Most financial practices in Australia rely on word-of-mouth for new clients, but this is typically a passive “sit back and hope the leads come in” approach that they have little control over. Leveraging digital marketing is more about actively growing the word-of-mouth referral channels than generating direct leads. The currency is trust and visibility.
This is a plain-English look at how that works for financial planners, accountants, mortgage brokers and lending businesses in Australia.
Typically, digital marketers focus on numbers and funnels – how many ad impressions leading to how many website visits leading to how many leads. A simple cause and effect measurement. While this is appropriate for ecommerce businesses, for service businesses it falls down and often leads to truncated marketing effort – “we spent money on marketing and didn’t get any leads”.
But client buying behaviour is messy. Choosing a financial service company is likely to involve a fragmented period of research – talking to friends and family; researching online; discussion with your partner, etc. The final buying decision may be delayed for some time by life events and indecision.
A key factor in their decision is trust. “Can I trust the advice I’m going to get?”
The key factors for the financial service company are:
- Are we in the conversation? i.e. Visibility
- Are we perceived as trusted?
So what we’re looking at with digital marketing is nurturing referral channels – clients, intermediaries, specific target audiences. That means leveraging your expertise and experience by consistently putting content of value in front of your referral channels. Consistency means you retain visibility over time and are top of mind when people come to buying decisions. Valuable content builds trust.
Visibility comes first, findability comes second
No matter how good you are at your job, that skill has limited value while the people who need it don’t know you exist. Put two equally capable practices side by side and the more visible one grows faster. Telling people you are good does not shift that, because every practice says it. You have to demonstrate it: put your knowledge in front of people, and let your clients speak for you through reviews.
Findability sits downstream. It is what search engine optimisation deals with, and it assumes somebody is already looking for you – which means knowing your name first. Even at the top of the page, organic or paid, you are in a line-up with every competitor on the same screen, and the name the reader recognises usually wins it.
Broking shows it plainly. Mortgage brokers facilitated 81.6% of all new residential home loans in the June 2026 quarter, up from 53.9% in June 2018, on data collated by Cotality for the MFAA. When that many borrowers already use a broker, being a broker is not the point of difference. Being the broker they already know is.
Your website and Google Business Profile are where referrals check you out
A referral does not remove the checking step, it shortens it. Somebody hears your name over dinner and looks you up before they ring.
Make it clear what you do and who you do it for
Too many financial services websites look and sound like each other – no personality, no sense of who is behind the practice, no clear statement of what the business does and who for. In our experience the most-visited pages are the home, team, about and contact pages. People come to find out who you are, which is why your story has to live on the team and about pages rather than being treated as filler.
There is a quick way to check how you fare. Scroll your home page, and only your home page, top to bottom, and ask whether a stranger could say precisely what you provide and who you provide it to by the time they reach the footer. Then do it again reading only the headings, in sequence. If the headings alone do not explain the service, rewrite the headings rather than adding another paragraph underneath them.
That second pass is the one that matters, because most visitors do not read a page the way you wrote it. They skim the headings, look at the images, and many never touch the body text at all. A page that only makes sense to someone who reads every word loses people quietly – they leave, and never tell you why.
Give the site personality and a real story
When every site in a competitive market says the same words – trusted advice, tailored solutions, your goals, our expertise – none of them say anything, and the reader falls back on price or proximity. The common advice is that clients only want to hear what you can do for them. We would push back on that. People hand over their mortgage, their tax position or their retirement savings to someone they trust, and trust starts with knowing who that someone is. Your story can come through while your copy stays entirely compliant.
Review the pages your marketing sends people to
One principle gets missed in website reviews: judge the site against how you intend to get people to it. Not everyone arrives at the home page. Someone coming from an ad, a social post or an email should land on a page built for that moment – one that picks up where the ad or the post left off, repeats the thing that made them click, and makes the next step obvious.
It matters because every dollar you spend on outreach ends on one of these pages, and what people see when they arrive decides whether they become clients.
Don’t overlook your Google Business Profile
Your Google Business Profile does more of this work than most practices expect. Our analytics indicate the final phone call to book an appointment may come from the Google Business Profile lookup rather than the website. It is also where your reviews sit, so ask for them: when a client tells you they are happy, that is the moment to ask them to say so publicly. A steady flow of genuine reviews says more about your practice than anything you can write about yourself. Claim the profile, complete it, keep it current.
Email: staying top of mind between transactions
Email is how you stay visible to the people already inclined to recommend you – your clients, and the intermediaries who send work your way. Between the tax return, the annual review and the refinance, months pass where they hear nothing from you, and the relationship cools to the temperature of a transaction.
The job is not to sell. It is to give people something they can bring up in their own conversations. When your client is at a barbecue and someone mentions they are wondering about fixing their rate, the useful thing you sent last week is what puts your name in their mouth.
One short, genuinely helpful email a month is the aim. A plain explanation of what a rate change actually means for someone with a mortgage. A question your clients keep asking, answered properly. A situation you see all the time, and what you would do about it. One useful email a month, every month, keeps you visible; a burst of effort followed by months of silence does not.
Email also has the clearest rulebook of any channel. Under the Spam Act you need consent before sending marketing messages, and the burden of proving you have it sits with you – you cannot email someone to ask for consent, because that message is itself marketing. Every message must identify your business, keep its contact details valid for at least 30 days, and carry a free unsubscribe option honoured within five working days. Buy a list and the consent for every address on it is still your responsibility, which makes a purchased list a liability rather than a shortcut. Our email marketing service exists to make that rhythm somebody’s actual job.
Outreach and being found both come back to what you publish
Outreach reaches people before they start looking
Paid social, paid video and the Google Display network put something useful in front of a defined audience that has no reason to search for you yet. Often that is a better use of a marketing dollar than bidding for the top of a search page, because you are choosing who sees you rather than waiting for them to ask.
Being found shapes everything you create
Being found is not a separate channel. It is a consideration in everything you produce, and it now covers two things: ranking in Google, and being the practice that gets named when someone asks an AI tool. AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT and the rest are increasingly where the first question gets asked, and they answer from content that explains things clearly and comes from a source they can attribute. The method is the same for both: understand what people search for and ask these tools, then write for the human audience you actually want.
What you create matters more than where you put it. Useful information given away freely lets someone experience your thinking before they pay for it. A feed of offers, awards and “we are pleased to announce” posts builds nothing, it just asks. Explain how a process actually works. Say what you would do in a common situation, and why. The case for it sits in your own meetings: in the MFAA’s August 2026 Market Sentiment Survey of 588 brokers, 55.3% said their clients were feeling negative about their finances, against 24.2% six months earlier. People in that frame of mind are not looking to be sold to. They are looking to understand their options.
For organic search that means a service page for each thing you want more of, because a page about everything ranks for nothing, plus articles answering the questions clients ask in meetings, in the plain language you use in the room. If you would like a hand working out which terms are realistically winnable, that is what our SEO services are built around, and our guide to digital marketing for small business covers the fundamentals underneath it.
Paid search: useful, but you’re still in a line-up
Paid search responds to people already looking, and puts you in the same line-up as everyone else on the page. Financial services is among the most contested categories in the auction, so clicks are priced accordingly and the landing page decides whether the spend is worth repeating. That page is a compliance surface as well: Google’s policy requires the physical address of the business, all associated fees, and links to any third-party accreditation you claim, clearly visible rather than hidden behind roll-over text or another tab.
Know the advertising rules before you start
Google requires advertisers promoting financial services to complete a financial services verification for each location they target, enforced in Australia since 30 August 2022, with ASIC, the Australian Financial Security Authority and the Australian Business Register named as the relevant regulators and registries. Verification asks for the services you offer, the licences you hold and your registration number, it may need renewing, and it applies to advertisers generally, not search campaigns alone. Treat it as a lead-time item, and weighing that up is the substance of our Google Ads management.
Meta has its own rules. Its advertising standards for financial and insurance products require ads promoting credit cards, loans or insurance to be targeted to people aged 18 or older, and to avoid asking for personal or financial information directly in the ad.
Meta also requires financial services advertisers to be verified. It covers ads for insurance products, mortgages, loans, investment products, credit cards and credit applications, and asks you to verify your beneficiary and payer information, including your Australian Financial Services Licence number unless otherwise exempt, before running ads to Australian audiences. Meta has highlighted exceptions for ads about financial education, training and skill building, such as how to apply for loans or manage them – one more argument for the educational content this article keeps coming back to. Exceptions can change, so confirm the current requirements with Meta before you plan a campaign around them.
ASIC reissued Regulatory Guide 234, Advertising financial products and services (including credit), on 9 June 2026, and it applies to publishers of the advertising as well as the promoters of the financial product or service. ASIC separately publishes guidance on discussing financial products and services online. We are not going to interpret either for you: read them alongside your compliance adviser.
What to do first: record the conversation
We sit down with you, press record, and interview you about your practice. It is how we start with every practice we work with. You talk through what you provide, who you provide it to, and why a client should choose you over the practice down the road, and everything else is built from that recording.
It works because talking to a person gets you past marketing copy and into actually explaining something, and what you say out loud is almost always richer than what is on your website. It is hard to do alone, because it needs someone outside the business asking the questions that make you explain what you assume everybody knows. That interviewing is the part we bring.
The recording then becomes source material. The way you described your process in the room is the way it should read on the website, the situation you explained off the top of your head is next month’s email, and the phrases you use without thinking become the language of everything you publish.
Then compare what you said with what your website says. Where the two do not match, the website is wrong, and it needs fixing until it reflects the quality of service you believe you provide. A blunt way to grade it: is the site adding to your business, detracting from it, or neutral? It is worth being honest about, because everything else in your marketing spends money sending people to that website, so it has to be right first. While you are there, claim and complete your Google Business Profile, and if you intend to run Google Ads, start the verification early.
On budget, we will be straight with you: there is no reliable Australian benchmark for what a practice should spend, and the percentages quoted around the internet are mostly overseas rules of thumb wearing local clothes. A more honest starting point is what one new client is worth to you over the life of that relationship.
Where to start: one thing running properly
You do not need all of this at once. You need the right thing running properly, and the next one ready when it is. If you would like a hand working out which that is, our digital marketing strategy work is exactly that conversation, and it usually starts with the recorded interview above. Web Intelligenz is a Melbourne digital marketing and web design agency, and we work with financial planners, accountants, brokers and lending businesses across Australia. If that sounds useful, get in touch and we will take a look at where you stand.
