You're listening to “Financial Advisor Marketing”: the best show on the planet for financial advisors who want to get more clients, without all the stress. You're about to get the real scoop on everything from lead generation to closing the deal.
James is the founder of TheAdvisorCoach.com, where you can find an entire suite of products designed to help financial advisors grow their businesses more rapidly than ever before. Now, here is your host, James Pollard.
James: I've been helping financial advisors with their marketing since 2015. It doesn't feel like it's been that long. Man, it's like a blink, but it's been over 10 years and I have been in the marketing world since before that, so I have seen several market cycles. I've seen things get really good. I've seen things get really bad. I think things are going to get harder in the financial advisor marketing space, and here's why. [00:56.6]
I'd say, from about 2021 to today, things have been much easier than they should be for financial advisors. I actually believe in reversion to the mean. If you're a financial advisor, you should believe in reversion to the mean because it's kinda sorta part of your job. But let's say that things are really, really bad for a while, then you can kind of trust in the process and know, okay, things are going to revert to the mean and things are going to get better in the future. If things are really, really good for a while, then you can keep your head in check and don't get too crazy and realize that things are probably going to get worse. It's not necessarily pessimism. It's just realism.
From 2021 to today, it has just been a remarkable period where the tide has lifted virtually all boats, even the mediocre ones. However, things are changing. First, client-acquisition costs have been steadily increasing every single year and I don't think it'd be long before we reach a breaking point for a lot of financial advisors. Even Michael Kitces, who I had on the show not that long ago, pointed out some research that found that client-acquisition costs increased a whopping 75% from 2021 to 2023, and there are other studies that I have in my vault, in my archives, that show that it's even worse. [02:12.3]
I have seen this cycle play out with online ads many, many times, where stuff like Google Ads get very expensive and then there's a breaking point, or Facebook ads get very expensive then there's a breaking point. I even see mini-cycles every single year where the summer metrics are different than the winter metrics, especially around times like December and January versus times like July and August. It's just different, you see these mini-cycles. But I think that we are in a macro-cycle now that is ending second.
Second, the RIA industry has been growing faster than the economy as a whole. This should be a massive warning sign that something has to give in the next few years, and I've had a few people say, “Oh, James, that's because more advisors are transitioning to becoming RIAs,” and yes, while that is true, let's go back to Statistics 101. Let's go back to the classroom. Does that explain the variance? No, it does not, because transitions alone don't account for the growth in total advisor numbers, while the available pool of ideal clients isn't growing at the same pace. It's simply supply and demand. [03:17.0]
Actually, let me give you another lesson in supply and demand, because financial advisors tend to be about five to 10 years behind the cutting edge of marketing, and there are still so many financial advisors out there who believe that they need to increase their search engine optimization efforts, or, even worse, make SEO a priority in their businesses.
Search traffic is declining because people are simply using other tools Like ChatGPT and Claude and other artificial intelligence tools. Also, there is a limited supply of the number one search results, I mean, and the number two and the number three. There's a limited supply. In fact, there's only one number one spot, so what happens when you have lower demand for a thing and increasing supply for a thing, an increasing supply of people competing to supply the thing? Fewer and fewer people will get results with SEO. This should not be rocket science. [04:10.8]
Imagine you're considering investing in a company and that company tells you, “Hey, not only are we going to have fewer customers every single year, but we're also going to have more and more competitors every single year.” Would you think that's a good investment? I hope not. It's crazy to me that financial advisors will go to these SEO consultants and say, “Hey, do you think I should invest in SEO?” Of course, they're going to tell you yes. Of course, they're going to tell you, “Yes, you should invest in SEO.” It's like asking your barber if you need a haircut. Of course.
Here's the real mind trip—every single other client that your SEO consultant gets is a competitor for you, right? If you're hiring a marketing agency or something, I mean, God help you if you're doing that, but if you are doing that and your marketing agency who specializes in SEO gets more clients who are also financial advisors, then guess what? They are your freakin’ direct competitors. You are giving these people an incentive to build on more competitors into your space. It is just absolutely goofy. [05:07.1]
But enough about that. The third reason why I think the golden age of financial advisor marketing is ending is because we are seeing massive commoditization in the industry when everyone is saying the same things, like holistic planning, fiduciary, and independent and personalized strategies. It just becomes white noise. Let's just keep it real. It becomes noise. It just is. I'm sorry, I'm not going to say, “Oh, well, people value these things.” I'm not going to give you the little sugar-coated things. I'm just going to tell you it is noise to the average consumer. The differentiators in 2017 don't hit the same in 2025. The advisors who have been skating by with this vague, boring marketing, they're going to get absolutely smoked in the next era.
Fourth, the financial advice industry continues to be one of the least trusted industries, period. The Edelman Trust Barometer studies consistently find that consumers do not trust financial advisors, period. The effects of this started to show themselves years ago. This is not a 2025 thing. This was showing years ago, and it's not going to get better. At least, it's not getting better. Maybe it will get better, I don't know. I can't predict the future. [06:14.2]
Back in 2022, CNBC and Acorns released this report stating that 67% of millennials now turn—back in 2022 they did—they turn to social media for financial education instead of traditional advisors. Also, more and more people are saying that they would rather have robo-advisors than human advisors. We started seeing this years ago, too. In 2021, MagnifyMoney did a survey and found that 29% of Gen-Zers would prefer using a robo-advisor to a human advisor. Do you think that number has gone down in the past four years? If so, I think you need to get your head examined.
Fifth, more and more financial advisors are hopping on the same marketing bandwagons like social media, content marketing, email marketing and more. These are proven strategies. Yes, they work. Yes, they are awesome. Yes, I talk about them all the time, but it's just going to get harder and harder and harder to stand out. [07:10.4]
Plus, I've heard from more and more financial advisors who think their growth over the past few years is due to their own brilliance. They think they grow because they're awesome and they're just amazing and this they're superior business people, and they are not. Whenever this happens in any industry, people are in for a rude awakening. It is literally the Dunning–Kruger effect. They have been operating in an environment where everything worked, even if it was half-baked, even if it was sloppy, even if it was copied from someone else, and because the bar has been set so low, it gave people a false sense of mastery. [07:43.3]
It's kind of like even if you're a horrible basketball player as an adult, if you go against elementary school children, you're probably going to dominate. But when you get into a room of other basketball players, like D1 basketball players or even NBA players, you're going to realize you are not that good, and as the market tightens in the financial advisor marketing space, we are going to see a big separation between the advisors who actually know what they're doing, D1 and the NBA players, and the ones who just so happen to be at the right place at the right time, the people who are playing against elementary school kids. This is where things get real. You will need to have sharper messaging. You will need to have better positioning. You will need to have clearer offers. You need systems that aren't just nice to have, but necessary. You need these things.
That's why I keep hammering on fundamentals, because those are the things that endure. Even as trends come and go, there's always opportunity in transition and the opportunity goes to people who master the fundamentals. The advisors who adapt and double down on what works, the advisors who stop cutting corners and they take this stuff seriously, those are the ones who are going to be just fine. The people in my Inner Circle? Going to be just fine. In fact, they'll probably grow faster than ever before, because most of their quote-unquote, “competition” will be too busy posting another TikTok to get 63 views and no leads. [09:02.0]
Let's go through some things you can do to make sure you survive and thrive during the next few years.
No. 1: I got to fulfill my legal obligation to mention this on every podcast, niche down harder than ever. By the way, that's a joke. Some of you think that's serious, like there's some legal thing that I have to fulfill this obligation. No, no, no, it is a joke. Come on, guys. Generalist advisors are going to struggle. You cannot be just another advisor anymore. You need to go deeper than the surface-level demographics like pre-retirees or high-net-worth individuals. You need a niche where you understand the specific pain points of your market. You can articulate a clear transformation from Point A to Point B, because that's what you're offering. Nobody buys a drill to get a drill. They buy a drill to get a hole. You're going from Point A to Point B, and you speak their language. You don't speak like a financial advisor necessarily. You speak like them. [09:51.0]
So, ask yourself, “What problems do I solve that other advisors can't solve or won't solve?” and if you can't answer that, clearly and immediately, it is time to niche down. Here is your action step. I'm spelling it out for you so you know exactly what to do—rework your value proposition to speak directly to your ideal client. Instead of “I help people retire” try “I help engineers at this specific company retire with confidence using a specialized three-step plan tailored to their pension and their stock compensation.” Of course, you don't have to be that specific. I'm just giving you an example to get you thinking. [10:27.0]
Listen up, financial advisors. This is something special I'm doing exclusively for people who listen to this podcast. If you subscribe to the Inner Circle Newsletter over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching, I will send you a collection of seven copyright-free emails, personally written by me, that you can use right away to begin getting more clients.
I call these my “objection-busting” emails, because they are designed to overcome the biggest objections financial advisors face. All you have to do is send me an email letting me know you’ve subscribed and I will reply with a link where you can download them for free.
I originally offered these in the May 2024 Inner Circle Newsletter issue, and it was one of the most popular bonuses I've ever given away. Today, these seven objection-busting, copyright-free emails are only available to listeners of this podcast, because I'm not mentioning them anywhere else. Go to TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching to subscribe today. Now, back to the show.
No. 2: build a marketing system, not a list of tactics. I have been saying this since the very beginning, back in the early, early days of the financial Advisor Marketing show—what, like 2018, 2019, late-2018, early-2019? Something like that. Most advisors, all these years later, they're just stuck in activity mode. They send a random newsletter. Here they post a motivational quote here. They attend a networking event over here. They hope for a bite over there. That is not marketing. That is motion masquerading as progress. [11:55.6]
What you need is a system. You need a process that attracts attention, that gets leads to know you, like you, and trust you, and converts them like clockwork. That might include a lead magnet tied to your niche, something I recommend all the time. That might include an email follow-up sequence that educates and builds trust—and when I say “educate,” I don't mean sitting at the front of the classroom, drawing on a blackboard. I mean handling objections. You're educating people as to why their objections aren't valid. You're educating people about why their beliefs are limiting to them, that sort of education. I don't mean like you're a teacher.
You might have a regular calendar of content that you share with prospective clients, and that content leads to discovery meetings. Oh, and by the way, if you want to have better discovery meetings, go to TheAdvisorCoach.com/meetings. That's where you can find my newest video training, which is titled “How Financial Advisors Can Have Better Discovery Meetings.” I'm not very creative with titles, but I can get the job done. [12:54.7]
This has four videos with two and a half hours of video content, because it's video, about how you should structure your meetings to maximize your chances of turning prospects into clients. So, here's an action step for you. Go to TheAdvisorCoach.com/meetings, of course, but document your current lead flow. Figure out where your leads are coming from. What happens when someone expresses interest? What happens to those people? Where do they go? What do you do? What are the gaps in your business? And turn your ad hoc efforts into a real pipeline.
No. 3: double down on relationship marketing, because in a world of commoditized content and all this automation—I love automation, but sometimes it just gets to be too much—what is rare is real human connection. That is your advantage as a human advisor, so get personal, get specific. Send one-to-one videos. I talk about this in the Inner Circle all the time. Remember people's birthdays. Send handwritten notes. Know your top clients, or actually all of your clients. Know their children's names. You have no idea how much it means to people when you remember their children's names. People crave feeling seen. They want that. They don't get it anywhere else, really, so use it in your marketing. [14:07.0]
Here's an action step. I spell it out for you. I tell you exactly what to do. I say go to all of your clients and do this, but if you really just want to get something done quickly, pick your top 10% of clients and send each of them, every single one, a personalized, unexpected message this week. Don't pitch them. Don't try to segue into your business. Don't do any of that. Just make a real, genuine connection and watch what happens.
I have been suggesting this to my Inner Circle members over the past few months and the ones who have done it have seen great results. It's an easy thing to do, but I think that's why so many people don't do it. They brush it off because it seems like it is too easy, and I've noticed that in life, too. I've noticed that people will ignore things because they seem too good to be true, and guess what? They never get results that seem too good to be true. I get results that seem too good to be true because I do things that seem too good to be true and that is just what it is. If you plant corn, guess what? You're going to get corn. If you plant soybeans, you can't be upset when you get soybeans. You have to reap what you sow. [15:04.8]
No: 4: track metrics that matter. Vanity metrics will lead you straight into a marketing death spiral. Who cares, who gives a crap if 1,000 people liked your post if none of them booked a call? Who cares? Focus on bottom-line indicators, like leads generated, appointments booked, client-acquisition costs, lifetime value and pipeline velocity. These are all things that you can track.
The action step is this: if you don't have a weekly or daily or monthly—you have to have something—if you don't have some sort of scorecard or way to track your metrics, just start now. Start simple. Track how many new leads came in this week. Track how many calls were booked. Then reverse-engineer what activities led to those numbers, because if you know what activity led to the number, you can modify the activity and, by extension, modify the number. [15:57.6]
Most financial advisors think they're tracking their marketing, but what they're really doing is just looking at easy-to-measure numbers and confusing activity with progress. They'll say things like, “My post got 47 likes,” or “My email had a 30% open rate,” and while those numbers aren't totally useless, they don't mean much unless they're tied to actual business outcomes, clients in the business, money in the bank. So, if you want to grow, then you need to shift your focus from vanity metrics to performance metrics, and those are the metrics that directly influence how many clients you get.
Here, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll talk a little bit more about the metrics that you should track, because we're only at about the 15-minute mark on the podcast, and 15 to 16 minutes, and I want to make sure that I get this to about 20 minutes or so, so I need to riff on some of the metrics I think you should track. [16:47.4]
What did I say? I think I said leads generated. Obviously, that is probably one of the most important things that you could track. That's the number of new people who have entered your marketing world in a measurable way, people who have gotten to know you somehow. Maybe they've downloaded a lead magnet. Maybe they've opted into your email list. Maybe they've scheduled a consultation. Maybe they have connected with you on LinkedIn. This matters because without new leads, you don't have a pipeline. You're just going after the same audience again and again and again until it dries up.
You also want to track appointments booked. Appointments booked is obviously the number of people who took the next step and scheduled a consultation or a discovery call with you, and it matters because appointments are the bridge between interested and client. This metric tells you whether your funnel is actually working—and, honestly, not to get too technical, but a lot of times, financial advisors are better off tracking appointments than they are, let me say this, building systems based on appointments generated rather than clients generated in their marketing, simply because they have more data that you're going to have more appointments set than clients gotten so you have an easier time reaching statistical significance and you can make actual decisions that are based on math, not feelings. [18:01.8]
You could track client acquisition cost. That's the average amount of money you spend to acquire a new client, and if it costs you $4,000 to get a $2,000 client, you're upside down, so customer acquisition cost helps you measure efficiently and profitably.
Right along those lines, you have lifetime client value, and that's the total amount of revenue, profit, however you want to measure it—either one is fine. I like profit, but revenue is okay, too—that a client brings in over the course of your relationship, because knowing your client lifetime value, your lifetime client value, however you want to say it, it helps you justify the client acquisition costs.
If your average client is worth $10,000 to you over his or her life with you, and it cost you $1,000 to acquire that client, that is a great trade. That is something that you should do. You should spend $1,000 to get a client again and again and again and again, because that is how you build a real business. You don't sit back and say, “Oh, spending $1,000 on marketing, I can't do that. That's too expensive,” and so and so forth. That's goofy. You're not thinking like a business owner. You want to invest $1,000. You want to invest up to many times that in order to get that $10,000 client. [19:10.8]
Finally, did I say pipeline velocity? I think I did, and that's how quickly leads move through your funnel. How quickly do people go from the first contact with you, their first interaction with you, to a booked appointment or if you're tracking clients to becoming a client? That is so important, because the faster someone moves through your pipeline, the sooner you get paid. A slow pipeline is stalled growth most of the time.
I'll end the podcast episode with this. One of “the” fastest ways to increase your pipeline velocity is to have better discovery meetings. Again, go to TheAdvisorCoach.com/meetings and get your hands on “How Financial Advisors Can Have Better Discovery Meetings,” because that's something you can do to get more clients even if you change nothing about your marketing—you don't have to do anything with your marketing. You don’t have to change your LinkedIn. You don't change your website. Nothing—because it helps you get more clients with the leads and prospects you already have. The people who are already sending appointments with you, all you have to do is convert more of those people and you will get more clients. [20:14.1]
I hope this helps you. I hope it gets you thinking about some things you can do to improve your business—and, as always, I will catch you next week. [20:22.7]
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