How Financial Advisors Build a Marketing Plan That Actually Works
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Most financial advisors aren’t doing too little marketing. If anything, they’re doing too much.
A LinkedIn post here, a newsletter there, a request for Google reviews that sat in the drafts for six months before it got sent.
The problem isn’t the work. It’s that it’s all tactics without a strategy.
Without a clear model connecting your marketing activities, each piece feels disconnected and returns nothing meaningful to the others. You keep adding tasks to the pile and wondering why your pipeline is still driven almost entirely by referrals and luck.
There’s a better approach. I call it the brand authority flywheel.
What Brand Authority Means for Independent Advisors
Before getting into the model, it’s worth being precise about the word “authority.”
In the advisory space, authority is often conflated with credentials: your CFP, your CFA, your AUM. Those things matter, but they don’t differentiate you. As of early 2025, there were more than 103,000 CFP-certified professionals in the United States alone. Credentials are table stakes.
Real authority, the kind that generates inbound leads, is something different. It means being the most useful, visible, and trusted voice around for a specific type of client. Even when someone gets referred to you, they Google you first. And they need to like what they find.
According to a 2025 Wealthtender study, 96% of people who received a personal referral to a financial advisor said they would research that advisor online before reaching out.
Think about that. Your best referral source sends you a lead. That person immediately goes to Google. What they find either confirms the decision or gives them a reason to pause.
That’s the context in which authority-building work operates.
The Four Spokes of the Flywheel
An authority flywheel has four components, and none operates in isolation. Each one reinforces the others, and over time, the whole thing gains momentum without requiring proportionally more effort.
Spoke 1: Clear Brand Positioning
This is where most advisors skip ahead. They start posting content before they’ve made a clear decision about what they stand for and who they serve.
That’s backwards.
Without a defined position, your content has no consistent signal. Without a specific audience, your messaging gets watered down trying to speak to everyone.
Clear positioning means choosing a niche and a point of view, and being willing to let the wrong prospects self-select out. An advisor who works with women navigating divorce has a clear position. An advisor who helps anyone with investable assets over $500k doesn’t. Both might be equally good at their jobs, but only one is building authority through specificity.
The best place to start is by working through your brand messaging before you do anything else.
What you say about yourself, and how consistently you say it across every channel, is the foundation everything else rests on.
Spoke 2: Consistent Original Content
Content is how you convert your positioning into evidence. While a stated niche is a claim, a body of content about that niche is proof. Advisors who publish consistently, even at a low volume, compound their credibility over time in a way that sporadic posting can never hope to duplicate.
Research shows that advisors with formal marketing plans generate 168% more leads than those without. That gap doesn’t come from spending more or working harder. It comes from having a repeatable system that moves leads through your funnel because trust was built before the first conversation.
Content doesn’t have to be complex. One original video or article each week, grounded in what you know and built around the questions your client is actually asking, is enough. The key is specificity and consistency over time.
Spoke 3: Third-Party Validation
The first two spokes build your “owned” presence (e.g. media no one controls but you). This one extends your reach through “earned” credibility. Getting quoted in a publication your clients read, appearing on a podcast in your niche, or being featured by an association relevant to your audience, these things do something your own content can’t: they signal that someone else vetted you, and they believe in your expertise.
Third-party validation functions as a trust amplifier. When a prospect finds your article in a trade publication or hears your perspective on a podcast, they experience your expertise through a neutral voice. That’s a different level of credibility than seeing you post on LinkedIn or Facebook.
If you’re looking for a great PR team, I only point my clients to Greenrose Communications and StreetCred.
Spoke 4: Social Proof
This spoke closes the loop. After a prospect has found you through content, seen your name in a publication, and self-validated through your website’s clear positioning, the last thing they want before reaching out is confirmation from someone who’s already worked with you.
Fewer than 10% of SEC-registered investment advisers currently use client reviews, even though the SEC’s (no longer new) marketing rule allows advisors to proactively ask for testimonials and spotlight ratings on third-party review sites.
That’s a significant missed opportunity. Advisors who build a proactive review strategy are positioning themselves for massive returns from a channel most of their peers are ignoring. (It’s also fantastic for your local search strength.)
Social proof can include Google reviews, testimonials on your website, or client stories told with specificity. It’s not a “five-star wealth manager” rating from USA Today.
A review that says “I came to Sarah after a divorce, and within six months I was finally comfortable with my own finances for the first time in my life” is a conversion asset.
Why It’s Called a Flywheel
The reason this model compounds is that each spoke feeds the others. Your clear positioning makes your content sharper. Consistent content gives you something to pitch for third-party placements. Third-party placements bring new readers to your content. Social proof validates everything else you’ve done and provides the final proof a prospect needs once they arrive on your website.
Putting It in Motion: A 90-Day Pilot
You don’t need to build all four spokes at once. Here’s a realistic 90-day start:
In the first 30 days, focus entirely on positioning. Get clear on your niche, your one-sentence value statement, and three convictions your firm will return to consistently. If your messaging guide isn’t documented anywhere, that’s the work you need to accomplish.
If you want a structured process for this, a Brand Positioning Workshop can compress months of iteration into a single focused day.
In days 30 through 60, build your content baseline. Create four to six pillar pieces, one per week, on your core niche topics. They don’t need to be 5,000 word essays, but they need to be specific and useful. Publish them, and start distributing on LinkedIn consistently (or whichever social channel your prospects prefer).
In days 60 through 90, layer in spoke three and spoke four. Either hire a PR firm, or identify two or three publications or podcasts relevant to your niche and send a pitch to write an op-ed or be a guest.
Simultaneously, build a simple review request process. If you’re worried about compliance, work with a reputable company like Wealthtender to accomplish this step.
A Website Clarity Check at this stage can help you see whether your site is ready to convert the traffic you’re starting to earn.
The Compounding Logic
Authority doesn’t come from any single piece of content or any single review. It comes from the accumulation of consistent signals across all four spokes, over time, pointing to the same clear position.
You’re not competing on credentials or AUM. You’re competing on clarity and consistency. The advisors who win the next decade of organic growth will be the ones who started building evidence of their authority before prospects went looking for it.
Ready to build your authority flywheel?
Schedule a strategy call and we’ll work through what a focused financial advisor marketing plan looks like for your practice specifically. No generic frameworks, just clear thinking about where your biggest leverage is.