An advisory firm's website is an important piece of its marketing plan, but it isn't the only piece. For one thing, potential clients need to be able to find their way to the website to begin with (e.g., through a blog, social media campaign, or SEO strategy). Then, once they're there, the website needs to be compelling enough to get the prospective client to click around, and it needs to build up enough trust so they'll to decide to reach out – and there needs to be an actual way for the prospect to reach out, whether that's by booking a meeting, filling out a contact form, or signing up for an email list. The website is just one segment of the marketing funnel, one that hopefully gets prospective clients from the "curious" stage to the "ready to book a meeting" stage.
There are tech solutions for advisors up and down this marketing funnel. Tools like Yext work to enhance online visibility for advisors, driving prospective clients to the advisor's website by getting them to show up in more search results. Solutions like Finsites, Paladin Advantage, and Advisor Websites can provide the website itself, while content solutions like Clearnomics (for charts and visualizations), Catalyst Writing and AdvisorStream (for written content) and Pageport and VidVisor (for embedded videos) can engage clients on the site itself. Calendar tools like Calendly, OnceHub, and Acuity Scheduling can help with meeting booking, and then tools like Mailchimp and Snappy Kraken can help advisors manage email lists and drip marketing campaigns.
But one provider that's grown to encompass nearly the entire website-based marketing funnel is FMG. Starting as a provider of compliance-friendly website templates for broker-dealer firms, FMG has gradually expanded its 'suite' over time, mainly via acquiring other providers, to include SEO and content tools, email and social media marketing automation, client event promotion and management, and client texting (following FMG's acquisition of MyRepChat). So while websites may still be at the center of what FMG provides, its strategy over time has been to fill in all the other gaps around website-based marketing to give advisors an end-to-end solution.
And this month FMG announced its latest acquisition, the client testimonial platform Testimonial iQ, which adds yet another piece of website-related marketing technology to its collection. The tool is being rebranded as FMG Testimonials, and will continue to be offered as a standalone product along with being bundled into FMG's broader suite of marketing tools.
Testimonial iQ launched in 2023, a year after the SEC's updated Marketing Rule allowing (with numerous caveats) advisors to solicit and promote reviews and testimonials from their clients went into effect. The idea was to create a single interface where advisors could send clients to write a review, which when submitted by the client would post to the advisor's Google Reviews and would also be made available for the advisor to display on their own website.
But in spite of the potential for testimonials to boost advisors' online presence and drive traffic to their websites – and despite the fact that leveraging online reviews and testimonials has become a standard marketing practice in other industries – testimonials haven't gained all that much traction among advisors in the years since the Marketing Rule took effect. In the most recent Kitces Research on Advisor Marketing (which was conducted in 2024, four years after the new rule was announced and two years after it went into effect), only 7% of advisors were actively using testimonials in their marketing materials – and while many advisors indicated that they planned to start using testimonials in the near future, it isn't at all apparent that testimonial use has picked up significant steam since then. This is likely at least in part because of the need to create documented processes to comply with the Marketing Rule, including creating a standardized (and documented) way to ask clients for testimonials and providing disclosures when required, but it ultimately spells bad news for providers like Testimonial iQ (and related tools like Amplify Reviews), since when the vast majority of advisors are too intimidated by the existing regulations to dabble in testimonials to begin with, there's a very narrow market for a standalone tool to help garner and promote those reviews.
At the same time, though, a tool like Testimonial iQ could make more sense as a part of FMG's broader suite of digital marketing solutions. Advisors who are already using FMG for their website, social media, SEO, and email marketing might find it easier to incorporate testimonials when they're integrated together with the platform they're already using than they would have as standalone software. And for FMG, which had fresh capital after its own acquisition by private equity firm GTCR last fall, client testimonials represented one of the few sections of the digital marketing funnel that it didn't offer on its platform, making Testimonial iQ a natural target for what is effectively the advisor digital marketing version of a PE rollup firm.
The big question going forward is still whether testimonial marketing will see any meaningful increase in adoption as advisory firms get used to the rules and put the needed processes into place. It's possible that Testimonial iQ was just a little ahead of its time, and launched when testimonial marketing was too new and unfamiliar of a proposition for many firms to handle – which would make it potentially a great acquisition for FMG if the use of testimonials ramps up as advisors get more comfortable with the regulations and put the needed compliance processes into place. But on the other hand, if testimonial adoption continues to stagnate, FMG's acquisition won't be as valuable – but it still has all of its other digital marketing tools to fall back on. Which goes to show that when one company owns the entire digital marketing funnel, it's not that big of a deal if advisors use some parts of the funnel less than others. But when one provider builds around just a single area of the funnel, then it's risking a lot on advisors showing up in that area – and if those advisors don't show up, then there's only so long that it's possible to remain viable as a standalone company.
This article first appeared on the Nerd’s Eye View at Kitces.com at https://kitc.es/advisortech-march2026, and has been reprinted here with permission.
Ben Henry-Moreland
Ben Henry-Moreland is a Senior Financial Planning Nerd at Kitces.com, where he specializes in writing and speaking on financial planning topics including tax, practice management, and technology. He also co-authors the monthly Kitces #AdvisorTech column. Drawing from his experience as a financial planner and a solo advisory firm owner, Ben is passionate about fulfilling the site’s mission of making financial advicers better and more successful.
Michael Kitces
Michael Kitces is Head of Planning Strategy at Focus Partners Wealth, which provides an evidence-based approach to private wealth management for near- and current retirees, and Focus Partners Advisor Solutions, a turnkey wealth management services provider supporting thousands of independent financial advisors through the scaling phase of growth.
In addition, he is a co-founder of the XY Planning Network, AdvicePay, fpPathfinder, and New Planner Recruiting, the former Practitioner Editor of the Journal of Financial Planning, the host of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, and the publisher of the popular financial planning industry blog Nerd’s Eye View through his website Kitces.com, dedicated to advancing knowledge in financial planning. In 2010, Michael was recognized with one of the FPA’s “Heart of Financial Planning” awards for his dedication and work in advancing the profession.
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