Key Points

• Marketing in the financial advisory profession is one of the most debated, and least resolved, challenges for firms.

• Traditional starting points (ideal client profiles, websites, content, SEO, etc.) are useful but require heavy upfront time and investment.

• A better starting point is identifying what the firm is struggling with right now and addressing it through focused, micro-actions.

• All marketing activity connects back to five groups: Strangers, Visitors, Prospects, Clients, and Promoters.

• Focus, not budget, drives the best results: Consistently investing in one priority outperforms scattered efforts.

• Marketing functions as a growth loop and progress in one stage naturally strengthens the others.

• The key question: Do we need more strangers, visitors, prospects, clients, or promoters right now?

• Firms that succeed at marketing resist chasing trends; instead, they address current needs through micro-actions, creating marketing momentum over the long term.

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Marketing in the financial advisory profession is one of the most highly discussed, and paradoxically least resolved, topics in the business. Conferences dedicate entire tracks to it. Industry publications run headline after headline on “marketing that works.” Advisors debate the tactics (social media, AI, client events, google ads, podcast, etc.) in forums, while consultants argue over which frameworks deliver the best results. Yet, despite all the noise, when most firms set out to build a marketing growth strategy, they don’t know where to start.

Traditional marketing agencies almost always begin in the same place: define your niche, then develop a marketing strategy focused on content, update your website (or redo it entirely) to focus on your target audience, deliver content via multiple channels to attract that client, and lean into SEO for AI worthy content. These starting points are not wrong, in fact, they follow the core fundamentals of successful professional services marketing. Understanding who you want to serve matters and so does choosing channels to reach them. But in practice, many advisory firms find themselves with an ideal client profile, and a handful of disjointed tactics, only to wonder nine months later why the results aren’t producing more new clients.

The problem is that these starting points ignore a much deeper, and far more important, conversation: what is the firm struggling with right now?

Your Current Clients Hold The Marketing Clues

If a firm has made it this far, they already have clients. How did those clients arrive? In the beginning, when no referrals were possible, marketing was done somehow. In most firms it starts with introductions through friends and family, a presentation at a local event, some personal social media posts, a few conversations with accountants, and maybe even a cold call or two. Over time, the firm gained 10 clients then 20 and referrals begin to flow, but that doesn’t explain everything. Every client in a firm today represents some form of marketing that worked, whether intentional or not.

That means the real starting point is not a hypothetical ideal client, but rather a hard look at the firm’s existing client acquisition successes, and where along the growth path those successes drove results and why it slowed down. To diagnose this, it’s helpful to break down the different groups of people who came into the firm in the past and ultimately became clients.

The Five Groups That Drive Marketing Outcomes

When stripped down to the essentials, all marketing activity in advisory firms connects to five general categories of people.

1. Strangers: Building Awareness

Strangers are people who need what you offer but don’t yet know you exist. They might be business owners approaching liquidity events, young professionals needing guidance on stock options, or retirees worried about portfolio drawdowns. At this stage, your marketing focus is on visibility, making sure these prospects know you exist. The goal in targeting the Stanger is simply visibility: helping those who need you, find you.

2. Visitors: Turning Interest Into Opportunity

A Stanger becomes a Visitor when they know you exist, but they haven’t reached out to schedule an appointment. They may follow you on social media, read a blog post, download a guide, sign up for your newsletter, or come across your firm through a podcast, or even in today’s world find you on ChatGPT. They’re paying attention, but they haven’t taken the step to contact you. The marketing challenge to solve here is engagement: turning passive curiosity into active interest. The goal in targeting your visitors is action, and the step you want them to take is to schedule an appointment.

3. Prospects: Securing the Relationship

Prospects are those who have an appointment scheduled and haven’t talked to an advisor yet and/or they have spoken to an advisor, attended an initial exploration meeting, or asked questions about services. At this point, the issue is conversion to a client. The goal of this stage is to give them the clarity and confidence to commit.

4. Clients: Building Life-Time Value

Clients are obvious, they are the individuals and families you serve every day. Marketing for this group looks different: it’s about delivering exceptional service, creating client journeys worth talking about, and deepening the relationship. Strong client experience generates not only retention but also referral potential. The goal here is to serve them so well that they become promoters of your service.

5. Promoters: Creating Raving Fans

And finally, there are Promoters. These are the most powerful forces in growth. They may be satisfied clients who actively recommend you to others, or strategic partners like accountants, estate attorneys, or real estate professionals who channel introductions your way. Promoters don’t just feed your pipeline; they validate your value. The goal here is to get them to send more people your way.

Each of these five groups presents the entire marketing function, which is why many firms get lost in marketing. They try to hit each of these groups all at once. Firms experiment with tactics: social media ads, drip campaigns, podcasts, events, etc. only to spread their marketing budgets and time to thin and abandon initiatives before they bear fruit.

Instead, the simplest and most productive question to ask is: Which of the five groups needs the most attention right now?

• If your challenge is that very few new people are finding you, you need to focus on strangers—visibility campaigns, brand awareness, and lead generation.

• If you have plenty of website visitors and followers but few inquiries, the focus shifts to visitors—strengthening your outreach, clarifying calls to action, and offering easy ways for visitors to schedule appointments.

• If you’re booking introduction meetings but very few are converted to clients, the priority is prospects—refining your sales process and better training to communicate the firms value with clarity.

• If referrals are drying up, focus on clients—enhancing service delivery and creating communications that inspire referring their friends.

• If your base of satisfied clients is strong, but you’re not seeing referrals, focus on promoters—formalizing referral programs and building strategic partnerships.

This micro approach creates focus and commitment to where pain is most acute, rather than chasing tactics that may or may not improve any results.

Why Focus Matters More Than Budget

One of the most important insights from marketing research across professional services is that focus, not budget, determines effectiveness. In fact, a 2023 Kitces Research study found that the firms seeing the strongest marketing results weren’t necessarily spending the most money, they were the ones consistently investing in a single channel or approach long enough to refine it. Similarly, research from Hinge Marketing, which studies high-growth professional services firms, has shown that firms who clearly identify and focus on specific marketing priorities grow 3x faster than peers. The differentiator isn’t the number of tactics; it’s the discipline to concentrate on resources where they matter most.

How Focus Produces Results

In our consulting, we’ve seen an interesting phenomenon happen when firms commit to solving one marketing problem at a time: progress in one area naturally improves the others. That’s because marketing operates as a growth loop.

• Boosting stranger visibility increases the pool of visitors who begin following your content.

• Better visitor engagement converts more people into prospects.

• Smoother prospect conversion grows the client base.

• Stronger client journeys create satisfied promoters.

• And more promoters feed new strangers back into the pipeline.

This loop means firms don’t need to solve marketing everywhere at once. The act of focusing on one weak link often strengthens the entire chain. The key is simply to identify where the pain is greatest, fix that stage, and allow the loop to carry the momentum forward.

In other words, each stage doesn’t just lead to the next, it recycles energy back into the marketing engine. By fixing the biggest gap first, firms set in motion a self-reinforcing growth loop where the other stages strengthen as the firm’s commitment to marketing increases.

Pulling it All Together

The danger in marketing, especially for advisors under pressure to grow, is chasing tactics without a strategic focus. Launching a podcast, posting to LinkedIn, or running Google ads can feel productive, but without clarity on which group you’re targeting and why, you create costly distractions that eat your capacity to grow.

The discipline lies in resisting the urge to “do more marketing”, and instead asking: Do we need more strangers, more visitors, more prospects, better client experiences, or stronger promoters? As firms gain traction in attracting strangers, converting visitors, or cultivating promoters, patterns begin to surface around what resonates most with their messaging and who the ideal client really is.

From our experience, the firms that are successful at hitting their growth goals through marketing aren’t the ones trying to master every channel or implement multiple tactics. They’re the ones disciplined enough to create momentum across the entire growth engine by making small, micro improvements in the areas that are falling behind.