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Practice Management > Marketing and Communications > Client Outreach

6 New Marketing Tips for Growing Financial Advisors

By John Manganaro

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Since launching in 2021, the financial advisor marketing and business development platform Intention.ly has grown its team to include more than 20 employees across seven states, and it now serves clients across the financial services ecosystem under the leadership of Kelly Waltrich, CEO and co-founder.

Waltrich is known for her prior roles at eMoney Advisor and Orion, where she helped those firms craft and deliver their marketing messages in a rapidly evolving segment of the financial industry. Last year, Waltrich played a key role in Intention.ly’s acquisition of C-Suite Social Media and the onboarding of its CEO Tina Powell.

Waltrich recently appeared on the Retire With Style podcast to share her latest insights for financial advisory practice leaders who want to improve their marketing game in 2023. In conversation with podcast hosts and retirement experts Wade Pfau and Alex Murguia, Waltrich emphasized the paramount importance of sending the right message to the right set of clients at the right time.

According to Waltrich, marketing challenges have piled up for advisors because of the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, alongside rapid changes in regulations, social media, technology and other factors. Increasingly, the expectation among clients that advisors provide “holistic” services is proving to be a particular challenge when it comes to the ability for a firm to effectively tell its story, Waltrich warns.

Here is Waltrich’s latest list of marketing do’s and don’ts for financial advisors, updated for the emerging opportunities and challenges advisors face in 2023.

1. Devote the appropriate resources to marketing.

Given that Waltrich runs a firm dedicated to supporting the marketing work of financial advisors, she acknowledges that this suggestion may seem self-serving. Nonetheless, Waltrich says, advisors fall far short of other industries when it comes to effective marketing practices.

“For our part, we are trying to be really smart about working with those firms that we believe have the right recipe for success,” Waltrich says. “We only want to work with firms who have the understanding of the importance of doing marketing right.”

As Waltrich points out, there are a lot of complex and evolving stories to tell in the financial services space. Whether an advisor is breaking away from their longtime home office or they are looking to capitalize on new partner platform distribution opportunities, these are not simple stories to tell.

In many cases, professional support may be appropriate, and it may not be as costly or complex as a practice leader assumes.

2. Have a clear point of view.

In Waltrich’s experience, if there is one single thing that makes a firm stand out from its competition in today’s marketplace, it is having a true point of view and a true passion about a specific aspect of the advisory and wealth creation process.

“If a client can’t look at your website and get a good point of view about what you believe financial planning actually means, that’s a red flag,” Waltrich warns. “Far too often, firms take pains to outline their process in marketing materials, but they do nothing to communicate their unique passion or goals.”

According to Waltrich, consumers today are very wary of cookie-cutter messaging, whether it is coming from a financial advisor or any other professional service provider. Furthermore, many consumers of financial services care less about the details of the process and more about what the process is meant to deliver — at least as an introductory matter.

Whether a firm believes in wealth maximization, the protection of retirement assets or any other goal, this should be made clear on the website and in marketing materials.

3. Targeted outreach always outperforms.

Waltrich says advisory firm leaders with little marketing experience often assume that casting the broadest net possible will result in the best outcomes. In reality, that approach is at best going to be inefficient, and at worst its going to be entirely ineffective.

“Our performance data shows clearly that firms which target a specific niche — whether geographic or based on the ideal client type — get so much more out of their marketing spend,” Waltrich says. “A tighter focus almost always results in better outcomes in terms of definable and measurable marketing goals.”

4. Emphasize your team and resources.

While some financial advisors may have operated as true solo practitioners in the past, Waltrich says, the reality in 2023 is that the vast majority of advisors are working with at least a small team behind them, and this should be made clear in the marketing effort.

“I don’t mean to say that a practice led by a single advisor can’t serve clients well,” Waltrich says, “but I do think that showing the team behind the lead advisor is important. I will use myself as an example. Are you going to have a lot of confidence in hiring a marketing agency that doesn’t have a few specialists on board? Probably not.”

In today’s marketplace, Waltrich says, clients want holistic services, and they know they are going to need access to different specialists to serve their evolving needs throughout their lifetime. From tax mitigation to portfolio management, there is just so much going into the planning process.

“Even if you don’t have all these people on board as W-2 employees, that’s not the point,” Waltrich says. “Sending the right message is about showing the extended network of resources that you have available to tap into as needed. Even if you are truly running that one-person shop, you likely have partners or turnkey asset management programs that you can point to. These are the partnership you need to showcase.”

5. Speak to consumers like people — not students.

“One of the best things that I see today from a marketing perspective is that firms are speaking to consumers like people,” Waltrich says. “There is now a more casual tone going into financial services marketing that has not been there traditionally.”

Previously, firms put a premium on demonstrating some kind of complex expertise or communicating some type of tactical advantage in their marketing materials.

“With a traditional advertisement, a typical consumer probably had to go ask someone they knew in the industry about what the firm in question actually does,” Waltrich says. “You also had to pull out your magnifying glass to read the fine print at the bottom of the advertisement. Today, these things are changing.”

Increasingly, advisors and product creators are trying to speak to people more conversationally and trying to relate to consumers.

“I think this is a winning formula,” Waltrich says. “Effective marketing is no longer about trying to prove you are just smarter than everyone else.”

6. Market yourself as a solver of complex problems.

According to Waltrich, effective marketing of financial advisory services strikes a fine balance between emphasizing the complexity of the job without making people feel like they are being talked down to.

“The message cannot just be that this firm is your new best friend and they will take care of everything for you with ease,” Waltrich warns. “I believe the right message underscores that financial planning is a complex topic, but one with which you can get the right help.”

Waltrich says firms today still tend to fall on one side or the other of this spectrum, with marketing messaging that is either too focused on complexity or too focused on simplification.

“As we enter a world in which trust and fiduciary-level service is highly prized, you can’t just skirt around the complexity,” Waltrich says. “You can’t make things seem so simple that the end client doesn’t realize everything that goes into your work — otherwise they won’t value the work you do.”

John Manganaro

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