Smaller firms can tap into marketing technologies to gain their footholds in a top-heavy and rapidly consolidating industry — but that entails financial advisors learning some new skills.
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And it also involves moving past some common misconceptions about the difficulty smaller registered investment advisory firms face with their growth potential from drawing in new clients. A smart combination of digital tools and old-school referrals can make a big difference, according to six presentations at last week’s virtual Kitces Marketing Summit 2026.
Those myths include the supposed limitations of reaching clients through social media and search results, even though those channels may appear to be the domain of only huge and highly trained tech mavens.
Five planners and one marketing company founder who recently sold his RIA did point out the necessity of targeting that outreach toward an advisory practice’s ideal clients and investing the time and resources required to understand and test the tools for the best results over time. With organic growth rates falling across the industry in recent years, those costs could pay off many times over with reliable streams of leads with the best potential for conversion. Alternatively, they would at least present data about what didn’t work, so advisors could try something else.
In either case, RIAs can get out of the old mold of competing “head to head with other advisors for really anyone who had money to invest,” said Taylor Schulte, founder of San Diego-based RIA firm Define Financial and, alongside planning entrepreneur and writer Michael Kitces, the co-organizer of their 11th annual marketing conference. He recalled that approach from his first days in the industry 20 years ago at a wirehouse firm.
“I’d sit across from a prospect who was looking to hire an advisor, and my approach at that time was to convince them that we were better than everyone else — we had better products, we had better performance, we had a better team, a better story, whatever it took,” Schulte told nearly 1,000 attendees in the introductory session. “The whole pitch was just, ‘I’m better than the other advisors you might be talking to,’ and sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t. In other words, it was not predictable — which, for me, at the time — it was just making it hard for me to build and scale and really compete in this business and build the business that I wanted.”
To help busy small business owners do that, he and Kitces selected six presenters to explain how to deploy social media, search and referral strategies in a forum without any sponsors, consultants or anyone “here to sell you anything or to tell you what you should be doing with your marketing,” Kitces said.
“Our goal is to make this a day of sharing to show you what some other advisors are actually doing in their practices, and have them share their marketing successes with you — what they are doing in the real world to attract prospects and turn them to clients,” he said. “And my hope is that, in doing that, we spark some ideas for you about how you could better market yourself to your prospects and create some new client growth for you as well, because I’m assuming we’re all here because we want to do something different in how we’re marketing ourselves.”
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Mythbusting organic growth
Part of that revolves around getting rid of notions that can amount to “a mindset issue” about what is possible through a channel like Facebook, according to Jason Hamilton, the founder of Orange, California-based RIA firm Keep it Simple Financial Planning.
For any advisors suggesting that “there aren’t people there that are my ideal clients,” he shared that he is regularly hearing from prospective clients seeking advice on wealth of multiple millions of dollars or tens of millions with the targeted ads available through Meta’s channels. For about $10 to $15 per day, advisors can boost their engagement with prospects significantly — especially among people who have already visited their social media pages, downloaded some of their content or liked or commented on a post. Hamilton netted $12 million in AUM and more than $60,000 in planning retainers over nine months last year through that retargeting strategy.
“I think this is like the lowest-hanging fruit that every single advisor should be doing, and it’s one of the cheapest ways to do marketing, and, for me, it’s been really effective,” Hamilton said. “I do put out content, but this strategy is about making your content live longer, get in front of the right people, and then help them find ways to connect with you through consultation calls and other things.”
Another misconception is that advisors can only reach young through social media. For instance, Nate Hoskin, who is now focusing on the advisor marketing video firm he co-founded, SageContent, after selling his RIA, began getting so many responses from prospective clients through his video marketing strategy that he had to reduce his client headcount. Even so, he more than doubled his former practice’s annual revenue to $650,000 in 2025 through his social videos and raising his demand to the point that he could lift his fees.
“I managed to meet with pretty much every different client demographic over the course of about four years,” Hoskin said. “I actually had a call on a Saturday morning with someone who was the elected financial head of 30 families across a three-generation family tree. They represented $178 million, and they wanted one financial advisor who could give them economies of scale and really bring the fees down for the entire family. That lead came from TikTok, so that just blew my mind. I told him no, I was like, ‘Dude, I’m 24, I have no idea what this trust is, I’m not the person for you.’ But I was blown away that someone would be vetting advisors on TikTok to make a decision of that scope.”
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Finding the niche
While outreach from an estate of that size would never be the norm, advisors can set themselves up to receive the highest-quality leads by carefully calibrating their messages to a niche. Katherine Fox, the founder of Portland, Oregon-based RIA firm Sunnybranch Wealth, uses Instagram videos that each speak to questions or topics that are important to current or future inheritors of wealth who are “primarily young women who just don’t feel like they have space for them,” she said. Over a year, she hosted 70 intro calls and picked up $19 million in new assets under management, as well as $175,000 in additional revenue.
“They are unattached, they are delegators, but the problem that I have to overcome with my content is that they are also highly suspicious and distrustful of the financial advice industry at large,” Fox said. “The way that I connect with my audience is by creating content that builds that parasocial relationship and really making my ideal client avatar feel seen and feel like I understand their problems. … I focus on talking about trust, talking about rich-kid guilt, estate planning, tax planning, family money relationships, budgeting as a current or future inheritor, and inheriting generally being hard. So, some of these are technical financial planning topics, and some of them are just thoughts and feelings, but all of them flow up into the content planner that I use to really get at what I want to talk about, what it says about me and how I’m going to catch the attention of my target client.”
One aspect of drawing that attention these days involves showing up in web searches and large-language model answers to AI chatbot users, as well as deploying a time-honored niche in the form of a geographical advantage. Local search engine and AI optimization methods enabled Shaun Melby, the founder of Nashville-based RIA firm Melby Wealth Management, to prosper as an example of what the Kitces marketing program described as “an intentionally solo lifestyle practice,” to the tune of an average of 10 new clients each year for the last seven.
In Melby’s presentation, he pointed out how the phrases “financial advisor in Nashville” and “fee-only financial planner in Nashville” appear all over his RIA’s website. His firm now ranks higher than some of the largest in wealth management in Google searches with those terms, but that started with doing research through the company’s free keyword trends tool.
“That’s not by accident. That’s very intentional and by design,” Melby said. “Before I optimized my website, I needed to learn what people are actually searching for, so I knew what to target. So this is a kind of hypothetical list, because I wasn’t sure if local was the way to go or if niche was the way to go, and I kind of figured out, well, there are enough people searching for financial advisor in Nashville, Tennessee, that you can kind of build a business over it.”
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Building a website and a referral pipeline
Smart, but not necessarily pricey, website design can pay big dividends for advisors using them to home in on a niche. Corbin Blackburn, a Cleveland-based principal with RIA firm Tempo Wealth, and his two business partners used long-term referrals and targeted content to add more than 100 new planning clients and more than $200 million in AUM in roughly the first year of the strategy, he noted. The firm’s website clearly speaks to that niche, down to landing pages for the employees of specific large employers.
“Everything we do is focused on this niche that we work in, and that’s really what’s created the baseline of referrals to start from,” Blackburn said. “The content and the automated pieces have kind of ratcheted that up as we’ve gone along, but you can see on the front page very clearly saying the type of people we work with. In particular, I’d highlight down here where we list a few of the companies where we have a deep presence at. So, while our niche is corporate executives with stock compensation, we have three companies where we have over 100 of their executives working with us.”
Since referrals remain the largest driver of new business, many RIAs could benefit by incorporating new technology tools into their efforts to nudge clients toward recommending friends and family. Radnor, Pennsylvania-based RIA firm Presilium Private Wealth drew more than 100 referrals and $100 million in AUM in 2025, for the largest one-year expansion in the company’s history — thanks to reaching out to clients and setting up a Zoom meeting to discuss their satisfaction with the services and suggestions for improvement, according to CEO Jerry Davidse. The top priority for the conversations was how “to make their experience better and better understand how we could serve them,” Davidse said.
The RIA’s staff follows up with a summary of the roughly 15- to 30-minute meetings, a handwritten thank-you note, a phone call to talk about the next steps if the clients mentioned anyone they knew who may benefit from the company’s services and updates on implementing their feedback, among other correspondence with the customer base.
“We had four main goals in mind when we started this process,” Davidse said. “We wanted to strengthen our client relationships. We wanted to get direct, honest feedback from our clients on how we can improve. We wanted to talk with our clients about how we want to help more people just like them, and we wanted to give clients a way to tell us exactly how they feel, exactly how their experience has been and know that we’re open to that feedback at any point.”
