The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 70% of respondents globally were unwilling or hesitant to trust someone with different values, facts, approaches to problems or cultural backgrounds. What does that wider trust climate mean for marketing a financial advice practice?
A separate measure of competition is advertising activity: Nielsen estimated Australia’s financial-sector advertising at $756 million in 2025, up 20% from 2024. These are gross estimates at published rate cards across the financial sector, including banks and superannuation providers; they are not advisers’ actual net advertising spend.
For an advice practice, the useful response is to make the service, credentials and client fit clear. Set a budget the practice can sustain and measure enquiries through to suitable clients.
This is a practical guide on exactly how to do so.
Match Marketing to Practice Capacity
Before increasing demand, check how many new clients the practice can serve and which needs it is equipped to address. Capacity, service fit and onboarding time should inform the marketing plan.
If the practice is already busy, a repeatable content and follow-up process can make marketing easier to manage than ad-hoc activity.
Use Social Proof Carefully
Genuine client feedback can help prospective clients understand the service. Keep it representative, permission-based and clear about what the client experienced.
Do not use a review-conversion statistic from another category as a forecast for a financial advice practice. Test approved client feedback against your own enquiry and conversion data.
In paid campaigns, review themes can suggest useful questions to answer in the creative.
Compare client-experience messages with clear explanations of the service and practitioner expertise. Use the results to decide which approach deserves more budget.
How to Actually Use Your Reviews
The majority of financial practices get reviews and then simply display their Google rating, with no thought for much else.
The best thing to do with them is to analyse reviews for the language clients actually use. What problems do they have? What made a difference to them? What words do they use to explain why they chose you?
Use review themes to understand the questions and concerns your advertising should address. Before republishing a client quote, obtain permission, preserve its meaning and check that the finished ad does not imply an unrepresentative result.
For example, a genuine, authorised comment about a clear explanation of superannuation can illustrate the client experience. Present it in context and avoid turning it into a promise about every client’s experience or financial outcome.
The Advisor-as-Brand Shift
The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer also found that 44% of respondents globally trusted a financial influencer. Among that group, 57% would trust or consider trusting a company they distrusted if a trusted financial influencer vouched for it. These are global survey findings, not an Australian adviser conversion forecast.
A visible adviser can give people a clearer sense of who they would work with. The firm’s reputation, credentials and service still matter.
This has a range of practical implications for how you should structure your marketing. Your face, name and perspective should be put front and centre instead of the firm's logo and something uninspiring like a random stock photo.
Choosing Your Channels: A Budget-Realistic Framework
Not every financial practice is working with the same budget, so the right channel depends largely on what you can invest and how quickly you need to see results.
Google Ads: High Intent, High Cost
Google Ads can reach people actively searching for financial advice. Review the actual search terms and service intent behind the clicks.
A click does not establish suitability or readiness to engage. Assess enquiries, booked meetings and client fit alongside traffic and advertising cost.
Low conversion can reflect search intent, service fit, page clarity, trust, form friction or response time. Investigate those possibilities before assigning a cause.
Google Ads works well for practices with big backing and the infrastructure required to convert expensive clicks, such as dedicated landing pages, fast response times and a robust follow-up system.
Set the test budget using local forecasts, affordable acquisition cost and the practice’s capacity. There is no universal monthly spend that guarantees enough data or suitable enquiries.
Meta and TikTok: Creative-Driven, Lower Entry Point
For practices working on smaller budgets, Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and TikTok offer a good alternative.
Use the available audience and campaign controls alongside creative that clearly explains the service. Measure who enquires and whether the practice can help them.
Test a mix of formats: approved client-experience quotes, short explanations from the adviser, or a carousel addressing a common misconception. Judge them on enquiry quality as well as engagement.
Test meaningfully different creative concepts instead of assuming small visual changes will answer a different client question. Let the account’s results determine which concepts to develop. Our Meta Andromeda guide discusses the campaign context.
Possible topics include budgeting, questions about debt and what a financial adviser actually does. Choose topics from the practice’s expertise and real client questions, then complete compliance review.
Funnel-Staged Ads
A staged content plan can help you organise the questions an audience may have. This is a planning framework, not a guarantee that each person will see the ads in sequence.
Top-of-funnel: educational content that builds awareness, such as a video explaining a concept or a blog post shared as an ad. No hard selling.
Middle-of-funnel: where permitted and available, use relevant engagement audiences to explain the service and share approved, representative client-experience material.
Bottom-of-funnel: a direct call to action for people with whom you've already built familiarity by encouraging them to book a call, attend a webinar, download a guide, etc.
Set audience rules and exclusions where appropriate, then check delivery. Platforms do not guarantee that every person sees the ads in the intended order.
Building a Website That Converts
Your website doesn't need to look like it cost a million dollars to make, but it should definitely appear professional and feel human.
The most common mistake we see is practices trying to look bigger or more corporate than they actually are while stripping out the personal element, which is what resonates with most would-be clients. They should see team photos and faces so they get a sense of who they'd actually be working with.
This is a personal service, and people want to see who they're trusting with their financial future.
What "Professional and Human" Looks Like
The professional signals: accurate licensee and authorised-representative details where applicable, current qualifications, and clear disclosures. Make the Financial Services Guide or applicable website disclosure information easy to find, in line with ASIC’s advice guidance.
The human signals: real photographs of the team (not stock images), bios that include personality alongside credentials, a video introduction if possible, and language that's warm without being casual.
The conversion elements: a clear primary action on every page, contact forms that are short and easy to complete on mobile, and no separate "Contact Us" page that sends people away from the content they were reading.
A clear page should help people understand the service, assess the practitioner and take the next step. Check those elements alongside traffic quality and follow-up when investigating low conversion.
Content Marketing: The Education-First Approach
Content marketing is one of the most effective and cost-efficient strategies for financial advisors. For advisors specifically, it’s also a compliance function.
Educational content still needs compliance review. ASIC distinguishes factual information from financial product advice by what the content communicates. A recommendation intended to influence a financial-product decision can be advice even when presented as education. Check the content, licensing and disclosure requirements before publishing.
Topics That Resonate in Australia
Start with topics that fit your qualifications, service and client questions:
- Superannuation strategies (consolidation, contribution caps, SMSF)
- Retirement planning and income stream structuring
- Insurance within super (TPD, life, income protection)
- End-of-financial-year tax strategies
- Life stage planning (first home, growing family, pre-retirement)
- Estate planning (wills, powers of attorney, death benefit nominations)
Each of these gives answers to questions that people are actively searching for, all while building trust by demonstrating expertise long before the first conversation happens.
Video: Authenticity Over Production
A short video can help prospective clients hear how an adviser explains a subject. Test clear, accurate explanations rather than promising that video will create trust.
Choose production quality that makes the explanation easy to hear and understand. A simple desk recording and a professionally produced video can both work; the result depends on the content and audience.
Three video formats that work particularly well are "the worst financial advice I've heard" (relatability), a clear opinion on a topical issue (authority) and a serious walkthrough of a planning strategy (confidence).
Navigating ASIC Compliance
ASIC’s Regulatory Guide 234, updated on 9 June 2026, explains how financial product, advice and credit advertising can comply with obligations against false or misleading statements and misleading or deceptive conduct.
The core principle of the guide is the "overall impression" test. This is the cumulative effect of everything in your ad (headlines, images, fine print, etc.), which must be accurate and not misleading from the perspective of an ordinary member of your target audience on first viewing.
What You Can't Do
- Imply guaranteed returns or performance outcomes
- Understate risks or oversell benefits
- Rely on a click-through disclosure to correct a misleading headline or overall impression
- Misrepresent qualifications or experience
- Use prohibited or restricted language without meeting legal requirements
What You Can Do
- Share educational content on financial topics
- Use balanced, current past-performance information with prominent warnings; a disclaimer does not fix a misleading claim
- Use genuine, authorised testimonials that do not mislead about the service or likely results
- Promote your qualifications, experience and approach
- Run paid advertising with compliant messaging
- Build thought leadership through content
The Compliance Advantage
This is something we take very seriously for all our regulated industry clients. Working in regulated industries can sometimes make you feel like you aren't able to say anything because the regulations make it seem like every ad has to sound the same.
But that's actually not true at all. The key is understanding exactly what you're allowed to do and maximising the impact of what's within the rules. The financial practices that fully understand their compliance obligations are able to market more confidently, while the ones that don't end up either overclaiming (and getting penalised) or undermarketing themselves (and staying invisible).
A common frustration we hear from advisors who've worked with agencies before is that they didn't properly understand the regulations, so they'd end up writing copy that had to be pulled. Either that or they'd play it so safe that the ads didn’t actually say anything.
Compliance knowledge isn't a limitation. It's a competitive moat.
EEAT: Being Found in the Age of AI Search
Financial content falls under Google's YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) classification, which means it gets the highest level of quality scrutiny.
Do not treat a core update as proof that Google penalised a particular writing tool or rewarded author bios. Assess the page’s accuracy, usefulness and evidence, then use Search Console to investigate changes in visibility.
For financial advisors, showing relevant expertise helps readers assess who they are trusting. Google’s guidance places particular weight on trustworthy content for topics affecting financial stability, but author profiles do not guarantee rankings or AI citations.
Attribute content to its actual author, show relevant qualifications accurately and make the bio easy to find. Support advice with sources and practical expertise. Google says no special schema is required for AI Overviews or AI Mode; structured data should match the visible content and does not verify credentials.
For more on implementing these trust signals, see our EEAT Playbook.
Where to Start
If you're a financial advisor looking into digital marketing for the first time, or reassessing what isn't working with what you’re already doing, here's where to focus:
First, establish a consistent review process. Invite genuine feedback at an appropriate stage, without filtering requests only to happy clients. Google prohibits selectively soliciting positive reviews. Respond without exposing confidential client information and use the themes to understand client questions.
Second, build your personal brand presence. A professional photo, a proper bio and a short video introducing yourself. People buy from people in financial services, so make sure they can see and hear you before they make contact.
Third, start with content. Choose a sustainable publishing schedule and address questions your clients ask. Review accuracy and compliance, then measure whether the content reaches and helps the intended audience.
Fourth, choose one paid channel. If you have budget and conversion infrastructure, go with Google Ads for high-intent search. If you're starting with less, use Meta with creative diversity and a funnel-staged approach.
The financial practices that treat marketing as a trust-building system rather than a lead-buying exercise are the ones that grow. In a sceptical market, trust isn't just an advantage, it's the entire strategy.
Leadtree helps financial advisors build personal brands that convert, from video content and social proof systems through to funnel-staged paid campaigns. If you want prospects who already trust you before the first conversation, book a free 30-minute call.
