Your Guide to Client Testimonials: How to Show Up When Prospects Search for You

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us today. We are thrilled to be here talking with you about testimonials, which is such a hot topic and so many of you have many, many questions about, which is completely understandable. So while everyone is just, joining in, we’re gonna do a couple quick introductions and housekeeping items. So, yes, today’s session will be recorded, and you will all get the recording.

If you have any questions that you want, to ask only the panelists and nobody else to see, you’re gonna wanna put that in the q and a box. Or if you wanna make sure your question is seen and doesn’t get buried, if you want to make it something that everyone can see or just add to the conversation, leave a comment, that should go in the chat, which everyone can read and interact there. And we really encourage you all to ask as many questions. The whole reason we’re doing this is for all of you, so please ask away.

So why don’t we start with some introductions? Susan, why don’t you introduce yourself first?

Well, hi, everyone. We’re so glad you’re here. I’m Susan Theater. I’m the chief marketing officer at FMG. Nice.

And Andrew, we’re so glad to have you.

Can you please I’m really happy to be here.

My name is Andrew Johnson. I’m the CEO and cofounder of Testimonial IQ. You can all probably guess what we do by that title.

Well branded.

Yes. Very, very good. I’m Samantha Russell, the chief evangelist here at FMG. If you’re not familiar with FMG by now, we are the all in one marketing solution specifically created for financial advisers to help you grow organically and stay compliant.

So let’s go ahead and get started. One other thing we wanted to let you know, you all are so lucky to be here today because hot off the press, we have this testimonial guide we put together for advisers, and you’re all gonna get the very first copy sent to you. So this will be coming to your inboxes for being here, and it is gonna be a really great in-depth overview of everything we’re talking about and even more specific. So, Susan, I know one of the things we’re hearing a lot from people are some compliance concerns from their home office or their compliance.

And what I love about this guide our team put together is that I think this is something you could even hand over to your compliance teams to help get them on the same page when it comes to testimonials. Testimonials.

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you did that great social post yesterday, and I was just looking through the comments. And I’d say just my guess, I’d say eighty percent of them, if not more, were just about like, I don’t think my compliance team lets me do this. And the SEC marketing rule, it came out, I think Andrew, was it four years ago, three years ago?

Enough for a minute.

Yeah, it’s been out for a while. We are going to tackle, first of all, this guide is an excellent education. It’ll help make you comfortable, but also your compliance teams. But we are going to spend time today talking about all of the questions. We’re going address all the questions that we’ve gotten as it relates to how you can do testimonials and reviews in a compliant way. So trust us that we will hopefully answer all your questions, but feel free to interact and share them in the chat as well.

Awesome. Carla said she uses testimonials, but it can be a pain to get approved. So this will be helpful. Awesome.

And then someone else asked if it’s compliant with the UK FCA.

I actually Oh. Andrew, that might be something.

That one?

I just dumped us on that one. Yeah.

Different different set of rules. So something we’ll be happy to research and look into. But, yeah, asterisk there is this is focused on FINRA and SEC regulated firms.

Thank you. Awesome. Okay. So we would just wanna know in the chat, we’ve we’ve been doing quite a few conversations about just the AI search that is taking over. And every time, the results are different, and it’s trending up into the right. So let us know in the chat, Have you had a lead come in or new conversation with a prospect who said they found you because Google Gemini or Perplexity or ChachiPT or Copilot recommended your firm? We would love to know.

And it’s because it is becoming more and more common. So Carla said yes from ChatGPT. And I also wanna mention, if you haven’t started asking people where they found you, that is absolutely something you wanna do. Marketing attribution can be really difficult, but just asking or having a simple form can be such an easy way to find out.

So we’re getting some no’s. Oh, wow.

Someone We’re getting a lot of yeses, though.

Somebody just had two from ChatGPT in the last two days.

Wow. Amazing.

So that person who said that, do you And you know what the others are saying?

Not no, but not yet.

Oh, we love that growth mindset. Yes.

We love it. Okay. So one of the things that I just to set the stage before we really go into all the compliance and how to ask and all the other things is really just how critical reviews and testimonials have become. And this might sound a little doomsday, but, really, I’m I’ve talked about this as a visibility crisis because there’s some firms that truly you know, when they look at how visible are they online, if so much of the search now volume is coming from these AI tools and a huge part of how they decide who to rank is reviews and social proof.

It is a really, really can be a crisis if you do not have any of that yet. Right? Because this is what search results used to look like. We all remember these days.

We had the links that were given when we asked a question. And now what do they look like? We are just given a few recommendations, whether on Google, it’s a map, or ChatGPT. It’s just a list of three firms to go check out.

So if you’re not there, you’re not there. You’re not visible. You’re either there or you’re not. And that so that is why There’s no you know, can’t scroll to see more.

Exactly. That is why this is just so incredibly important. And, actually, some people you know, I know that the argument being Google if you look at, you know, where all traffic is coming from, Google’s still predominant. But Google’s doing more and more of these AI overviews.

So AI search as a whole is predicted to overtake traditional search by twenty twenty eight. I actually think that that might be even more far fetched.

I totally agree. And I think, you know time I clicked the link.

I feel like you coined the expression zero click for social strategy, And now it’s zero click for search. Because even if you’re in Google, you’re looking at the answers. We are just getting we are, you know, an attention deficit disorder society. And if somebody will give us the answers and we don’t have to look for you know, read to try to figure it out, that’s the path we’re gonna go. So I think we’re in the zero click search environment. Era.

Yeah. I would love to know in the chat for all of you, what where do you predominantly go? Do you do a mixture of, like, chat GPT for certain things and then still Google for other things?

But even if you’re googling, are you clicking on results, like links to websites, or do you typically find yourself if you don’t get Gemini up top.

Yeah.

If you don’t get what you need in the AI overview, do you just move on and research something?

Right?

I I so we see mostly AI, some Copilot. I Google seventy five percent, but never click. Like that.

Both. Both. Yeah. Okay. So I do and I do think that the both is very common.

ChatGPT, this is from Neil Patel, a marketer in our space.

They have found that it is I think as of right now, it’s just at about one billion. So this was from September, One billion weekly active users, which is one eighth of the world’s population now uses that’s just ChatGPT. That’s not Copilot. That’s not Google, Gemini. So, again, I think the numbers are just the, you know, proof that we all are on this trajectory.

So, again, AI search is growing so fast because we no longer want links. We want answers. Same way you all want us just to give you the answer right now of how to do this. Yeah.

Like, get to it. Get to it. Right. So the reason let’s talk a little bit, though, about and, Andrew, I’d love to hear your perspective on this.

Why do these AI tools love reviews and testimonials so much?

I think it’s because their goal is to give to your point, they wanna give the person an answer they’re looking for without having to click.

So instead of summarizing, all the data points on the person’s website about their services, they’re gonna get to the heart of what that person is looking for, which is can I trust this person? Can I trust this business?

Yeah. And I think what’s really interesting about reviews and testimonials is both human beings we wanna see. Like, I don’t know about all of you. If I’m gonna go stay at a hotel, I wanna read from other people who stayed there.

If I’m gonna buy some new product, I wanna read from other people. But then the bots also like them. So historically with SEO, right, we had certain things we wanted to do to please the algorithm or please Google, and then other things we wanted to do to make human beings wanna buy. This testimonials and reviews serve both purposes.

Both these AI tools are scraping them, and then as human beings, we wanna read them as well.

Yeah. I think it comes down to you know, we always we were using I’d say a year ago, we were using the term social proof, And now I feel like we’re talking more about reputational credibility. And I think the LLMs are looking at testimonials and reviews to assign sort of a, if their best financial advisor somewhere, they’re going to prep they’re gonna give preference and they’re going to serve up those where they see actual trusted citations that talk about from a third party, your clients on your website that you’ve got five stars because you did this and this and this. So it’s helping the LLMs differentiate between those that have reputational proof and those that don’t.

That fair for Andrew?

Absolutely, yeah. Think the core point is that the importance is not going away of testimonials and reviews, it’s just going up. But the way that they’re ingested and then presented back to prospects is just evolving with the LLM search.

And we’re gonna I’m actually I’m gonna steer one question that I actually don’t even I’m not sure I know the answer and then Sam, I’ll show up. What is the difference between a testimonial and a review?

Andrew.

Yes. So, we get that a lot and they can overlap. I think we have some more slides where we’ll go into the you know, some of the compliance elements besides Venn diagram at some point.

But I think Oh, did I jump ahead? Stop. No. We can come back.

That’s okay. Let him explain it and then we’ll go back to the other one because I think a lot of people this will good be good to frame the conversation going forward.

Yeah. And so I think a lot of times you’ll hear us talk about reviews and when we do that we we tend to mean content that’s on a third party site, whether it’s Google or Yelp or your Facebook page. And then we might talk about advertisements and that would be typically content that you put on your website or in your own marketing. And we’ll get into the nuances because a review, third party review could be considered an advertisement by FINRA or the SEC depending on how you structure or interact with it. So we’ll definitely kind of cover that in more detail as we go.

Yeah. Okay. So sorry. Close your eyes for a second while I go back. Okay. So one of the things, though, that I do think is really interesting, and I just saw a question about this.

I it says, I’m gonna add an office with multiple advisers. This is from Thomas. I want to build my business, not theirs. So I don’t wanna be unfriendly.

How do I build reviews for the work I’m doing? One of the things that’s so interesting, and you can see this here, is that if people mention your name particularly in reviews for your firm over and over again, AI is not just paying attention to is it five stars or three stars or four stars? They’re actually paying attention to the words in the review itself. So if you’re, you know, Thomas Marino constantly being listed in the review your name, AI is going to recognize that and understand that.

So that is one thing. And this applies to then anything related to your business. Right? So if you wanna be found when someone’s looking for someone who can help with business succession planning and your reviews keep mentioning that you’ve helped clients with that, the AI tool is going to pair your business with that information.

So we’ll talk a little bit more about different strategies, but it is a good point that having reviews at an individual level versus a firm level are two different things.

And, Andrew, I don’t know if you wanna talk about that at all or if there’s, like, different strategies you’ve seen firms deploy to And a lot are doing both and we’ve built tools so you can kind of have both at the same time and you can work with your your website team to construct both.

And so you can have a whole section that says this is what it’s like to work with our firm And then there’s a lot of great ways and website tools through platforms like ours or FRMGs where you can say I want to craft individual advisor profile widgets and have something above that that says this is what it’s like to work with Thomas. And then the LLMs are going to pick that up and they’re going to include that in the results.

Okay. Love it. So I just wanted to mention, I thought this was really, really interesting. So how we search on LLMs is very different than how we typically used to search on Google.

Right? Yes. Some people still will say best financial adviser near me, but the information that these LLMs are keeping about us, they start to really know us. And when we go talk to them, we’re giving them more information like this.

Like, my husband and I, we live in St. Louis. We own a successful business. We wanna find an adviser who can help us, and we give all this information.

And then who gets recommended is gonna be based upon all that context plus previous conversations. But let me just show you this. So this from that scenario, ChatGPT gave us these four advisers.

Google gave us a a different set of advisers. Only one was the same as ChatGPT. So completely different recommendations. Then Perplexity gave us four more, and only one of those was the same as Google.

None were the same as ChatGPT. But when you ask all of these LLMs, why did you choose who you chose? They often said a lot of the same things. You know, they were looking for someone who had comprehensive service that had a local presence.

But I went back and looked at all of the firms that were recommended across every search.

They all had client reviews publicly or testimonials publicly listed. None of them did not have that. So this is table stakes if you want to be one of these recommended firms.

Alright. So let’s talk more about how you can actually do oh, sorry. An LLM is a language learning model. Sorry.

So another phrase for all of the different tools you can go use. You can use Copilot. You can use Perplexity. You can use Claude.

You can use ChatGPT.

Those are all LLMs. So, you know, only nine percent, ten percent, Andrew, I don’t know if this number’s a little outdated. Do you know what the percentage is now?

I think it actually hasn’t changed much, unfortunately. It’s still hovering right around ten percent, which is shocking.

Ten percent of firms across Which shows that everybody on this call could potentially have a first mover advantage.

Yes. And like I just showed, any of the of those AI tools, it didn’t matter which one. What did they all have in comp the firms all have in common that were being recommended, they had reviews. So the same people right now are really, you know, having a big leg up who do already have these reviews. Alright.

So And I’m gonna there was one other question that I just wanna address because just like with SEO, and Andrew, you can chime in and Sam too, there is no one magic ingredient to AEO.

So it’s not like suddenly you hire testimonial IQ, you start collecting customer reviews, you post them on your website, check I’m done. It’s not that simple. There’s we have another webinar that we did on AEO broadly and we also have an AEO guide that you can download, feel free to go to the our website and you can see it. It’s one of you know, ten different things.

There’s really just like SEO, there’s not like a perfect formula that we can give you the recipe and then you’re done. So if you’re not showing up, even though you have reviews, there are other aspects that we aren’t intending to go too deep into that today. But unfortunately, there is more, but it’s controllable. It’s actually, I think, easier to control than Google.

Vanessa, back to that.

Slides at the very end of just talking about a few things. Oh, good. Okay. I forgot about that.

We’ll we’ll mention those as well. But I would just love to know what is the number one thing holding you back? If everyone could put in the chat quickly, do you is it compliance concerns? Is it you’re worried about getting negative reviews?

Is it you’ve just felt overwhelmed and, like, creating a process?

If the Asking for reviews is against compliance for every adviser I talked to is the first one that came in.

Compliance. Compliance. Compliance. Compliance. Creating a process.

Compliance. Compliance. Negative reviews.

Google Business listing to work, which is interesting. What tools to use? Helping advisers to feel comfortable asking for the review or why we need it.

Oh, somebody LPL allows it, and it’s easy. Well, there you go.

Okay.

Well, actually, I’ll skip over that.

This let’s talk a little bit about the rules. And, Andrew, I’m gonna pass the baton to you because this is information coming from you. So let’s go back to this and talk a little bit about the difference between testimonial and advertisement and an endorsement because you even taught Susan and I some of this. We did not, you know, always know the distinction.

Yeah. So you’ll hear a lot of terms turn around when you’re reading through the the FINRA regulations or the SEC marketing rules. A few of the key ones will be testimonial, advertisement, and endorsement.

Testimonial endorsement very, very similar. Key difference is testimonial from someone who’s a current client. Endorsement could be a CPA partner you work with or an insurance agency you work with or someone who’s not a client.

And then there in the middle, see advertisement because testimonials may be advertisements, they may not be. And in terms of FINRA, the language they’ll use will be is that content considered a communication of the advisor? And this part here is a little bit dense, little bit technical, but I think it’s important to understand because I keep seeing compliance, compliance, compliance, compliance mentioned in the chat. And I want to make sure everyone here is armed with the right language so they can go back to compliance and say, look, you’re saying I’m not allowed to do this, but FINRA and the SEC actually say I am, and here’s what it looks like to do it the right way. And so the key is, especially when we’re talking, we’ve talked about Google business listings or other third party sites, a big key is, is the content on that site going to be considered an advertisement or a communication from the advisor?

And so a couple of terms to know are entanglement and adoption.

Adoption is do you use that content afterwards? So if you tell clients or prospects, go check out my five star rating on Yelp, you’ve just turned that into an advertisement because they’re going say you’ve adopted that content.

The other key piece is entanglement, is were you involved in the preparation of the content? So did you write the testimonial and ask the client to post that? Or did you write to review and approve it before they posted it? All those things could trigger that sort of entanglement threshold and it could turn that content into an advertisement and suddenly you’re accountable for it. So I skipped ahead here. Was going through the key the key compliance stuff.

So making sure that you’re aware of how you’re asking and all that really comes down to make sure you have an unbiased process for how you do this. And then the content that you put up on your website through one of these widgets or you display that in your own marketing, all of that by default will be an advertisement or communication from the adviser. So that’s where you really need to make sure you have a process to review and vet that content and include the required disclosures there.

So let’s go through the entanglement and the adoption a little bit, because I do think that that is something that people get confused about. So and correct me if I’m wrong at all. The entanglement, right, you cannot examples of entanglement would be that you can’t actually write the review for your client. Right? You can’t big no. Exactly.

You can’t only ask certain clients that you know just love you and are gonna say the most flowerly over the top thing and avoid asking someone who you know had a bad experience or is going to complain about something because you don’t want it to be All the things that you see other industries do and get away with to try to make sure they have a perfect five star rating, those are the things that you need to avoid.

And another one you see on there is review gating. That’s really common with a lot of platforms that aren’t built for this industry.

So sometimes you’ll get a survey that says, how was your experience? And if you rate it five star, they’ll say great, leave us a review. And if you rate it a three star, they’ll say, oh, we’ll handle that directly. That would be considered entanglement as well.

Such a good point. Our industry definitely you know, there are other platforms out there that say they will help you collect reviews, but often they are not designed for financial services, and you can quickly get into hot water. What about this? A lot of people will and I even saw a question.

Can we collect or can we have people leave us reviews on Google and then put that Google, like this? Go see all of our so they’re not even showing any reviews. They’re just directing people to go to Google. Would this be considered adoption?

So this is definitely something where there hasn’t been a firm enforcement action that would determine this. But most of the folks I’ve spoken to have said recommended best not to directly reference a third party review site unless you’re willing to be accountable for the content, even if you weren’t biasing the process. And the reason is, you might have a review on there that was left with wonderful intent. But let’s say it’s talking about the great performance results that person received while working with your firm. Well, now you’ve got performance results and something that would considered an advertisement.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t use the content on your site. So if you get that person’s permission to use that review they left in Google on your own website and marketing, work with your website team, use a tool like ours, like FMGs, and get that content on your website. Because I saw some questions earlier actually about, well, have great Google Business Reviews, I’m not getting found in AEO. And there’s two different strategies. Your Google Business Review is going to feed local search and it’s going to feed your authority ranking. But you still want that content on your website in a compliant way, because that’s what’s gonna feed the LLMs and make it easy for them to summarize that content for prospects.

That’s such a good point. One thing we actually haven’t seen enough at FMG, Susan, wouldn’t you agree? A lot of advisers are have well, a, we’d see less than ten percent have them. But even the ones that do have not come to us saying, hey.

Can we get these on my website? And yet we know with all of the different AI tools out there and the different LLMs, some of them will reference certain review sites. Some will reference others, but they all will pull from your site directly as a source of truth. So having them on your website and then adding schema markup is such a important step to take when you are setting up a process to collect reviews.

And this might be a good time to put up our poll, Aubrey.

If that’s something you’re interested in learning more about with FMG is how we can help you both with your marketing overall, but gathering these reviews and then adding them to your website, let us know. You can just say yes, please, and we can follow-up with you on more information about that. But as we’re gonna show you some other examples, but it is very simple to set up a widget. So if you’re using testimonial IQ, we partner together, and we can gather the reviews. Right, Andrew? And then just put them right into the site so they’re being fed in automatically and you don’t have to manually do anything.

Absolutely.

Okay. Wonderful. And if you haven’t do have some good reviews or testimonials and you don’t have them on your site already, that’s absolutely something that you want to do. Okay.

Let me just go back to see if like, another thing just to plan a seed.

I don’t think we touched on this is a lot of people think that the only way to do this is to do Google reviews. And with testimonial IQ and actually almost a I I think almost a a preferred method, would say, to start is and you might want both is through client surveying, which is not some public, like, go on Google and you have to have a Google account and then give us a big public, you know, recommendation.

You can also gather testimonials and or reviews through client surveying. Andrew, I think we might talk about this later, but just to plant that seed, it can be done in a very controlled process way whereby perhaps after every annual review or after every six months, you’re sending out a client survey and what they write in that client survey is what you use as a testimonial. So we’ll talk about that as another strategy.

Yeah, I think that’s such a good point. Just because you mentioned it, we kept seeing compliance, compliance, compliance in the chat. That’s such a great way to get compliance folks comfortable with kind of the reps and the process of the overview, because there is nothing in the regulations that say the moment you get client feedback, you have to post it on your site. So go out, collect the feedback, understand what people say about you and what your process would be to display it. And then every single time we’ve done that with the client, at the end of the day, they said, wow, our clients love us. How do we get this on our site tomorrow?

Yeah. So actually, just to break that down a little bit, what we’ve seen a lot of people do is they actually are using Andrew, like, example, TestimonyIQ as a survey tool first, where they’re gathering feedback and they have complete control. They have not yet made the decision that it will have to be displayed. They’re using it to collect that feedback and then ninety nine percent of the time, it’s all five star.

We love you. And then they’re like, oh my gosh, everybody loves me. And then they can decide to make that public. Once you make it public, you do have to display all of the reviews, but you can start the process and kind of assess what the reviews look like in this in this using this strategy before you turn it on.

Is that correct, Andrew?

Absolutely. Yep.

Yep.

So if you are thinking about something like that, here’s a great example. So we covered some of the dos and the don’ts when it comes to actually displaying them. This is an example of somebody using testimonial IQ. They have well, maybe, Andrew, you could walk us through it. So they first gathered this feedback. Right?

Yep. Exactly. So you start collecting feedback. And again, you can wait, you don’t have to the moment you get a testimonial in, you don’t have to display that.

But start by collecting feedback that can be, as Susan mentioned, you reach out to people after you ask a meeting. That can be sending a quarterly client survey. That can be a mix of the two. Some advisors are even starting to take these links for feedback surveys and put them in their email signature so they’re getting them on an ongoing basis.

You take all that content, you send it to your compliance team, and you make sure they have a chance to review performance results or PII or things that aren’t appropriate. And then you have a tool to display that. And what’s important is once you get to the point of displaying it, you want to make sure that you have a process so each of your clients are getting an opportunity to leave you feedback. It doesn’t mean they all get it the same day, but some sort of process where you can show regulators that all of your clients have an opportunity to leave you feedback.

They have a process to review and vet that content before you’re putting it on your site. And then you’ll hear a lot about disclosures. You’ve got to have those three clear and prominent disclosures that accompany those testimonials. So is it a current client?

Were they compensated? And are there any material conflicts of interest?

And I love the line you have at the top of this. Right? It’s just so simple. The testimonials displayed are from current clients. They were not compensated. There are no material conflicts of interest. So very, very straightforward.

It doesn’t need to be some long lengthy Oh, and, also, just a question because this I actually had the same question.

So if you’re using these and they’re coming from a client survey, but you’ve got them on your website, is there any difference to the LLMs? Do they have a preference for piping in the Google reviews versus the client testimonials from a survey? I don’t think so, right? I think it’s the same.

Well, it depends on the LLM. So Google is very protective of the data. So if you’re asking a question in Google search bar or Geminiar, Google’s going to prioritize Google data from Google reviews. Google actually doesn’t let ChatGPT read Google reviews directly, which is why it’s so to say I’m going to get reviews on Google, but I also want to find a compliant way to put those on my site. So ChatGPT can see it, Google can see it, you get the local search benefits, you get the authority ranking benefits.

So unfortunately for now you have to kind of, know, you mentioned earlier with all the different LMs, you kind of have to optimize a little bit for each of them.

So is there any downside then to doing the customer survey approach versus the Google approach? Obviously it’s a little comfortable for advisors, but should they how do they think about the pros and cons to those approaches?

I think the best scenario is that you get the content on Google, you get it on your site, you have it for use in your social posts, in your LinkedIn posts, and all the other marketing you can do with it.

But really, it’s start where your compliance team is comfortable. Build a process and you can always expand out and start encouraging people to share content on third party sites later. But it’s really, really important to kind of get that reps of getting your customers used to leaving you feedback, getting your compliance team used to incorporating that process, and then getting your marketing team comfortable incorporating that.

Yeah. It’s one of the reasons why we started this presentation showing you that you could do the same search on multiple of these different LLMs, and you’re gonna get different results because they’re pulling from different sources, but they all had reviews somewhere. So making sure that you’ve you know, eventually, if you have more than one type is really great. But for now, I think starting with where compliance, you know, is gonna approve it is gonna be the great the best thing. So we already talked about this.

We are gonna send everybody a in that testimonial guide we put together. We actually have email options that you can choose from when you’re first setting up these types of campaigns. But this does lead to a good question that somebody had asked about, you know, do you have to email everyone at once? When it comes to having a process and proving it and showing that you’re following this process, what if you just had a QR code at your desk that anyone could scan or you’re asking, you know, clients individually after a meeting? What does that look like, Andrew?

Yeah. And so we actually, when we were building our platform, had a chance to sit down with some folks at the SEC who helped write the marketing rule, and we asked them exactly that.

And what we heard is, you know, there’s a lot of ways to skin a cat and there’s a lot of ways the process can be compliant. But what we care about is that everyone’s getting an equal and unbiased opportunity to leave you feedback. And then that you had a written process and you can show you followed it. So put something in your policies and procedures.

It doesn’t have to be lengthy. It doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, I think there’s a lot of stuff in that marketing guide that your team put together that they’ll be able to take and basically say, hey, is this okay for a policy? You write it down and then just make sure you follow that and have some documentation where you can show, look, everyone’s getting an opportunity.

We’re not compensating them or implying compensation and we’re not cherry picking who we’re asking or what we’re displaying.

Yes, love it. Like I said, we want this testimonial guide to be so helpful to all of you, so we can’t wait for you to get your hands on it and hope it will solve some of those, problems. Let’s you know, we’ve been talking a lot about both, but just when it comes to actually, Google reviews and this this ties up personally with the next question. Brian just wanted to make sure he gets some clarity. If we use the reviews on our website from Google, is that considered adoption? And so do we want to avoid it?

Yes. So great question. And the key is what you’re referencing. So if you say, here’s the here’s our Google Business Profile reviews and all the reviews associated with it on your site, that’s likely going to be considered adoption you’ve adopted that third party content, which could the concern there is it could mean that everything on that Google Business Profile would be considered an advertisement. But if you want to make sure you’re doing this compliantly, what you can do is you can get those clients permission to also use that content on your own website. So that way you can do it without having to have that specific Google widget and that Google logo. And you can just build your own widget and say, this is what our clients say, what it’s like working with us.

That would not be adoption, but the content on your own site, it is by definition an advertisement communication from the advisor. That way you have a chance to vet and approve that content before it goes live.

Great question.

Andrew, we’re getting a question.

I think it’s a good one because you mentioned it pretty quickly, but are you saying that Google reviews are not being pulled by any of the LLMs because Google has sort of prevented, say, chat from pulling Google data?

Exactly. So indirectly, they can still help your help you get surfaced in ChatGPT because they serve as an authority signal for your business. But ChatGPT as of today at least is not able to pull data from Google Business Profile. But when someone does that search at the top of Google and it summarizes AI search results that they’re using Gemini, all of a sudden all that data is available.

So it really depends which search engine someone’s looking What if you’re framing them using Testimonial IQ and FMG, you’re framing those Google reviews into your website.

Exactly. That’s why we built it and that’s why we made it very easy to partner with FMG because then you can use the platform, get the content on Google, get it easily on your own website, and you kind of get to double dip in that sense. You get the benefits of local search, you get the benefits of being discovered by any of the LLMs. And then when someone takes that next step to land on your page, they have all this social proof that they can look through and feel good about taking that next step to to book a meeting or download the lead magnet.

So if you’re listening to this and you’re like, okay. So where do I start? Ideally, we would love it so that you have Google reviews and you have your own reviews through your own system.

Think and you’re putting on your website. From nothing to a hundred. But most compliance teams are not gonna be as comfortable with Google reviews as they are with a process that you can control, like using testimonial IQ first, collecting the information, putting them on your website. So we wanna start with the low hanging fruit we know we can get approved first, and that still is going to work to help you in a lot of ways. So, again, you know, there are you it’d be great to have both, but if you need to start somewhere, starting in a way that, you know, compliance is gonna get on board is a great way to tackle this.

Absolutely.

Awesome. Joe just asked, is there any way to capture verbal client feedback for testimonials? For example, we do our client surveys over the phone, and I know a lot of people are using AI notetakers in meetings now.

Would that could be and this might be a question we don’t know, but would that be considered, do you guys think, a a verbal yes if you had an AI notetaker recording the call?

I think you can. I think the key is you wanna make sure you’re not cherry picking pieces of that conversation. So if you’re talking for sixty minutes and somewhere in the middle of that someone says something great about you and then afterwards you say, oh, you said this, I’m going use this as a testimonial. That would probably be considered cherry picking.

But if you have a structured format where every single call ends with you saying, by the way, would you mind sharing what it’s like to work with us? I think that would be totally fine. You just want to make sure that you know, you might have an exam in five years and they say prove to me that you had a compliant process. So as long as you’re a notetaker, your record keeping supports going back and showing that.

And this is if this sounds overwhelming, this is why we’re partnering with Testimonial IQ because we want you to have a system and a process that allows you to collect them compliantly and that solves this problem, Andrew what Andrew’s built. We did promise you we would mention a few other things that really do impact how you get found. So we’ll talk about these, and we’ll keep adding your questions in. Again, this is from another presentation we did.

We will send you the link to this one when we send all the follow-up materials, but maybe Aubrey or Hannah in the background, if you could drop the link here. So this presentation was all about all of the different things that these LLMs are looking for when they decide who to list. And this is kind of the overview of the various strategies that we covered. So having content that’s written in a question in a format, having FAQ pages on your website, writing in a conversational style, putting your answers at the top of your content.

And these are all things, by the way, that Susan and me and our entire content team at FMG are constantly paying attention to and updating how can we make the content in our library, follow all the best practices for LLM search.

I think one of the things that’s also if you go back, maybe let people kinda read through that list.

Another thing that’s part of that is recency and consistency. So if the last time you posted a blog was a year ago, that’s going to have a detrimental effect. And being consistent with creating content or leveraging a platform like FMG and posting content on social, on your website, it all is going all of those things are factoring in. So, yes, it kinda feels overwhelming because it feels like you’ve gotta be working all the time. But you should talk to FMG because we do have some solutions to take some of that off your plate. Yeah.

This was a crazy Oh, the recency.

There it is.

Yeah. Where they actually just change the date on content, and it would be surfaced more often. Obviously, all of these little black hat tactics are not gonna work.

Truly having regularly added information is very, very important, and that is one of the things we can absolutely help you with at FMG.

The other thing we can help you with is formatting the content in a way that we know AI likes to read on your website. So we have these FAQ widgets that you can add to any page of your website, and they already have something called schema markup in the back end, which is basically just a way of saying they’re speaking the AI tools language. It’s telling the AI exactly what it wants to know to help easily find you. And we’ve added this feature so you can add these to any page of your website, and it’s a great way to also help yourself be found and recommended by these AI tools.

Okay. So I think that was the the three things, again, when we’re thinking about AI, this new AEO world in general, we really spent a lot of time today, obviously, talking about reviews and testimonial because as you saw, literally ninety percent of advisers do not have them. And so to Susan’s point, you have a huge first mover advantage here. A lot of people are publishing content, creating things that not a lot of people are getting reviews or testimonials, and not a lot of people are formatting their comment content for AI. So those are the two things where I think you really could have a great first mover advantage if you want to be one of those recommended firms. But, Susan or Andrew, is there anything you wanna say about this, or should we look is there other questions people we’ve had that we wanna answer?

Think if I could leave everybody with just like, oh, you go first, Andrew.

I I was just gonna say that, you know, I I feel like we’ve talked about a lot of, somewhat deep and complex topics in in terms of or overwhelming. Right? You’ve gotta do SEO, not only AEO, but apparently, you have to optimize for four different AEO engines and they pick different things. And then we talked about some of the nitty gritty terminology in the regulations. But what I want to highlight is the reason I think we’re so excited about partnering with an FMG and Testimonial IQ is because we take off most of the heavy lifting for you there. So we wanted to make sure you had the terminology so you could talk with your marketing compliance teams to get this going. But once this is implemented, it’s something that can almost be run on autopilot and you’ll get a lot of the and our software working together will kind of handle the hard part for you.

Yeah, I was going to kind of boil it down to next steps because I’m just a very, okay, what do I do next?

So I think we probably have nods from most people in the audience that this conceptually seems like something they’d like to move in the direction of doing, but there’s probably a little bit of anxiety. I think one thing that I would love to plant the seed and Andrew, you can validate this, but from the advisors who have started this and they’ve sent out these client surveys and opened the door for feedback, I think ninety nine point nine of them have gotten amazing feedback. That’s to debunk that first concern that maybe is sort of bubbling in the back of maybe some of your minds.

I think you will be wowed by how much your customers love you, first of all.

And secondly, yes, compliance has to be on board with this. So I think leveraging our guide and talking to compliance about the way that they can get comfortable is the next step. If you’d like to kind of consider doing this, that’s the next thing to do is every compliance department is different. So we’re talking to a big audience.

There’s no way for us to generalize the approach that will be right for your compliance team. So just talk to them and say that you’d like to do this. What we found to be maybe the lowest hanging fruit of the approach that most compliance teams would be comfortable with is coming up with a process whereby after a certain type of event, like a year end review or six months after you onboard a new client, something where it’s very specific where you’re sending out a client survey and it’s very easy to write that down in a process. And you’re taking those client survey results, and you’re putting them on your website.

That’s probably the approach that has the the least friction with compliance teams. We are happy to work with you. And then once you have those reviews and you’re comfortable with them, then you can just you know, if you were on an FMG website, you can literally just tell us, I’d like to add them to the website, and we do that for you. So I don’t know if that helps everybody, but it kinda breaks it down into something that’s a little bit more manageable.

I a hundred percent think so.

And I we would love to know in the chat, was this helpful to you?

Please tell us. Your feedback is really important as we decide what topics to tackle next. And, you know, if you think there’s a a follow-up that would be great to even dive into more. And while you’re all giving us some feedback, a question that came in is, are we allowed to respond to Google reviews? Would that be entanglement or adoption, or is it a best practice to say something?

So I I know and, Samantha, I think I’ve heard you talk about this. Responding to reviews is the best practice from an SEO perspective.

I have heard mixed signals about whether or not it would be considered adoption from a compliance perspective.

We know a lot of firms we work with that are doing it and haven’t had issues.

But again, you know, that is something that would be up to your compliance department. I will say the ones that are responding to them tend to respond with sort of a structured, I wouldn’t say canned, but pre approved response template they’re using.

Folks are saying LPL has three specific answers you can use to respond with.

There you go. Yep. Yeah. And I see I see a related question about, you know, what do we do if we can’t claim our Google Business Profile?

I think Susan kind of answered that earlier, right? There’s a lot of ways to start this. It doesn’t have to be going from zero to one hundred. Start collecting client feedback once you’re comfortable and your compliance team’s comfortable, get it on your site.

You’re still gonna be ahead of, you know, ninety percent of the advisers out there.

Yeah.

Great. Great tip. And I think one of the, you know, other things when you’re thinking about reviews and somebody you know, if you’re men if you’re worried about getting any bad reviews is think of this. If you go and you read reviews and you see by if, you know, far, almost everyone has great things to say say, and then maybe one or two people out of fifty or a hundred, you know, take issue with one or two things.

That to you just proves that this is a real person and not a bunch of bots leaving a review. So I don’t know about you all, but for me, if I am reading something and, you know, most people have glowing things to say and then you see one person, I’m kinda like, yeah, maybe that wasn’t a good fit or they’re sort of a curmudgeon, not like, oh, that’s it. Never mind. I’m changing my mind.

So, actually, I think the exception proves the rule in that in that scenario.

Oh, and we even got feedback from Ryan who says you actually want a couple three and four reviews because otherwise it’s really not believable. Yes. Exactly. Exactly.

Are we allowed to refrain from asking for a review for clients who’ve already left one? And actually, maybe this will be our last question in the interest of time because somebody had asked me earlier in preparation for this about, do you ask clients for a review every year? Do they leave you once and then it’s enough? How do you approach that, Andrew?

I’m gonna go back to have a process and write it down and follow it. I think both can be okay, and it’s what your firm’s comfortable with. You just wanna make sure that you can never be accused of, oh, well, you asked someone twice and someone else once. So just be consistent.

And I would say it’s great to ask once a year just because if you stop asking after you get a review from all your clients and then all of your reviews or testimonials are seven years old, that’s also not gonna look great either.

And so we can’t wait for you to get your hands on the testimonial guide. I see someone asking, do you have a prototype client review form or ways for us to ask? All of that’s gonna be in the guide. So once you get it, we’d love to hear your feedback on it. We have our email address right there. You can reach out. Andrew, if somebody wants to get started with you, what’s the best way for them to, reach out?

You can send me a note at andrew at testimonial IQ dot com or just visit our site testimonialiq dot com.

Amazing.

And if you want, you can also reach out to marketingfmgsuite dot com and we can connect you to Andrew as well.

Well, thank you both so much for joining us. And thanks everybody for all of the great questions. Your questions just helped make things clear for everyone on the call. So we appreciate your, engagement today, and we hope we will see you again for another one. And if we don’t talk to you sooner, have a very happy and healthy Thanksgiving. Thanks, everybody.

Thanks, everybody.