Kitces has made available for download their article, “Measuring The ‘Best’ Marketing Strategies And The Second Kitces Research Study On Advisor Marketing”, published on Kitces. The Executive Summary begins as follows:
One of the largest hurdles for many financial advisors is not in developing the technical skills to be able to give good advice to clients, but in learning how to engage effective marketing strategies that are essential to growing and sustaining a successful advisory firm. Unfortunately, this struggle to attract a critical mass of prospective clients to actually pay for an advisor’s services has resulted in a very high attrition rate in the advisory industry (as high as 70% in the first three years). Accordingly, there has been a great deal of attention on identifying the ‘best’ marketing strategies for financial advisors to help them grow their businesses.
However, there have been surprisingly few studies exploring effective marketing practices in the financial advisor industry over the past years. Which is why we launched the first Kitces Research Survey on Advisor Marketing in 2019, to identify the marketing strategies financial advisors are really using that work (or not), what tools, technology, and systems advisors use, best practices in the most popular advisor marketing techniques, and what advisory firms really spend on marketing (including hard-dollar marketing costs, tools and technology, and staff support). Our study revealed that, while some of the most popular marketing strategies actually being used by advisors were those that required a large investment of time (such as establishing relationships with COIs, social media, and other forms of networking), many of these popular time-based marketing strategies turned out to be among the least effective at using the firm’s resources (i.e., time and money) to generate new clients. Conversely, strategies with comparatively modest investments of time and dollars (like SEO strategies and paid web listings) were far less common among the advisors surveyed in the study, yet ended out having the lowest Client Acquisition Costs!
To read the full report, click: “Measuring The ‘Best’ Marketing Strategies And The Second Kitces Research Study On Advisor Marketing”
Posted by Anthony Tran, Associate Editor, Wealth Strategies Journal
Wealth Strategies Journal 