How Google Reviews Can Help (or Hurt) Financial Advisers

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Editor’s note: This is the second article in a three-part series about the best practices financial advisers should consider following to properly use client advocacy statements as marketing tools. Part one focuses on how to handle client testimonials and endorsements, and part three details best practices for video or audio testimonials and endorsements.

When you have a spare minute, conduct a Google search on your firm’s name.

Chances are, you’ll see a listing with photos, a map of your location, links to your website and a text area with a short description of your firm, its phone number and hours of operation.

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This is your firm’s Google Business Profile (GBP). Google creates it without your involvement or permission. Not surprisingly, these listings often have inaccurate information.

Even if your GBP is factually correct, you shouldn’t leave it as is. Why? Because anyone — including your competitors — can take virtual ownership of any unclaimed GBP.

Claiming your firm’s GBP prevents anyone outside your company from changing it. That’s why someone in your company needs to own it.

That person will need to have a Google account that can be tied to your business’ email domain. Then they can claim your GBP by signing up for an account at business.google.com/us/business-profile.

Once they’ve secured your profile, they can make as many changes to it as your advertising compliance department allows. If changes are made, compliance will probably need to review the modified GBP.

Once your GBP is approved, you can leave it alone. Whoever owns the profile will receive notifications of any activity related to the profile — how many phone calls, website visits or requests for directions it generates, as well as summaries of search terms that produced it as a result.

However, firms that want more of their leads to come from online sources might want to take advantage of one of GBP’s most powerful marketing features: the ability for clients to leave reviews.

They're there, whether you want them or not

Every GBP allows anyone to leave reviews — either positive or negative.

You can’t control who leaves a review. You can’t control what they say. You can’t change the wording of a review. You can’t delete a bad review. And, in most cases, industry regulations don’t allow you to publicly respond to reviews.

But what you can do is encourage your clients to leave reviews. Reviews not only differentiate your firm from the competition and build its brand credibility, but they may also improve its ranking in search results.

Google reviews have been particularly useful in generating leads for Peak Wealth Management, a Michigan-based financial planning firm, according to president and founder Nick Hopwood.

‘We are receiving a ton of leads from our website and Google Search with no paid ads,” he says. “We always ask people how they found out about us, and whenever it is an Internet lead, they mention the high number of five-star reviews we’ve received. Depending on the year, between 10% and 25% of all new incoming money is coming from this source.”

How to responsibly encourage Google reviews

The rules for Google reviews aren’t the same as those for client testimonials and endorsements. The biggest difference is that you can’t directly ask individual clients to leave Google reviews.

Why? Because these reviews bypass the usual compliance review process.

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Compliance can’t reject them or require that a disclosure be added to them.

So, you can’t actively solicit a review one-on-one from a single client. You can’t even ask them to leave positive reviews.

So, what can you do?

You can generically invite clients to leave Google reviews by providing links to your GBP in your email signature, on your website, in newsletters or in other mass communications.

For a text link in your email signature, you could use a line like:

Click here to leave a review on Google.

Or you could embed an image with a link that says something like “Please leave us a review on Google.”

Hopwood uses business cards as an effective method for encouraging reviews. “When we’re in a meeting and the client makes a statement about how happy they are with the work we are doing, I hand them one of our business cards that has an embedded QR code that takes them right to our Google reviews page. I find that with the card, they are much more likely to follow through and take the time to write a review,” he says.

It's important to understand the nuances between providing a way for clients to leave reviews and actively asking them to leave a review. If you’re not sure which is which, get the rules of the road from your compliance department.

What you can do after a client leaves a review

As with testimonials, you may be allowed to send a nominal gift (such as a $20 gift card) as a thank-you gesture to a client who left a Google review on their own.

However, if a client leaves a negative review, or you don’t like the wording of their review, there’s nothing you can do. You’re not allowed to ask them to change or delete it. But wouldn’t it be great if you could repost a client’s positive review on your website or on social media?

Technically, you can. But only if you repurpose that review as a client testimonial.

To do this, you would need to contact the client and ask if they’d be willing to have their review used in your marketing materials.

If they agree, you’ll need to follow your firm’s advertising compliance processes for collecting, reviewing, approving and publishing standard client testimonials, including any required disclosure language. (Again, read my previous article — the link is in the editor’s note — for a general overview of this process.)

Should you encourage Google reviews?

There are pros and cons.

Amassing a large collection of positive reviews on your GBP can dramatically improve your firm’s visibility in search results.

More importantly, they can go a long way toward persuading prospects who are looking for financial advisers to take a closer look at your firm and its website and contact you for more information.

However, because one single bad review could torpedo much of the goodwill generated by your firm’s online supporters, you might decide that the risks outweigh the potential rewards.

Which is why, if you’re looking for opportunities to use your clients’ good words to bolster your brand, you might want to focus on gathering and publishing testimonials instead.

Disclaimer

This article was written by and presents the views of our contributing adviser, not the Kiplinger editorial staff. You can check adviser records with the SEC or with FINRA.

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Jeff Briskin is the marketing director for a Boston-area financial planning firm and principal of Briskin Consulting, which provides strategic, digital and content marketing services to asset managers, wealth management firms, TAMPs, trust companies and fintech firms. Jeff has more than 25 years of financial marketing experience with some of America’s largest mutual fund companies, banks and wealth management firms.