One of the UK's largest financial advice firms.

Fairstone is one of the largest independently-owned financial planning firms in the UK, with hundreds of advisers across the country offering pensions, investments, mortgages, and protection advice. The firm has scaled significantly through acquisition, with advice partners brought into a centrally-supported platform.

Our brief sat at the intersection of brand, demand, and lead generation - paid media that would feed the adviser network with genuinely qualified financial advice enquiries, while respecting the regulatory and compliance constraints that apply to every word of FCA- regulated marketing.

A volume problem disguised as a quality problem.

The starting paid media programme was generating leads, but the volume was inconsistent and the quality was variable enough that the adviser network's confidence in paid as a channel was wavering. The audit picked up the usual suspects:

• Lead quality not feeding back to platforms. Closed-loop attribution from CRM to ad platform wasn't in place. Google and Meta were optimising on form fills, not qualified leads.
• Account architecture mixing intent stages. Brand, generic, and competitor traffic running through the same campaigns - making it impossible to optimise bids by real intent.
• Compliance frictions slowing creative. Every ad was going through a long approval cycle, killing the creative testing cadence the channel needed.
• LinkedIn underused. A high-intent channel for considered financial decisions, not really being used at all.

Tighten the loop. Then scale carefully.

The work fell into three connected programmes:

• Closed-loop attribution. CRM lead-quality scoring piped back to Google and Meta as offline conversions. Within six weeks the platforms were optimising on real qualified leads, not raw submissions.
• Account architecture. Campaigns separated by intent and region, brand isolated, generic structured by financial-product category (pensions, investments, mortgages). Bid strategies tuned to actual cost per qualified lead.
• Compliance-friendly creative ops. A pre-approved creative library built with the compliance team, with templates that made variation safe. Testing cadence moved from quarterly to monthly without adding compliance friction.
• LinkedIn build-out. A small but high-quality LinkedIn programme targeting the high-net-worth and pre-retirement audience segments where considered B2C decisions actually happen.

Built for compliance and performance at the same time.

The infrastructure was designed up-front to handle FCA-regulated communications, audited consent, and closed-loop attribution from the first day of the engagement.

A channel the adviser network actually relies on.

Twelve months in, paid media is producing qualified financial advice enquiries up 62%, at a cost per qualified lead down 41%, and a pipeline contribution that's grown roughly 3.1× over the engagement.

More importantly, the adviser network's confidence in the channel has shifted. Paid media isn't seen as a tap of variable-quality leads any more - it's a structured, compliance- aware, measured programme that the central team and the partners can both rely on.