Free Marketing Compliance Checker

What marketing compliance means, and which rules decide it.

The rules that govern what a regulated business may say about itself are older than the web and stricter than most marketers expect. Here is who writes them, the kinds of claims they catch in each industry, and where a phrase checker helps and where it cannot.

What marketing compliance is

Marketing compliance is the discipline of making sure what a business publishes about itself is allowed by the rules that govern it. For most companies that means one baseline: the Federal Trade Commission Act's ban on unfair or deceptive practices, and the FTC's Endorsement Guides for reviews and testimonials. For a regulated firm there is a second layer on top. An investment adviser answers to the SEC, a broker-dealer to FINRA, a lawyer to a state bar, a doctor to a medical board and to HIPAA, an insurance agent to a state insurance department, and a sponsor raising money for a private deal to the securities laws that govern the offering.

That second layer is why a sentence that is ordinary copy for a coffee shop can be a problem for a financial adviser. "Our clients never lose money" is puffery in one business and a misleading performance claim in another. The consequence is not only a regulator's letter. It is a complaint that names the page, a state bar grievance, or a claim that a private offering used general solicitation when it was not allowed to. The copy is the evidence, and it is public.

The rules, by industry

No single rulebook covers marketing. Each industry has its own, and each pack in this checker is built from the governing body's own texts. The main ones:

Two families often appear on marketing-compliance checklists that this checker does not cover, on purpose. Privacy and email laws such as GDPR and CAN-SPAM govern how you collect data and send messages, not what the message claims. And FINRA's rule, although it is in the table, has no pack of its own here yet: the checker has an SEC adviser pack, not a broker-dealer one.

The SEC Marketing Rule and FINRA Rule 2210

The SEC Marketing Rule treats almost anything an adviser sends to more than one person that offers its advisory services as an advertisement, and any compensated testimonial or endorsement as one too. Extemporaneous live oral communications are outside it. Every advertisement is then held to seven general prohibitions: no untrue statement of a material fact, no statement the adviser cannot substantiate, no misleading implication, no discussion of benefits without fair treatment of the material risks, no cherry-picked specific investment advice, no performance results included or excluded unfairly, and nothing otherwise materially misleading.

FINRA sorts a broker-dealer's written communications by audience: correspondence goes to 25 or fewer retail investors within 30 calendar days, a retail communication to more than 25, and an institutional communication only to institutional investors. Its content standards forbid any "false, exaggerated, unwarranted, promissory or misleading statement or claim", and say a communication may not "predict or project performance" or imply that past performance will recur. Those two lines are why a phrase like "guaranteed returns" sits in the base pack under every financial vertical, not just one.

Syndication language: 506(b) versus 506(c)

A real estate syndicator's marketing is governed less by what it says than by whether it may say anything publicly at all. Under Rule 506(b), an offering may take up to 35 non-accredited purchasers who are financially sophisticated, but it may not use general solicitation, which in practice means no public advertising of the deal. Rule 506(c) permits general solicitation, on the condition that every purchaser is accredited and the issuer takes reasonable steps to verify it. The same sentence is therefore fine in one offering and a problem in the other.

That is the logic of the Reg D pack. "Invest now", "limited spots available" and "closing soon" are flagged as active solicitation of a specific offering. "Anyone can invest" and "no minimum net worth" are flagged because Reg D offerings have investor qualification requirements. A return figure such as "earn 14%" is flagged unless a label like "target return", "projected" or "historical return" sits beside it, and "no PPM" is flagged because the offering document is where the risks live. The real estate syndication pack underneath adds the claims that property values always go up, that a syndication interest is liquid, and that tax benefits are guaranteed.

Medical practices: HIPAA and outcome claims

For a medical or dental practice, marketing runs into two separate rules. HIPAA requires a covered entity to obtain the patient's authorization before using or disclosing protected health information for marketing, with narrow exceptions for face-to-face communication and promotional gifts of nominal value; if a third party pays for the marketing, the authorization must say so. That is the rule a patient story, a before-and-after photo or a named testimonial runs into. The second rule is the FTC's: a health claim needs substantiation. The medical pack flags cure and guaranteed-outcome language, "cures arthritis" or "permanent results", as hard, and superlatives such as "painless dentistry" or "top dentist" as review tier.

Law firms: misleading claims and "specialist"

Model Rule 7.1 bars a lawyer from any false or misleading communication about the lawyer's services, and its comments treat a statement that creates unjustified expectations, or an unsubstantiated comparison with other lawyers, as misleading. The attorney pack encodes those: "we will win" and "guaranteed settlement" are hard, "top trial lawyer" is review tier, a claimed connection with the court is hard, and "no win, no fee" is a warning, because a contingent-fee ad can mislead about who pays the costs; the pack cites Model Rule 1.5(c) and 1.8(e) for it. Model Rule 7.2(c) separately bars a lawyer from stating or implying certification as a specialist unless an approved organization has certified the lawyer and is named in the communication. The pack does not flag "specialist" or "expert" wording today; read those claims yourself against your state's version of the rule.

A phrase library, by industry

These are real rules from the packs this checker runs, each with a phrase it flags. They are examples of the pattern, not the whole pack, and every one was tested against the rule it sits beside.

Why the required disclaimer is checked by phrase

Each pack carries one comprehensive disclaimer block, and a page is expected to carry it once, not stacked. Firms reword these blocks constantly, so the checker does not demand the exact text. It looks for the phrases that carry the legal weight: for the Reg D pack, "informational", "offer to sell", "accredited investor", "private placement memorandum", "past performance" and "forward-looking". If any is absent, the disclaimer is flagged with a count of how many.

This is also where a careful firm will see its first flag. Below is a real run: the investor-eligibility answer and the Important Disclosures block from the homepage of willowdaleequity.com, a syndication firm run by Verand's founder, pasted as published and checked against the Reg D pack. No banned claim matched. The disclaimer was flagged because one of its six phrases is missing: the block covers offers, the PPM, accreditation, forward-looking statements and past performance, but never calls itself informational. That flag may be right or it may not matter, which is exactly the decision a flag leaves to a person.

Manual review versus a phrase checker

A compliance reviewer reads for meaning: who the audience is, whether the piece is an advertisement at all, whether a performance figure is presented fairly, whether a testimonial was paid for. None of that is a pattern. What a deterministic checker does well is the other half: it never tires, never skims the fourth paragraph, and reads every occurrence of every rule the same way every time. It is fast enough to run on every draft instead of the finished one.

The price of that consistency is literalness. A rule written for "best lawyer" does not catch "nobody in town wins more cases", and a rule for "risk-free" fires on "real estate is not risk-free" unless an exception phrase sits nearby. That is why the packs carry exception contexts, why the phrases with real professional uses are review tier rather than hard, and why the first false positive the product fixed was "risk-free" beside the U.S. Treasury benchmark. Treat a clean result as the absence of the listed problems, not the presence of a green light.

Common mistakes

• Treating a clean scan as sign-off. No tool, this one included, can tell you a piece is allowed. It can tell you it did not find the patterns it knows.
• Checking the draft, not the page. Disclaimers often live in a footer or a template the writer never sees. Paste the whole rendered page, not the article body, or the disclaimer will read as missing.
• Qualifying a figure somewhere else. "Target" in the sidebar does not qualify "earn 14%" in the headline. The exception has to sit beside the number.
• Assuming the base rules are enough. A syndicator checked only against the FTC baseline misses every solicitation rule in Reg D. Pick the pack for the way you actually raise money or practise.
• Paraphrasing a guarantee. "There is no downside with us" makes the same promise as "you can't lose", and no rule in the packs matches it. Read your copy for the claim, not only for the words the tool knows.
• Forgetting who reviewed the rules. A pack marked draft is still being built. Weigh its flags accordingly.