Your Marketing Isn't Just Marketing. It's Consumer Duty Evidence.

Ask most advisers what Consumer Duty means for their business and you'll probably get the same answer: file notes, vulnerability assessments, fair value reviews, board packs. All correct and definitely all necessary, but all treated as a separate job from marketing. That's a mistake. Because if you're doing your marketing properly, you're already producing a lot of what the FCA wants to see as evidence. You just haven't been filing it under the right heading.

Two jobs, one output

Your compliance function spends hours building evidence that clients understand your service, that your pricing is fair and that support is genuinely accessible. Meanwhile, your marketing function is publishing blog posts, emails, videos and social content every week that does exactly this, in public, in the client's own words and language, dated and time-stamped. That's the disconnect.

You should be connecting the two. Compliance is treated as the fire door you check once a quarter. Marketing is treated as growth (when you have the time). Nobody in most adviser firms is asking whether this month's newsletter would hold up in a Consumer Duty file review. Done well, it should. And with a small shift in how you plan and store content, it can. And here's the payoff: when your content works twice as hard, you're not duplicating effort. That frees up time.

Price and value: be bold, say the quiet part out loud

The Price and Value outcome asks a blunt question: are clients getting fair value for what they pay? Not "is your fee competitive" in the abstract, but can you show a client understood what they were paying and what they got for it.

Marketing that spells out your fee structure, explains what's included at each service tier, and is honest about who a tier is and isn't right for, is doing exactly that work. Compare two adviser websites. One says "bespoke wealth management tailored to you" and stops there. The other lays out, in plain terms, what a client on the entry tier gets versus a client on the full ongoing-advice tier, what each costs, and why the difference exists. The second firm isn't just marketing better. It's building a public, dated record of exactly the kind of transparency the FCA is asking for.

If your fee page, your onboarding emails or your "what happens at your first meeting" video already does this, screenshot it and date it. That's evidence. If it doesn't, that's a gap your marketing should be closing.

Consumer understanding: your content is the test

This is the outcome marketing maps to most directly, because Consumer Understanding is essentially asking: did the client actually get it? Not "did we technically disclose it," but did the words land.

Every piece of client-facing content you produce is a live test of this. A guide that explains drawdown without three paragraphs of jargon. A short video that walks through what "diversification" actually means for a client's portfolio, in their language, not yours. An email sequence for new clients that checks understanding as it goes, rather than dumping a 40-page suitability report and hoping for the best.

Take a firm that replaced a dense "guide to pensions" PDF with a five-minute video and a one-page plain-English summary, then followed up with a short quiz-style email asking clients what stood out to them. That's not just better content. It's a documented attempt to test and confirm understanding, which is precisely what an FCA reviewer wants to see rather than take on faith.

If you're already writing in plain English, addressing the reader directly, cutting jargon, and checking understanding through comments, replies or follow-up calls, you're generating Consumer Duty evidence every time you hit publish.

Don't ignore the other two outcomes

Products and Services, and Consumer Support, get less airtime here, but marketing touches them too. Accurately describing who a service is designed for, rather than implying it suits everyone, speaks to the Products and Services outcome. FAQ content, nurture sequences that check in after a big life event, and clear guidance on how to get in touch and how quickly you'll respond, all feed the Consumer Support outcome. Worth keeping on your radar, even if they're not where your content effort is concentrated.

Make it a habit, not a one-off

You'll be pleased to know that none of this requires a new content strategy. It just needs saving in the right place.

When you publish something client-facing, ask one extra question: does this double as Consumer Duty evidence, and if so, where does it live for compliance to find later? A shared folder that mirrors your content calendar, tagged by outcome, is enough. A quarterly ten-minute review where your marketing team and compliance team actually look at the same folder together is enough. You don't need new software or a new process bolted on top of what you're already doing. You need the two functions in your business talking to each other, which for most firms they currently aren't.

A different way to see your content

The next time you sit down to write a client email, record a video, or brief a fee explainer, it's worth asking who else in your business should see it besides your prospect list. Compliance almost certainly should.

Good marketing isn't just about winning new clients. Done properly, it's a live, dated, in-the-client's-own-language record of the exact things Consumer Duty asks you to prove. Most firms are already sitting on this evidence but very few are treating it as evidence at all.