunderstood.

Section 923A of the Corporations Act restricts the use of “independent”, “impartial” and “unbiased”, along with words of like import, and the restriction extends to phrases such as “independently owned”, “non-aligned” and “non-institutionally owned”. You can only use them where you meet the conditions, which broadly means no commissions, no volume-based payments, no gifts or benefits that could reasonably influence advice, and no conflicts of interest.

The part advisers miss is the flip side. If you are not independent and you provide personal advice to retail clients, there is an obligation to disclose that you are not independent, impartial or unbiased and to explain why. That disclosure belongs in your Financial Services Guide, so check your website does not quietly contradict it. A site describing your “unbiased approach” while the FSG says otherwise is easy to fix and awkward to explain.

Social Media

ASIC’s guidance on discussing financial products and services online is aimed at influencers, but it draws the line advisers need: factual information describing a product’s features is one thing, but present it so it conveys a recommendation to invest and you may be giving financial product advice, with everything that follows. Licensees also carry exposure for influencers they engage, which is worth knowing before anyone signs a content partnership.

How Do Clients Actually Find an Adviser?

Four ways, in roughly this order of value.

Referral from an existing client or a professional contact. Still dominant and best-converting, which is why accountant and broker relationships matter. Someone arriving this way has borrowed the trust they need.

Search, usually local and usually specific. “Financial adviser [suburb]”, “financial planner near me”, “retirement planning [city]”, “SMSF advice near me”. Cover both labels, since plenty of the public still searches for a financial planner, and financial planner marketing reaches the same audience under a different word. Volume is lower than you might hope, but intent is unusually high.

Reputation and content over time. Someone reads three of your articles across a year and decides you seem to know what you are talking about. Slow, unmeasurable, and the thing that most reliably fills a practice.

The ASIC Financial Advisers Register. Prospective clients do check it, and so do journalists and referral partners. Make sure yours is current.

There is a market condition worth naming. Adviser numbers contracted sharply after the 2020 education and ethics reforms, from a peak above 25,000 to around 15,610 relevant providers on the register as at 28 May 2025 on ASIC’s own figures. Fewer advisers serving an ageing population means most practices are not short of demand so much as short of the right clients and the time to find them. That should change what your marketing is for: qualifying rather than volume.

It also changes what good looks like. If you are turning work away, a campaign that doubles your enquiries has not helped, it has added unpaid triage to your week. The higher-value move is to make your website do the filtering you currently do on the phone: say plainly who you work with, what an engagement costs and what it excludes. Every prospect who reads that and decides they are not a fit has saved you an hour, and the ones who ring anyway arrive halfway to a decision.

What You Can Do Yourself

What Content Is Both Compliant and Effective?

The good news is that the compliant approach and the effective approach are the same approach.

Marketing that promises returns is both non-compliant and unconvincing to anyone who has been paying attention since the Royal Commission. Marketing that explains something clearly, admits what is uncertain, and tells the reader when they do not need an adviser, is compliant almost by construction and builds exactly the trust the profession is short of.

So write the boring, useful thing. What the first meeting involves and what to bring. How fees work and what drives them up or down. What questions to ask any adviser before engaging, including the ones that are awkward for you. Whether someone with a simple situation needs advice at all, answered honestly.

Two mechanical points. Keep general advice general and label it as such, with the warning your licensee requires. And be careful with anything resembling performance: a case study built from a real client, even anonymised, needs consent, needs to be genuinely representative, and needs to be clear that it is not a prediction.

Your Pre-Publish Compliance Self-Check

Six questions before anything goes live. Agree them with your licensee, then run every page, post and ad through them.

1. Is every claim in this accurate, and could I prove it if asked?
2. Is the message balanced, with risks and qualifications as prominent as the benefits, rather than tucked into a footer?
3. Does anything here reference past performance, and if so, is it clear that it does not indicate future performance?
4. Have I used “independent”, “impartial”, “unbiased” or anything like them, and am I entitled to?
5. Is general advice labelled as general advice, with the required warning?
6. Do the images, charts and headline numbers tell the same story as the words, or do they flatter?

If a piece fails any of them, it is usually one sentence away from passing. That is the point of the check.

The Metric That Actually Matters Here

This is where most marketing advice fails advisers, because it is imported from businesses with a two-week sales cycle.

Someone deciding to engage an adviser often thinks about it for six to eighteen months. They read something, do nothing. They read something else, do nothing. Then a trigger arrives, a redundancy, an inheritance, a birthday ending in zero, and they act within a fortnight. What decides whether they call you is whether you are the name they remember then.

That has an uncomfortable consequence: leads this month is close to a meaningless number for an advice practice. If you judge your marketing on it, you will switch off the content that was quietly working and double down on the ads that produce enquiries from people who were never going to proceed.

What to watch instead. Are the right kinds of people arriving at all, measured by whether enquiries match the clients you want rather than by count. Is your name being searched directly, which is the clearest sign that the slow work is landing. And how many enquiries arrive already knowing your fee structure, because those are the ones that convert and they tell you your site is doing its job.

The practical version: measure an advice practice over quarters, not weeks, and never judge a content investment before it has had a year. That is an unpopular thing for a marketer to say, since it delays when I can claim credit, and it is what the sales cycle looks like.

When It Is Worth Getting Help

Later than you would think. If your profile is incomplete, your site does not say who you help and your fees are invisible, that is several weeks of unpaid but high-return work, and no agency would beat it.

When it does make sense, the work looks like this rather than a retainer for unspecified marketing.

A compliance-safe content system. Deciding what to publish, in what order, with the review step built in so nothing reaches your licensee as a surprise. That is a strategy engagement, and the constraint is the point: I would rather build something you can actually use than something that gets rejected.

A site that filters. Saying who you work with, what an engagement costs and what it does not cover, so the enquiries that arrive are ones you would take. That is a website build or a rewrite.

An honest read on what is already there. Going through the existing material against RG 234 and your own FSG before your licensee does it for you. That is an audit, and for an established practice with an older site it is usually the first thing I would do.

Someone accountable month to month. Ongoing management without a lock-in contract, which matters in a profession that has had enough of long agreements.

One caution about who you hire. Most marketers do not know these rules, and a good number will confidently tell you they do not apply. The cost of that is not a wasted budget, it is a compliance issue in your name. Ask any prospective provider how they handle RG 234, and if the answer is vague, that risk is landing on you. The same logic applies to mortgage brokers, who sit under the same regulatory guide.

If you want a straight read on where your practice stands, that is a fifteen-minute conversation and it costs nothing, and I will tell you if the honest answer is that you do not need me yet. You can also run the site through the free audit, or see how I approach SEO and marketing strategy.

Questions Advisers Ask Me