Articles About Financial Advisor Marketing

Marketing for new clients through education has long been a popular approach for financial advisors. Whether it's conducting seminars or speaking at networking events, podcasting or creating educational videos, advisors get an opportunity to demonstrate their expertise, show that they're approachable, and help a broad swath of consumers. As a result, Kitces Research on Advisor Marketing finds that education-based marketing is amongst the most popular marketing tactics that advisors pursue, behind only referrals from clients and centers of influence, and networking (in-person or online). Yet the reality is that nearly half of advisors fail to get a single new client in a full year of trying their education-based marketing approach.

In this guest post, advisor marketing expert Kendra Wright of Rebel Media Agency conducts a detailed "marketing funnel breakdown" of the changes that one financial advisor made to turn his multi-year podcast that had generated virtually no new client results into one that generated more than $100,000 of new revenue in just the past 12 months, and the specific changes that he – and any advisor – can make to whatever their marketing funnel happens to be, in order to drive better business outcomes.

The starting point is to recognize that education-based marketing is really a three-stage "funnel" process, where the actual educational content itself – the seminar or the podcast – is just the middle of the funnel. It's a crucial stage – where advisors demonstrate their competency and build trust – but a great educational podcast unto itself does not create new clients.

Improved results also require paying attention to the top of the funnel, where you earn the attention to attract attendees, viewers, or in the case of a podcast, listeners who will become regular consumers of your content in order to build trust with them. This means getting clarity on who your ideal prospects are (and what kind of content they would be interested in), aligning the title of the podcast and the titles of each episode to that ideal target audience, and then further expanding awareness to others who might be interested (which in the case of a podcast, means appearing as a guest on other podcasts that might have listeners who would cross over).

In addition, advisors also have to pay attention to the bottom of the funnel, where prospects are invited to actually reach out and learn more about how to become a client. Because especially in the age of "finfluencers", it's not automatic for video viewers or podcast listeners to even realize that you are a financial advisor who actually works with and accepts clients! That has to be said – more than once, with a clear statement of what you do (as a financial advisor), who you work with (e.g., retirees nationwide), that you're accepting clients (as they may not realize you have capacity!), and how to take the next action step to reach out and schedule an introductory call.

Ultimately, the key point is that marketing by educating is an incredibly effective way to build trust with prospects, but putting out great educational content alone doesn't drive results. Turning educational content into qualified prospects means paying attention to the top of the funnel to expand your audience, and the bottom of the funnel to help them understand that you're a financial advisor who is accepting new clients, and how they can begin to work with you. The good news, though, is that when it works well, you can quickly reach the point where there are more prospects than you can handle – such that ironically, for the most successful advisor podcasters, their scheduling form is built to introduce more friction to slow down how often prospects reach out (and ensure only the most qualified do so). A nice problem to have!

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Social media marketing remains an attractive yet often elusive strategy for financial advisors seeking to build their client base. Its low cost of entry and potential for wide visibility give it a strong initial appeal. However, as the latest Kitces Research on How Financial Planners Actually Market Their Services shows, it is also one of the least efficient and most time-consuming marketing tactics in practice. While social media ranks as the fourth-most-used tactic among advisors, the research reveals that acquiring a client through social media can cost advisors an average of $16,700 when factoring in both hard and soft costs. These soft costs – time spent on content creation, adapting to shifting algorithms, trend monitoring, and building an audience – can add up quickly, particularly when advisors struggle to consistently produce high-impact content.

A central challenge with social media is that success often hinges on two distinct but rarely simultaneous goals: reach and conversion. One post may generate likes, comments, and new followers (reach), while another might prompt newsletter sign-ups or webinar registrations (conversion). Expecting a single post to achieve both is unrealistic, and the constant push to meet these divergent goals can lead to an exhausting and unsustainable content creation cycle. Making matters more difficult, social media platforms are increasingly saturated, making it harder for advisors to stand out without significant time investment or specialized skills in content strategy.

In this article, Sydney Squires, Senior Financial Planning Nerd, discusses how advisors can overcome this issue by using evergreen content, which retains its relevance regardless of current events or seasonality, and offers a scalable solution to the high soft costs of social media. A guiding principle in evergreen content strategies is harnessing what's called the "long tail" effect: a small percentage of content often generates the majority of results. In practice, this means that only about 10% of an advisor's posts will drive most of the engagement and conversions, while the rest produce little return. This dynamic poses a significant burden for advisors who feel they must constantly create fresh content in hopes of striking gold. However, recognizing and leaning into the long tail can be a turning point. By identifying which posts already perform well, advisors can repurpose top-performing content – especially evergreen content that remains relevant over time – and avoid the burnout of perpetual reinvention. Reposting content is not only efficient but also effective – audiences are unlikely to recall seeing a post months earlier, and repeated exposure often strengthens a message's resonance.

The success of evergreen social media content ultimately depends on strategic planning and performance tracking. Each post should be assigned a clear objective – either engagement or conversion ­– and performance should be measured accordingly. Tools like UTM codes and Google Analytics can help advisors track which posts are driving website traffic, while social media platforms and schedulers often provide data on in-platform engagement. Over time, advisors can refine their evergreen libraries through regular audits, removing outdated or underperforming content and adding newer, high-performing posts. Leveraging AI or working with copywriters can further streamline ideation and content creation without compromising the advisor's unique voice.

In sum, while social media marketing is often labor-intensive and inefficient when approached haphazardly, advisors can dramatically improve their return on time and effort by leaning into evergreen content. This strategy not only mitigates the pressure of constant content creation but also maximizes the value of high-performing posts. By developing and maintaining a well-curated library of reusable, relevant content, advisors can build a more consistent and scalable marketing pipeline that highlights their personality and expertise – helping them connect with prospective clients more meaningfully over time!

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Great firms need great clients. But to find the right clients, they first need to be able to consistently find viable prospects – which means marketing. Modern-day marketing has nearly endless options – podcasts, webinars, social media, SEO – and firms can attempt nearly all of these tactics to see what sticks. However, the result is often a fragmented plan that attempts to appease everyone, lacks strategic alignment, and is quickly abandoned when early results disappoint. Over time, firms conclude that marketing itself doesn't work, when in fact the failure lies in how marketing decisions are made.

In this article, Kristen Luke, founder of Kaleido Creative Studio, discusses how firms can establish a marketing committee to develop an annual marketing strategy that resonates with its long-term strategy while balancing the firm's constraints of budget and time – ensuring that the firm gets the highest return for its investments.

Marketing decisions can be evaluated through six key filters: client journey stage, implementation capacity, time horizon, quality versus quantity, team preferences, and budget. This framework is designed to align marketing efforts with the advisor team's personalities, who they serve, and what outcomes they're trying to achieve. By defining upfront what the firm will – and won't – do over the next year, leadership can avoid second-guessing or being distracted by new ideas midyear!

From there, a marketing plan can be mapped to the different stages of the prospecting journey:  Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. A balanced plan typically emphasizes Awareness to generate new interest, Consideration strategies to nurture prospects, and Decision-stage tactics to help close business. Next, the firm can assess implementation logistics – whether activities are scalable, delegable, or advisor-driven – and determine the appropriate mix based on available time and resources. Among the components to consider are the desired balance between short- and long-term impact, as well as quality (e.g., deep relationship-building) versus quantity (broader reach with more lead filtering). And perhaps most crucially, the team's strengths and interests must align with the selected marketing activities. After all, if marketing strategies align with the team's inclinations and strengths, it is much easier to sustain them in the long term!

Once all these components have been written out, the marketing planning process becomes one of subtraction rather than addition – eliminating entire categories or specific tactics that don't align with the firm's audience, culture, goals, or constraints. Starting with a comprehensive marketing matrix, firms can cross out what doesn't fit and gradually highlight what does, eventually narrowing the list down to a realistic, well-aligned set of activities. Strategic decisions can then be documented in a one-page summary outlining the firm's target audience, marketing goals, and selected tactics, providing a clear reference point throughout the year.

Ultimately, a well-crafted annual marketing strategy serves as a powerful filter, helping firms say yes to the right opportunities and no to distractions. It simplifies planning, improves execution, and creates confidence that marketing is being done with purpose, not guesswork. By shifting from a reactive to an intentional approach, firms can build marketing programs that are not only more effective but also more sustainable – leading to better business development outcomes and a stronger alignment between marketing efforts and firm goals!

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Advisory firm founders often work tirelessly to develop processes for attracting good-fit clients. This painstaking effort to balance where viable prospects are with what the advisor is naturally inclined to do can eventually pay off in steady growth. Yet just as the firm begins to grow, these once-reliable pipelines often plateau. Referrals tend to slow, marketing techniques that once worked feel noisy and ineffective, and next-generation advisors may struggle to prospect while founders become increasingly consumed by operations and spend more time working in the business rather than on it. The result can feel like hitting a wall at the very stage where growth should be most reliable.

In this article, Stephanie Bogan, founder of Limitless Advisor, explores why growth engines that once fueled the firm may stall as it scales – and how advisors can revitalize their processes.

A key challenge is that many growth engines depend heavily on the founder's personal time and energy. If growth has primarily come from networking, for example, the founder eventually reaches the outer limits of viable prospects. Other approaches, such as digital lead generation, can be expensive without a defined conversion process. In other words, growth strategies that once worked often become barriers when the founder needs to step back from front-line marketing to focus on leading the firm.

Fortunately, there are several ways to reinvigorate foundational growth engines and make them scalable. Referrals, for example, remain the most efficient path to high-trust client relationships. Yet today's clients – especially those in younger and higher-income segments – are less likely to rely on referrals, and most firms lack a formal system to encourage them. By deliberately engineering advocacy into the client experience – identifying client 'champions', mapping referral-ready moments, prompting naturally, and reinforcing behavior with gratitude – firms can transform referrals from a passive hope into an intentional, repeatable driver of growth.

Founders can also strengthen their sales funnel by creating a structured, scalable process that doesn't rely on their own presence. Narrowing the target to a few key marketing channels and mapping multi-step sales processes can dramatically improve conversion rates and client quality, while also enabling non-founder advisors to execute them. Over time, a defined, trackable funnel allows firms to focus on fewer but better client opportunities – often resulting in significantly higher close rates!

Equally important is aligning service and profitability. Firms can't sustainably grow if they overserve underpaying clients or deliver inconsistent value. By right-sizing the client base, introducing service tiers tied to value, and systematizing delivery, firms can improve margins while freeing advisor capacity. When done well, these shifts allow firms to eliminate low-margin relationships, reclaim time, and reinvest resources into high-impact growth initiatives.

Ultimately, achieving double-digit growth isn't about flashy marketing tactics – it's about having scalable processes and a service model that supports the firm. Each growth component reinforces the others, creating a self-sustaining cycle that fuels growth without overwhelming the team. Rather than doing more, the fastest-growing firms focus on doing a few things exceptionally well. With a repeatable growth engine and the operational structure to support it, firms can achieve sustainable, long-term growth!

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For the last 20 years, Risk Tolerance Questionnaires (RTQs) have served as a standard tool in the advisory space for assessing a client's long-term attitudes and behavior toward investment risk. Yet despite their widespread use, many advisors remain unsatisfied with current RTQ technology. The newest Kitces Research on The Technology That Financial Advisors Actually Use (And Like), presented for the first time in this article, found that while risk tolerance tools are considered important, satisfaction continues to lag – highlighting a disconnect between the perceived value of these tools and how they're currently being used.

One overlooked reason for this dissatisfaction may be that RTQs are often used only after a client relationship has already been established – by which point most advisors are already applying a holistic approach to align a client's portfolio with their risk tolerance, goals, and reactions toward market volatility. And at that stage, a client's true perspective on risk may no longer be fully reflected by their behavior, as their risk attitudes may be filtered through the ongoing presence of their financial advisor – making the value of the RTQ less clear.

However, when used earlier in the process – before the relationship begins – RTQs can serve a different and perhaps more powerful role. Rather than simply measuring risk to inform portfolio design, they can help prospects recognize overlooked risks in their current portfolio, along with the gap between how they understand risk and how they actually behave. This, in turn, helps clarify the financial advisor's value by illustrating how their services can address these gaps. When used at the prospecting stage, RTQs can offer a tangible, personal reason for people who are otherwise 'on the fence' about hiring an advisor – serving as effective self-persuasion tools that allow prospects to articulate their own reasons for seeking advice.

To use RTQs as an effective prospecting tool, three elements are especially important: 1) Personal data inputs to make results feel relevant and accurate; 2) a clear (but brief) explanation of how risk is being scored, to build trust in the methodology; and 3) a visible connection between the results and the advisor's recommendations, so prospects can see the difference between their current approach and the guidance available.

Ultimately, the key point is that RTQs can be most effective when used with investment-focused prospects – not clients. When results are framed in a way that feels personal and actionable, RTQs can help prospects identify their concerns, recognize what's at stake, and clarify their own reasons for engaging a financial advisor – without needing to be explicitly persuaded of the value of financial advice. And for those who are open to working with an advisor but haven't yet found a reason to take the first step, that shift may be all it takes to move them from ambivalence to action!

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