Some businesses don’t have to worry about stringent rules and regulations when it comes to marketing their brand, but for financial service companies, and similar industries, bold marketing can be a challenge because they have crucial compliance policies to uphold. This is one big reason that companies in financial service or similar industries are behind other companies in terms of video marketing.

Many companies are quite timid when it comes to adding video production services and social media to their marketing repertoire. Perhaps you’ve experienced similar reservations in your own attempts to market your compliance-sensitive business?

Well, as long as you understand what rules and regulations are in place, and you ensure you’re kept up to date with them, online marketing shouldn’t be a threat to your compliance. This is a very good thing!

Especially since it’s been proven that video production and video marketing are beneficial to your engagement with customers, helping you build trust and loyalty as well as promote your products and services. To ensure you uphold your compliance standards when you create video content, it’s a good idea to work closely with a professional video production company who understands what this is all about!

Video Production Strategies for Compliance

A reputable video production company should be aware of these methods they can implement on your videos to help you maintain compliance:

1. Always include proper disclaimers before your promotional videos

One key to maintaining compliance is ensuring that your videos are not misconstrued as professional, financial or legal, advice. You should include disclaimers on all your videos stating such.

Many financial services professionals use disclaimers; they may even have an entire page on their website dedicated to their disclaimer that the content on their site is for informational purposes only. It’s important to remember that the videos you post may be in places where ads for other services or products may appear or where the comments on your videos may promote certain services or products.

Because of this, it’s a good idea to use a disclaimer that announces that you are not affiliated with any ads that may appear on the page or in the comments for third party products or services. Additionally, all video content that you produce that are promotions for financial investments have to be designated as such.

Any promotional content you create that you post on social media or elsewhere should be treated the same way in regards to compliance as traditional promotional materials that you would publish in a magazine or newspaper.

2. Don’t make endorsements

One of the benefits of video content is that it can be implemented as part of your social marketing strategy as well. Social marketing is an important way to engage with your target audience and strengthen your brand’s identity and reputation.

Video content is highly shareable and can drive engagement through comments, shares and likes. While this is typically great, it can cause an issue with compliance if you’re not careful.

The reasoning for this is because one of the inherent compliance risks of social media is the endorsement of content. According to FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority), advisors cannot endorse outside content because it could mean that they are adopting what the content is saying as their own.

By simply sharing someone else’s tweet on Twitter that expresses a financial opinion, you could be non-compliant. Not sharing, liking or commenting on other content should be easy enough, but sometimes you can accidentally seem to be endorsing another financial opinion or product via your video content.

For example, if you’ve created a video that provides viewers with some basic small business accounting tips, suggesting the use of a specific type of software even in an off-hand way could be seen as an endorsement. This is important to keep in mind when going over the content for your video.

3. Make sure that all of your videos are archived

The rules and regulations outlined by FINRA require you to retain records of any communications you make through social media sites. This means your published video content needs to be archived.

Although there’s no official regulations concerning how long you need to keep records of your video content, most financial service companies archive their content for at least three years.

4. Sit down with your compliance department

Be sure to schedule a meeting with your compliance department to discuss video marketing in general. They should be able to warn you of any potential problems that you should look out for.

Not only is this a good way to get an idea of what is and isn’t allowed, but you might want to consider meeting with your compliance department as soon as you have ideas for your videos.

You can go over your ideas in order to see if there could be any issues with compliance before you begin the script writing process of production. This could help you save a lot of time if there are serious compliance issues inherent in the idea for a video that you have.

5. Have your scripts checked before production

Send your scripts through to your compliance department to be looked over for compliance issues. If there are none and you get the go ahead, then you can go into production.

If you work closely with a professional video production company, they can schedule the production of your content so that scripts for future videos are being checked while you’re in the process of shooting videos that have already been checked for compliance. This will help with the process and ensure an efficient workflow.

Staying compliant with the rules and regulations of the financial industry is extremely important, but it shouldn’t scare you away from effective online marketing techniques, such as video content marketing. A good video production company will not only help you create high quality video content that will meet your marketing goals, but they’ll also be able to help make sure that you abide by financial compliance every step of the way.