Financial advisor Facebook ads and Facebook advertising for financial advisors who film their own videos

Yes, for advisors who use the ad to introduce themselves rather than to sell a product. Planning is something people put off until a trigger arrives: a retirement date, a buyout, an inheritance, a spouse's death. Facebook is where you can reach a 61 year old engineer or a dentist selling her practice on a weeknight, months before either one types "financial advisor near me". Meta's lead forms let them raise a hand without leaving the app.

The weak spot is the lead itself. An image ad that promises a free retirement checklist collects names of people who wanted a checklist. A video in which you explain one planning question, say who you help and describe the first meeting collects fewer names, and the people behind them have already decided they would like to talk to you. For a practice where one new household can be worth years of fees, that trade is worth making.

It also suits the targeting you are left with. Meta's financial special ad category takes away age, gender, ZIP code and lookalike targeting, so the video has to find its own audience. A hook that names the client ("If you own a business and plan to sell it in the next three years") does the targeting the ad settings no longer can.

Five formats cover almost every advisor campaign. All five can be filmed on a phone, and the generator writes each of them from the same description of your practice.

Start with advisor to camera. It is the cheapest to make, the easiest to approve and the one that does the most to make the call feel like a continuation instead of a cold call.

Plan on it. Meta's Business Help Centre says that starting from 21 January 2025 the Financial products and services category "is required for financial products and services campaigns for advertisers based in the United States or showing ads to audiences in the United States" and that "Ads may be rejected if an appropriate category is not chosen." Meta's own Marketing API page gives the date as January 14, 2025 for the same rule, which is one of several places where Meta's documents disagree with each other.

Neither page lists investment advice by name. Meta's Financial and Insurance Products and Services policy does, though: it names "Investment products and opportunities" among the financial products whose ads may need authorization, and for ads targeting the United States it does not allow ads that "Promote investment products or opportunities that suggest user interaction with the advertiser via on-platform or off-platform direct messaging services." The safe reading for an advisor is to choose the category, and to end the video on a lead form or booking page, never on "send me a message".

What the category takes away matters more than the label. On the help page, age, gender, postal code, exclusion targeting, lookalike audiences and saved audiences are "limited or unavailable", some interests disappear, and "Audiences based on city or pin drop locations will include an expanded radius." Meta's Marketing API documentation adds the detail: ages fixed at 18 to 65+, and a location radius of at least 15 miles. The life insurance Facebook ads page covers the same category from an insurance agent's side.

If you are an SEC-registered investment adviser, a paid Facebook video is an advertisement under the rule. We read 17 CFR 275.206(4)-1 at its source, and its definition covers "Any direct or indirect communication an investment adviser makes to more than one person" that offers advisory services. Extemporaneous live oral communications are excluded. A scripted video that runs to thousands of people is not.

The SEC enforces this. In September 2023 it announced settled charges against nine advisers who had advertised hypothetical performance on their websites without the required policies and procedures, with $850,000 in combined penalties (press release 2023-173).

Two groups follow different rules. State-registered advisers answer to their state securities regulator, whose advertising rules vary. Registered representatives of a broker-dealer follow FINRA Rule 2210, which requires a registered principal to approve a retail communication "prior to the earlier of its use or filing", bars communications that "predict or project performance", and requires testimonial disclosures including that a testimonial "may not be representative" of other customers' experience. Whichever regime you are under, the script goes to your reviewer before the camera comes out.

Yes, since the Marketing Rule took effect for SEC-registered advisers in November 2022, with conditions. The rule defines a testimonial as a statement by a current client "About the client or investor's experience with the investment adviser or its supervised persons", and an endorsement as the same kind of statement from someone who is not a client. Both need clear and prominent disclosure that the person is or is not a client, whether they were paid, and any material conflict. Paying a client more than $1,000 in 12 months brings two more conditions: a written agreement, and a check that the person is not ineligible because of certain disciplinary history.

In a video, clear and prominent means on screen at the same time as the person speaking, large enough to read on a phone. A card at the end that nobody reaches does not do it.

The generator never writes a client's lines for them. For a client story it plans the questions you ask, the order you ask them in and where the disclosure sits, and the client answers in their own words. That keeps the testimonial a testimonial. If you want help getting a client comfortable on camera, the video testimonials page covers how to run the interview.

These are hooks, not finished ads. Each one names the client in the first line, because with the special ad category the words do the targeting.

The left-out column matters as much as the hook. Each item there is either a projection, a promise or a claim that would need a disclosure longer than the ad.

Everything that would otherwise be decided by whoever is holding the phone. This is what an advisor video brief should cover, including the rows you add yourself.

Keep the approved script with the final video. Advisers have to keep copies of their advertisements, and the script is the easiest way to show what was said and why. For a broader look at writing ads to a time code, see the video ad script page.

Fifteen to thirty seconds for an advisor to camera or a planning question hook. That is enough for one client, one question and one ask. A client story or a workshop invite can run 45 to 60 seconds when the person on camera is good, and older audiences often watch longer than younger ones.

Shoot vertical. A 9:16 video fills the screen in Reels and Stories, and a 4:5 crop from the same footage fits the Facebook feed. Frame yourself with room above your head so the crop does not cut you off, and keep any disclosure text out of the bottom fifth of the frame, where Meta's interface sits on top of it. Burn captions in: a large share of feed video plays muted.

Film three or four at once. The same jacket, the same desk, a different hook and a different client each time. That gives you a test set in an afternoon, all of it in one approval batch.

Two costs, and they are separate. The media is what you pay Meta, and you set that budget yourself. The creative and management are what you pay an agency, a lead program or a marketing service, and that range runs from about a hundred dollars a month for scheduled social posts to several thousand a month for managed campaigns. We put the published prices of advisor marketing companies on one basis in financial advisor marketing agency pricing.

The script is the part most advisors can bring in house. UGCMarketplace is $49 a month for unlimited briefs and scripts, and the first one needs no account. You still need the media budget, a phone, half an hour of filming and your reviewer's sign-off.