By Molly McClure
Financial services firms will debate 20 basis points like civilization depends on it. Yet when organic growth stalls, some RIAs seem willing to bang their heads against the wall before asking whether they’ve actually built the machinery required to grow.
More leads. More referrals. More advisor activity. Maybe another acquisition.
But is the CRM connected to marketing automation? Is there a lead-scoring model? A real handoff process? Does anyone hold advisors accountable for follow-up? Is there a clear ideal customer and value proposition? Is there enough marketing investment to build a brand rather than simply run a few campaigns?
You can’t demand compound growth from marketing if you haven’t invested in the principal.
I’ve spent nearly a decade in financial services in some form or another, across insurance, investments, financial technology and wealth management. It is an industry I genuinely love. It is sophisticated, highly regulated and built around the idea that disciplined decisions compound over time.
Which is why I’ve always found one thing particularly interesting: we don’t always apply that same discipline to marketing.
The RIA industry does not simply have a marketing-spend problem. I think it has a marketing-maturity gap.
And that gap becomes increasingly important as firms chase organic growth, consolidation accelerates and trillions of dollars begin moving into the hands of a changing customer base.
Start With the Budget, but Pay Attention to the Denominator
Cerulli Associates reported in 2026 that RIAs allocate an average of 5% of their total expenses to marketing activities.
The word expenses matters.
Cerulli is not saying RIAs spend 5% of revenue on marketing. It is saying marketing represents 5% of what the firm spends.
For purposes of this discussion, let’s also assume that figure does not include salaries and benefits for internal marketing employees. Cerulli’s publicly available release doesn’t specify, so I don’t want to pretend we know something we don’t.
Even with that generous assumption, consider the math. If an RIA has $2 million in annual operating expenses, 5% represents $100,000 for marketing activities. At $5 million in expenses, it’s $250,000. At $10 million, it’s $500,000.
Those numbers can sound substantial until you consider what marketing may be expected to cover: a website, content, events, sponsorships, paid media, marketing technology, creative, PR, research, SEO, email, social media and outside agencies or consultants.
If you’ve ever priced a website rebuild, a major industry event and a decent agency in the same year, you already know how quickly that money disappears.
For a completely unscientific comparison, a local spa I frequent spends more than $50,000 a year on marketing alone. Sample size: one. Please do not build a benchmarking study around my facial appointments.
But I find the comparison interesting. This is a local consumer business that understands a simple reality: customers do not magically appear because you opened the doors. Creating demand requires consistent investment.
Now look at an industry famous for creating demand.
Gartner reported that consumer goods companies allocated an average of 9.7% of revenue to marketing in 2025.
Revenue. Not expenses.
Cerulli is measuring RIA marketing as a percentage of expenses. Gartner is measuring consumer-goods marketing against the entire revenue base of the business. Those are not directly comparable benchmarks, and I wouldn’t present them as if they were.
But the difference is revealing.
Then consider the people behind the budget. Cerulli found that only 14% of RIAs use a dedicated marketing resource.
This isn’t an argument that every RIA should suddenly spend 9.7% of revenue on marketing. It is an argument that firms expecting meaningful organic growth need to think beyond campaigns and activities.
Marketing is a capability. It requires strategy, people, technology, data, distribution, investment and time. When those pieces work together, marketing stops being something the firm spends money on and starts becoming part of how the firm grows.
But before hiring more marketers, there is another question worth asking.
Before You Hire Another Marketer, Build the Foundation
Is the organization actually prepared for marketing to work?
I once had the CEO of an RIA tell me he didn’t believe in lead generation.
Fair enough. I’m always willing to debate marketing strategy.
Then I learned the CRM wasn’t connected to the marketing automation platform. There was no lead scoring. No defined lead handoff process. No consistent mechanism for tracking what happened after a prospect raised a hand.
That makes it awfully difficult to conclude that lead generation doesn’t work.
You cannot declare the engine broken when you haven’t connected the transmission.
And this is a much bigger issue than technology.
What constitutes a qualified lead? Who gets it? How quickly should an advisor respond? How many follow-up attempts are expected? Who notices when nobody follows up? What happens to the promising prospect who says, “Call me in six months”? Does marketing ever learn which leads became great clients and which were terrible fits?
If nobody owns those answers, adding more leads simply adds more opportunities to lose them.
Before scaling demand, I want a clean CRM and usable data model. I want marketing automation connected to it, agreed lifecycle stages, lead scoring, documented routing and handoffs, advisor follow-up expectations with actual accountability, nurture programs, attribution and dashboards that connect marketing activity to pipeline, assets and revenue.
I also want a closed feedback loop between advisors and marketing. Otherwise marketing keeps optimizing toward activity while advisors quietly decide which leads they like.
Technology cannot solve an accountability problem. Neither can another marketer.
Then there is capacity. If marketing generates 50 qualified opportunities next month, can the advisory team absorb them? Is there a consistent sales process? Can advisors deliver the same value proposition the marketing promised? Can operations onboard those new clients without degrading the experience?
You cannot scale demand independently from the organization responsible for fulfilling it.
This is why a strong marketing leader may spend the first several months doing work nobody will applaud on LinkedIn: cleaning data, connecting systems, defining stages, fixing handoffs, building reporting and creating accountability.
Do it anyway.
Before you ask marketing to prove ROI, make sure you’ve built the infrastructure that makes ROI provable.
Otherwise, it becomes remarkably easy to conclude that marketing “doesn’t work” when the organization never gave it a functioning system in which to work.
And that is a very expensive misunderstanding.
The Basics Are Producing Serious Results
Once the foundation exists, the strategy doesn’t need to be revolutionary.
According to Charles Schwab’s 2026 RIA Benchmarking Study, firms with an ideal client persona, a clear client value proposition and a written marketing plan added 87% more new clients and 127% more new-client assets in 2025 than firms without that combination.
That 127% deserves a second look, particularly because none of those three things is particularly exotic.
There is no shiny new technology involved. No algorithm. No 47-slide transformation roadmap requiring six consultants.
Know your customer. Know why they should choose you. Write down how you plan to reach them.
Marketing 101 still has some fight left in it.
Schwab’s broader benchmarking findings reinforce the point. Its Top Performing Firms grew clients by 12.4%, compared with 4.6% for other firms, and generated 15.3% net asset-flow growth compared with 4.7%.
A marketing plan alone obviously doesn’t create a high-performing business. The more useful insight is that disciplined firms tend to be disciplined across functions. They know where growth is supposed to come from, build infrastructure around it and measure whether it is happening.
Marketing maturity tends to travel with business maturity.
Referrals Are Fantastic, but They Aren’t a Strategy
That brings us to the engine that has powered RIA growth for years: relationships.
Cerulli reports that referrals account for 74% of new-client acquisition among RIAs. That makes sense. Wealth management is a trust business, and trust transfers from one person to another in a way an advertisement simply cannot replicate.
Yet only 51% of firms proactively ask clients for referrals.
Nearly three-quarters of new-client acquisition comes through referrals, but roughly half of firms proactively ask for them. It is a little like identifying your best-performing sales channel and deciding not to bother it too much.
More importantly, receiving referrals is not the same thing as having a referral strategy.
Who is your ideal referral? When should advisors ask? Who makes the request? What happens after the introduction? Which clients and centers of influence consistently introduce prospects who actually fit the business?
If referrals are responsible for most new-client acquisition, those questions deserve an operating model, not good luck.
But there is an even bigger customer question coming for the industry.
Do We Actually Understand the Customer Who Is About to Inherit the Money?
I recently listened to George Nichols III, President and CEO of The American College of Financial Services, talk about the extraordinary amount of wealth moving into the hands of women.
The numbers stopped me.
Cerulli Associates projects that $124 trillion will transfer through 2048. Of the $54 trillion expected to move first between spouses, more than 95% is projected to go to women. Nearly $40 trillion is expected to transfer first to widowed women among Baby Boomers and older generations.
And this isn’t some distant 2048 problem.
McKinsey estimates women controlled about $18 trillion in U.S. assets in 2023 and projects that number to nearly double to $34 trillion by 2030.
So here’s the harder question: is the wealth management industry actually built for the customer who is about to control all that wealth?
That goes well beyond putting a picture of a woman on the website.
Do we understand what women want from wealth management? Are women meaningfully represented in the teams deciding what products get built, how advice is delivered, what the brand sounds like and how the customer experience is designed?
Research suggests the needs are not identical. Cerulli has found that women are more likely than men to prefer advisors who lead with financial planning and broader strategies rather than investments. McKinsey has found greater emphasis among women on real-life financial goals, retirement security, healthcare and longevity, along with a strong desire for a personal connection with an advisor.
There is also a business consequence for getting this wrong. McKinsey has cited research finding that 70% of women change their wealth-management relationship within a year of their spouse’s death.
Think about the economics of that.
An RIA can spend decades building a household relationship, manage millions of dollars successfully, survive multiple market cycles and deliver excellent investment performance, only to lose the assets when the person controlling them changes.
That isn’t just a retention problem. It is a customer-understanding problem.
Good marketing isn’t simply figuring out where to advertise. It is understanding where your market is going before it gets there.
The Great Wealth Transfer isn’t only a transfer of assets. It is a transfer of the customer.
If RIAs are preparing for trillions of dollars changing hands without asking whether their leadership, advisor teams, value proposition, brand and client experience reflect the people who will control those assets, they may be preparing for only half of the transfer.
Which makes the industry’s preferred approach to growth even more interesting.
Have We Gotten Better at Buying Growth Than Building It?
The RIA industry has become remarkably sophisticated at consolidation.
Cerulli reported in 2026 that 54% of RIAs are currently seeking an acquisition. Fidelity recorded 276 completed RIA transactions in 2025 representing $796.4 billion in purchased assets, setting records for both deal activity and assets acquired.
There are plenty of smart reasons to acquire. M&A can create scale, solve succession challenges, expand geography, add talent and bring new capabilities into an organization faster than building everything internally.
But the scale of consolidation raises a question worth asking: have we gotten better at buying growth than building it?
Cerulli has noted that the industry historically focused heavily on inorganic growth through M&A. As firms increasingly turn toward organic growth, gaps in marketing and business development capabilities are becoming more visible.
The contrast is hard to ignore.
More than half of RIAs are looking for an acquisition. Cerulli also reports that 56% lack a cohesive marketing plan, while advisors spend roughly 7% of their time, about three hours a week, on business development. Only 14% use a dedicated marketing resource.
Meanwhile, the industry has built increasingly sophisticated machinery for finding firms, valuing them, financing transactions and integrating billions of dollars in assets.
Building a predictable organic growth engine still has room to mature.
Aggregation and organic growth are not the same thing. Buying another $1 billion RIA makes the organization bigger. It does not automatically make the underlying business better at attracting its next client.
Eventually, every consolidator faces the same question: once you have assembled the firms, what makes the combined organization grow?
That takes us right back to marketing.
More Money Won’t Fix a Fuzzy Strategy
The answer isn’t simply to increase the marketing budget.
A larger marketing budget attached to an unclear strategy generally produces a more expensive unclear strategy.
Before increasing spend, I’d ask some basic questions. Who exactly are we trying to reach? What business problem are we solving? Why should that customer choose us? Where is growth expected to come from? What are we willing to stop doing? How will we know whether any of this is working?
And one increasingly important question: is the customer we built this strategy around the same customer who will control the assets five or ten years from now?
Those questions sound obvious until you discover how frequently they haven’t been answered.
A Weak Brief Can Make a Great Agency Look Average
Eventually, a growing RIA reaches the point where someone says, “We need an agency.”
An RFP goes out, and suddenly the agency is being asked to increase brand awareness, drive engagement, generate leads, modernize the website, improve social media, fix SEO and perhaps cure male-pattern baldness while they’re at it.
The problem usually starts earlier.
If the firm hasn’t clearly defined its ideal client, differentiated value proposition, business objectives, measurement framework and internal capabilities, it is asking an outside partner to solve a problem the organization itself hasn’t fully defined.
A better RFP starts with the actual business problem.
Maybe the firm is entering a new market. Perhaps acquisitions have created multiple brands telling slightly different stories. Maybe referrals are strong but unpredictable. Maybe the firm has tremendous awareness among retirees but needs to build relationships with the next generation inheriting those assets.
Or perhaps its future customer looks materially different from the customer who built the firm.
Give a smart agency that problem and see how it thinks.
I also like asking one question that doesn’t appear often enough in RFPs: What wouldn’t you do?
Anyone can give you a list of things to spend money on. Knowing what not to spend money on is often where experience shows up.
Marketing Is More Than Making Things Pretty
There is another version of the marketing gap that doesn’t show up neatly in benchmarking research. It is how the function itself is viewed inside an organization.
A marketing colleague in the RIA space once told me she received feedback that her presentation slides “weren’t pretty enough.”
I laughed because I knew exactly what she meant.
Presentation matters. Brand matters. Design matters. If your pitch deck looks like it was assembled during a turbulence warning, yes, we should probably fix it.
But marketing is not the department that makes things pretty.
Marketing should help determine who the firm wants to grow with, what makes the business different, where future demand will come from, how the brand earns consideration and which investments are producing growth.
It should also be one of the functions asking what happens when the customer changes.
When the conversation about marketing is dominated by the appearance of the slides rather than the quality of the strategy, that tells you something about the organization’s marketing maturity.
The same misunderstanding can show up in how quickly marketing is expected to produce results.
Give It Time to Build
A campaign launches. New positioning rolls out. Content starts gaining traction. Search visibility improves. The brand begins showing up more consistently.
Then someone looks at the numbers 60 days later and asks, “Did it work?”
Sometimes the answer is already clear. Often, it isn’t.
Financial services should understand this better than almost any industry because the entire business is built around the power of compounding.
Marketing compounds, too.
Awareness creates familiarity. Familiarity builds consideration. Content strengthens search visibility. Consistency creates recognition. Repeated positive experiences build trust.
The prospect who encounters your firm today may not experience a liquidity event, inherit wealth, sell a company or decide to change advisors for another two years. The fact that you cannot neatly attribute that future relationship to one article, event, email or LinkedIn post does not mean those earlier interactions had no value.
It means human decision-making is messier than a dashboard.
This doesn’t give marketing an unlimited runway. Good marketers should establish leading indicators, measure progress, understand what should change and when, and stop doing things that clearly aren’t working.
But firms also need to give the things that are working enough time to build.
Constantly changing positioning, campaigns, agencies or priorities can create the appearance of action while preventing anything from gaining enough momentum to matter.
Ironically, that is another lesson the investment industry already understands quite well.
So What Does Marketing Maturity Actually Look Like?
This is where all of these numbers come together.
The RIA marketing gap is not a debate over whether firms should spend 5% of expenses or 9.7% of revenue. Those aren’t even comparable benchmarks.
The more important question is whether the organization has built marketing into its growth model at all.
If you want marketing to prove ROI, build the infrastructure that makes ROI provable.
If most new clients come through referrals, build a referral system instead of hoping referrals continue.
If trillions of dollars are moving into the hands of women, understand what those women want from advice, service, communication and the advisor relationship.
If acquisitions are driving scale, build a brand and organic growth engine capable of making the combined organization more valuable than the collection of firms underneath it.
If marketing is expected to produce growth, give it the talent, data, technology, budget, accountability and strategic access required to do the job.
And if the strategy is showing the right early indicators, give it enough time to compound.
Marketing cannot be strategically underdeveloped and simultaneously expected to deliver predictable growth.
That matters because RIAs cannot assume existing assets will simply sit still. Cerulli estimates natural asset attrition of roughly 2% to 5% of AUM annually, even before accounting for clients who leave the firm entirely. Regular income withdrawals and one-time distributions accounted for 56% of RIA outflows in 2025.
Standing still is not really standing still. Assets leave. Clients age. Wealth transfers. Customers change. Competitors consolidate. Expectations evolve.
The industry has become extraordinarily good at managing money, building relationships and, increasingly, assembling scale.
The next competitive advantage may be learning how to build demand with the same discipline.
Define the customer, and perhaps more importantly, the future customer. Build the infrastructure. Articulate the value proposition. Build the brand. Systematize referrals. Create accountability. Invest appropriately. Measure what matters. Give marketing a seat at the table while strategy is being formed, not after someone decides the firm needs a new brochure.
Then give it time to build.
The firms that win the next decade will not necessarily be the ones producing the most content, buying the most technology, completing the most acquisitions or hiring the biggest agency. They will be the ones that can turn scale into sustainable organic growth while understanding where their customer is going next.
Because you can acquire AUM overnight. You cannot acquire brand equity, customer understanding or trust overnight.
Those take a thesis, disciplined investment, measurement, consistency and enough patience to let the right decisions compound.
Funny how often the best marketing advice sounds suspiciously like good financial advice.
Research Referenced
Research and statistics cited in this article are drawn from Cerulli Associates’ U.S. RIA Marketplace research and 2026 RIA growth, wealth transfer and M&A findings; Charles Schwab Advisor Services’ 2026 RIA Benchmarking Study; Fidelity Investments’ 2025 RIA M&A research; Gartner’s 2025 Consumer Goods marketing benchmark; and McKinsey & Company research on women and the future of wealth management.
About the Author
Molly McClure is an award-winning marketing executive and the 2025 Gold Stevie® Award winner for Marketing Executive of the Year. She has spent nearly a decade in financial services and currently serves as an executive consultant within the financial services space and Fractional CMO at DrugScreens.com, where she leads brand, growth and marketing strategy.
