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

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February 23, 2024

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.

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