While traditional sources of clients like referrals and networking events are still valuable in a financial advisor's toolkit, the world of lead gen has expanded, with a heavy emphasis on digital acquisition.
Our marketing and financial advising team has created this guide to cover all the areas of pipeline building, from clarifying your ideal client profile (ICP) and building your digital presence to leveraging marketing tools and working with lead aggregators.
Lead generation is the process by which financial advisors gain new potential clients, who will with the proper care and guidance become long-term relationships. Prospecting can be done by unpaid means, like ongoing networking or posting on social media, or through paid methods like advertising on Google or buying leads from aggregators.
At some point or another, most financial advisory firms will need to grow their book of business. This can be due to the natural turnover of clients or because the firm is expanding and needs more business for their additional employees – a recent study from Natixis notes that advisors need to add an average of 34 clients each year to meet growth goals over the next three years!
The way that businesses approach growth is nuanced and varies from company to company, but there are some basics of growth that are consistent.
Before diving into lead gen strategies, we need to address compliance. Every marketing activity – whether it’s a social media post, an email sequence, or a paid search ad – needs to align with industry regulations to avoid penalties and protect your firm’s reputation.
Advisors are governed by rules set by regulators like the SEC and FINRA. Two that impact marketing most directly are:
A few best practices for staying compliant:
Compliance may feel like a limitation, but it can become a trust signal. Firms that balance compelling advertising with transparent communication stand out in a crowded marketplace.
Your brand represents who you are as a company and as an individual.
Corporate branding encompasses things like the visuals and colors of the website, the tone of voice across platforms, who the company sponsors and the organizations it chooses to associate with, and what topics the company chooses to write about/highlight/feature.
Personal branding is similar, though on an individual level. Your tone in written content, what you choose to speak about or comment on, where you interact both online and in person, how you present yourself as a professional, your attention to detail and follow-up processes – all of these shape your personal reputation.
Your brand is what helps attract or turn away potential clients when they have had no prior experience with you. It is also what helps people decide between multiple close options; your personal and corporate identity can become the differentiating factor when the services you and a competitor offer are similar.
Branding is powerful and has compounding effects. While individuals may require slightly different follow-ups and nurturing, your overall strategy should remain consistent with your personal and corporate presence.
Once your brand is clear, the next step is defining who that is meant to attract – your ideal client profile (ICP). You likely have a sense of this already; getting specific sharpens targeting and messaging. This will allow you to focus your efforts on the individuals who are best aligned with your services and it also helps when adding lead vendors into the mix.
Although the market for financial advising services is large, not every investor will be the right fit.
Some things to consider when outlining your ICP:
You may find that you have several ICPs and need to adjust your marketing and sales processes for the best outcomes with these distinct groups.
Also keep in mind that ICPs are guidelines to help create a more formulaic marketing and sales flow; however, individual people are unique and may not fit perfectly within the outlines of your ICP(s).
Every business needs to have a follow-up process.
Here’s Advisor.com’s follow-up workflow:
The follow-up process for an advisor or their firm may look different, but speed and having multiple touchpoints are critical. Often, the person to make the first meaningful contact is the one that gets a schedule on the books.
If you don’t make contact with the first phone call, the account has not been lost. You’ll need to continue cultivating that relationship by staying top-of-mind and providing useful information.
We have a blog on how to be successful buying leads that has a dedicated section for nurturing prospects, which is applicable to both leads from aggregators and those generated internally. This includes things like email marketing, a schedule for additional phone calls, and text engagement. We’ll dive into each in the next section of this post.
Marketing models often use a funnel system to represent the consumer’s purchase journey: people first must become aware of your brand, then move into a consideration phase where they evaluate different options, then go into the conversion stage where they’re ready to make a decision.
While people still go through these stages, the stages are less linear than before, which makes it important to have a presence throughout the funnel and feedback loops within each part of it.
The key to creating a growth marketing engine is systematizing as much as you can, so that you, your sales team, your marketers, and anyone involved in gaining and converting leads don’t get mired in creating custom solutions for each potential client.
Financial professionals know that speed-to-dial is important, especially when buying multi-match leads from aggregators (where the same prospect is sold to multiple competing firms). However, there are a number of areas where this process can be refined.
Some consumers may prefer text over calls or vice versa. Try both to see where the responsiveness is, then lean into that area. Your team can also adapt the frequency of calls or texts, as well as the messaging itself.
In Advisor.com’s internal SMS program, we’ve found that people don’t usually respond to the initial text message that confirms their matches (unless it’s to opt out of future texts), but the response rate to a second text a day or two later that asks questions or solicits feedback is better.
Sometimes we intentionally ask questions where we think there’s a good chance of receiving negative responses (e.g. Are you happy with your matches?) with the intent of refining our program.
While the primary goal of phone calls and SMS messages is to get a meeting booked, these touchpoints are also opportunities to check in with potential clients and get a pulse on their sentiment about your brand along the way.
Both texts and phone calls can have a level of automation – texts often more than calls – so that this part of your business functions without much manual input.
Email serves multiple purposes: it is an additional initial touchpoint after or in parallel with SMS and phone calls, it can familiarize individuals with your company, it can provide value that investors don’t get through other channels, and it can help win back lapsed clients.
We have a much more in-depth post on email marketing for financial advisors here, but we’ll cover the basics in the following sections.
There are three main ways of getting people to subscribe to your email list:
In each of these cases, people should be opting in to receiving email communications from you.
We mentioned that Advisor.com uses email welcome sequences. These are usually 2-4 emails spaced out a day or two that confirm a prospect’s matches and share more information about those companies.
For financial advisors, these email welcome sequences can introduce a potential client to your corporate brand and to who you are (if the emails are on behalf of a particular advisor). This is where you lay the cards on the table and share your unique value proposition – what makes your approach different and how you can address this person’s needs.
Any email sequence can and should be templatized and automated. You can always send off an ad hoc email, but it should not be on your sales team to manually send the same email series to every new lead. See our post on the top email tools for financial advisors to streamline outreach.
After the initial welcome emails comes the nurture series. These can range from a few emails to an ongoing weekly or monthly stream.
Nurture emails keep you top-of-mind in a way that provides value. These can look like weekly market updates or quarterly business updates. If your company has a content marketing program with regular blog posts, you can link these in the nurture flows.
Don’t inundate consumers with emails that aren’t worthwhile. No one wants a nudge every few days for months on end asking them to book a call. Nurture sequences tend to be less sales-y and have more of a focus on giving people useful information to their particular goals.
If someone initially reached out for help with retirement planning, your nurture sequence could look like sharing information on how market changes can impact retirement portfolios or how new legislation may change financial planning. For more templatized (less current events) versions, you could share retirement planning tools and calculators or the steps your firm takes in retirement planning.
For people who were once clients but have discontinued the relationship, winback emails can help bring them back to the business.
Approaches can vary, but the goal is to revisit a past relationship by checking in on how things are going with their financial plans and potentially open the door to restarting the partnership.
You’ll want to have a refined email list for sequences like this, as not every lapsed account will be receptive to coming back to the firm.
Research from Broadridge shows that 41% of advisors have seen success in converting social media leads. Advisors can engage social media through unpaid and paid strategies. The goals are usually similar though: build brand awareness and familiarize investors with the value you provide. For a deeper look into all things social media, check out our social lead gen tips post.
The things individual professionals post as well as what the brand accounts share are part of organic/unpaid social media marketing.
Tips:
When you want a boost in visibility, putting sponsored support behind your social profiles can deliver. Social media’s primary goal is visibility rather than immediate conversions, but you can get a mix of the two.
Be sure that any paid ad goes to a landing page with clear CTAs and options for getting on your calendar.
There are two main ways of advertising on social media: you can boost organic posts or run separate campaigns. Boosting organic posts means you put paid support behind a brand or an advisor’s post that has been doing particularly well. Campaigns can be on all the time or you can run them to get visibility on a certain service, like a new offering or a service you want to get more potential clients interested in.
Several social platforms give you the option to run lead form ads, which request a prospect’s information directly within the ad. Other kinds of ads will bring a user to a landing page or an information request form hosted on your website.
If someone has visited your site or interacted with your content but has not yet chosen to work with you, you can remarket to them. There’s this Rule of 7 idea in marketing that a relevant potential consumer needs to see an ad at least seven times before they make a purchase, and social channels are particularly well suited to following up with people who haven’t yet converted.
Running retargeting campaigns can boost awareness and get your company into the consumer’s consideration set.
Paid search is one of the highest-intent marketing channels. People are actively searching for your firm or service, which is not always the case on social media or other channels.
Because of this, wealth management firms must prioritize showing up in Google’s results so that they can capture the demand that already exists for their services.
Paid search primarily functions on keywords. The advertiser defines which keywords they want to show up for and their ads only show when someone searches for those select keywords.
The financial advising space can be very competitive, with rival firms bidding on each other’s keywords. If this is the case for your company, brand marketing in paid search can help ensure that your company shows up when people search for you.
This involves bidding on and showing ads for your own brand keywords.
If you search for your corporate name and don’t see any competitors’ ads, branded search might not need to be prioritized. Presumably, your organic website would show at the top of the search results, meaning you don’t need to be paying for those clicks when you’d get them anyway.
Non-brand paid search is when you bid on keywords that don’t include your brand terms. For financial advisors, keywords like “retirement planning,” “best financial advisors,” and “financial advisors near me” are important.
This kind of advertising helps you capture demand from people seeking financial advice, but who might not know of your brand.
Display and native advertising are the kinds of ads that are intended to blend into their surroundings. For example, if you visit the MSN homepage you’ll see a variety of images and headlines about the latest news stories. Some of these “stories” will actually be ads. They’re labeled as ads, but designed to blend in with surrounding content.
Display ads can be run through Google and Bing, as well as bought from publishing platforms directly or through other ad-serving platforms.
Display ads are often intended to build awareness rather than convert right away. Like social ads, you can create retargeting campaigns that will appear for users who have interacted with your website or marketing in some meaningful way.
Content marketing provides useful and relevant information to prospective clients. It doesn’t usually involve a hard sell, but you can use gated content to get people to sign up for your email list or embed ads within your SEO content.
Content marketing for financial advisors can look like publishing a weekly blog post on topics like wealth management for entrepreneurs, retirement planning for empty nesters, or getting started with investing. These posts can be repurposed for your email nurture sequences.
SEO and technical SEO is about showing up in search engine results. The idea is that you put in the work up front to create the content, and it pays dividends over time as your relevant posts show up in search results where potential clients are looking for your services.
Not to be overlooked in this digital age, in-person methods of business development remain necessary. This can look like networking, partnering with related services (like accounting or law firms), teaching classes, or speaking at conferences.
People like working with people, not automated machines, so having an in-person element can be the difference between new business and a missed opportunity.
This can be more challenging if your firm works with clients remotely, but as a hybrid digital/personal approach, you could consider offering webinars with a Q&A session at the end where you can demonstrate your knowledge and ability to adapt strategies to individual concerns.
Last but not least in our marketing section are the more traditional methods of advertising, that include TV/connected TV and out-of-home (OOH) advertising, which includes tools like billboards or ads on public transportation. These avenues may be more expensive, but can be valuable if your ideal clientele is concentrated in a particular geo.
Even the most creative client acquisition strategy won’t deliver value if you can’t measure results. Advisors need to know not just how many leads they’re generating, but how those leads are converting into booked meetings and long-term business.
Some key metrics to track:
These metrics and more can be tracked with the proper setup, which can include using UTM parameters across advertising landing pages to see which sources are driving the traffic, call tracking software to ensure phone leads are captured and attributed correctly, and CRM integrations to ensure your team has visibility into the lead’s journey.
Once you’ve maximized your internal efforts or if you want to scale more quickly, your financial advising firm may consider building its pipeline with the help of lead vendors.
There is a healthy amount of debate on whether or not buying leads is worth it (see our post on if financial advisors should buy leads). While we at Advisor.com, a lead aggregator service, can’t be said to be objective in this debate, we find that financial advisors using services like ours can have significant success if they operate in the right way.
Working with external partners can be a way to fuel your growth engine quickly and let your team focus on the sales process rather than the marketing. You can also gain more consistent volume, and tailor your contracts with aggregators exactly to your needs.
Some common concerns, like quality (defined by cost per $100K or schedule rates) or not getting the potential clients you want (the right AUM or financial priorities), can be mitigated by having in-depth conversations with vendors before the relationship begins and by consistently sharing data so that your partner can make refinements to their acquisition process. See our post on how to be successful buying leads for all the details.
Although this post is about lead generation, client retention plays a role in that process. Keeping investors content (or delighted if you’re going above and beyond) is one of the best ways to generate referral traffic.
With a large client base, it can be challenging to stay ahead of client sentiment. Sending out experience surveys can help you catch developing situations early or double down on what’s working well.
On the referral side of things, know that people may not recommend your services on their own. It helps if you have a process in place for generating referrals, like having a line at the bottom of an email asking the recipient to forward it to someone who might be interested or bringing up referrals on a quarterly call.
Your firm may also consider offering plan discounts for every referral a current client generates, or implementing some kind of program that rewards them for generating additional business for your company.
The future of financial advising belongs to firms that blend traditional relationship-building with scalable, data-driven lead generation. Whether through brand visibility, nurturing campaigns, or working with aggregators, every touchpoint is an opportunity to earn trust and spark meaningful conversations.
At Advisor.com, we help firms unlock that growth potential by matching them with high-intent prospects who are ready to take the next step. By combining your expertise with a steady pipeline of qualified leads, you can spend more time doing what matters most – building relationships that last.
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