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Kitces' Research on What's Actually Working in Advisor Marketing

Presenter: Mark Tenenbaum, Research Director, Kitces.com
Host: Tom Dickson, Financial Experts Network
Original Air Date: October 1, 2026
Run Time: Approximately 1 Hour, 22 Minutes
Topic Area: Advisor Marketing, Practice Management, Organic Growth

Key Takeaways

• The true cost of advisor marketing averages approximately 8% of revenue when both hard-dollar expenses and the value of advisor and staff time are included.
• The typical practice in both the Kitces and Financial Experts Network research samples spent approximately $0.70 to generate $1 of new annual client revenue.
• Marketing strategies should evolve as firms grow. Below $1 million in revenue, time-intensive tactics can be more cost-efficient; above $1 million, scalable tactics relying more on fixed costs become increasingly important.
• Trust is a major differentiator. The research found stronger results from in-person seminars versus webinars, in-person networking versus social media, and video or podcasts versus written content.
• More marketing tactics aren't necessarily better. Higher-growth practices tend to concentrate their efforts around an anchor tactic supported by one or two complementary strategies, while continuing to accept referrals.
• High-growth firms generally reinvest more of their profits into growth, resulting in lower senior-advisor take-home income than comparable firms that aren't growing as quickly.
• Client referrals remain important, but firms that rely too heavily on them may eventually encounter a "referral coasting zone" as established clients exhaust their networks.
• Google Reviews and other third-party review sites are relatively underused but were associated with stronger growth, particularly when reviews were also used as website testimonials.
• In-person seminars emerged as one of the research study's most underutilized marketing opportunities, although results varied significantly based on execution.
• New AI and digital prospecting tools may appear inexpensive, but their true cost needs to include the advisor and staff time spent reviewing, editing and following up on generated outreach.

What Does Advisor Marketing Really Cost?

Mark began with a deceptively simple question: How much are advisors actually spending on marketing?

Looking only at the firm's P&L can significantly understate the answer.

The typical advisory practice spends roughly 2% to 3% of revenue in hard-dollar marketing costs. But those expenses represent only about one-third of the total cost.

Another approximately 5.5% of revenue represents the value of advisor and staff time devoted to marketing.

Combined, the typical firm's true marketing cost is approximately 8% of revenue. These results were remarkably similar between the Kitces and Financial Experts Network advisor samples.

That distinction matters because advisor time becomes increasingly valuable—and scarce—as a practice grows.

A Useful Benchmark: $0.70 to Generate $1 of New Revenue

Kitces Research measures marketing efficiency using revenue acquisition cost: how much a firm spends to acquire each additional dollar of annual new-client revenue.

For both the Kitces and FEN audiences, the typical revenue acquisition cost was approximately $0.70 for every $1 of new annual client revenue.

That's particularly interesting because advisors don't necessarily feel successful at marketing.

During the webinar, 71% of FEN attendees responding to a poll said they weren't pleased with the results of their marketing investment. Yet Mark noted that the underlying economics tell a different story: many advisors are acquiring recurring annual revenue for less than one year's value of that revenue.

Four Principles for More Effective Advisor Marketing

1. Your Marketing Needs to Change as Your Practice Grows

The marketing tactics that help an advisor build a young practice may become inefficient later.

Below approximately $1 million in annual revenue, tactics requiring significant advisor time tended to have lower acquisition costs. Newer advisors generally have more available time, and that time has a lower economic cost.

Once practices move beyond $1 million, the relationship flips.

Advisor time becomes more constrained and valuable, making strategies dependent on personal time harder to scale. Larger practices may benefit from shifting toward tactics that rely more heavily on fixed costs, technology, advertising or other people.

The lesson isn't that a particular marketing tactic is universally good or bad.

Its effectiveness may depend partly on the stage of the practice.

2. Marketing Is Ultimately About Trust

The second major principle was one of the clearest throughout the research:

The tactics that successfully establish or transfer trust tend to perform better.

Client and center-of-influence referrals are obvious examples. A prospect already trusts the person making the recommendation, and some of that trust transfers to the advisor.

But the same pattern appeared elsewhere.

Seminars vs. Webinars

Among advisors who used webinars for client acquisition, 65% failed to gain a single new client from the tactic during the prior 12 months.

For in-person seminars, the failure rate was approximately 25%.

Mark's interpretation: while both formats allow advisors to demonstrate expertise, an in-person environment is generally more conducive to establishing trust.

Networking vs. Social Media

The difference was even larger here.

Approximately 80% of advisors attempting to gain clients through social media failed to acquire even one new client from it during the prior year, compared with roughly 30% using in-person networking.

Written Content vs. Video and Podcasts

Written tactics such as blogs, newsletters and third-party articles also experienced relatively high failure rates.

Advisors were more successful with content that allowed prospects to hear or see them, particularly podcasts and YouTube videos.

The research suggests that hearing an advisor speak may help prospects establish trust in a way that written words alone don't always accomplish.

3. Focus Your Marketing Instead of Doing Everything

Should an advisor be blogging, podcasting, posting on LinkedIn, hosting seminars, networking, buying leads, sending direct mail and running digital ads?

The Kitces research suggests that more isn't necessarily better.

Practices using four or fewer marketing tactics grew faster and more cost-efficiently than practices pursuing five or more.

Mark suggested building around an anchor tactic and then adding one or two complementary strategies.

For example, a firm might:

Direct mail → Seminar → Newsletter follow-up

The seminar is the anchor. Direct mail fills the top of the funnel, while the newsletter continues building trust among attendees who aren't yet ready to schedule a meeting.

Referrals continue alongside that system.

The objective isn't to do less marketing. It's to concentrate resources on fewer tactics and execute them better.

4. Standout Growth Requires Investment

High-growth firms weren't simply discovering free marketing tactics that everyone else had missed.

They were reinvesting more into growth.

Across practice sizes, senior advisors at the fastest-growing firms tended to take home less income because more firm profits were being reinvested into marketing and growth initiatives.

That creates an important distinction between firms that say they want growth and firms willing to fund it.

Client Referrals: Valuable, But Don't Coast on Them

More than 80% of advisors in both the Kitces and FEN samples accepted client referrals, making referrals one of the industry's dominant sources of new business.

But there is a potential problem.

Early clients begin with untapped personal and professional networks. Over time, many of those clients refer the people they know who might need an advisor. Eventually, that referral pool can become depleted.

Mark called the resulting dependency the "referral coasting zone."

High-growth practices weren't necessarily receiving fewer referrals. Instead, referrals represented less than 40% of their new clients, because 60% or more came from other marketing activities. Among practices without standout growth, referrals represented 60% or more of new clients.

How Can Advisors Generate More Referrals?

The research identified several interesting strategies.

First, make your work visible.

Advisors perform significant "shadow work" clients may never see—such as reviewing a portfolio and determining that no changes are necessary. Client service calendars can help communicate that ongoing value, and advisors using them received more referrals in the research.

Second, don't necessarily ask clients directly for names.

The research found that more frequent direct requests for referrals were actually associated with fewer referrals.

Instead, advisors can naturally communicate that referrals are welcome.

Third, give clients clarity about who you serve. Advisors with a defined client persona received more referrals, and communicating that ideal persona both verbally and on the firm's website was associated with additional referrals.

Google Reviews May Be One of the Easier Opportunities

Only about 13% of advisors were actively using third-party review sites, but adoption is growing rapidly.

Among those using them, 89% used Google Reviews.

Practices encouraging clients to leave Google Reviews showed stronger growth than those that didn't use third-party review sites, while firms that both collected reviews and incorporated them into their websites as testimonials showed the strongest growth within this comparison.

Mark's practical takeaway was straightforward: advisors should consider claiming their Google Business profile, establishing a compliant process for requesting reviews, and appropriately using testimonials on their websites.

Importantly, he cautioned advisors not to cherry-pick only their happiest clients when soliciting reviews and recommended working with compliance professionals when developing the process.

Don't Overlook Seminars

Kitces Research identified seminars as potentially the most underutilized advisor marketing tactic.

But simply hosting a seminar doesn't guarantee success.

The more successful seminar marketers generally held them consistently—from approximately quarterly to as often as once or twice per month—and were more likely to promote them through:

• Paid direct mail
• Purchased lists
• Local community organizations

They were less dependent on existing email lists and social media.

Why?

Because the objective was to put the advisor in front of new people, not repeatedly market to people already familiar with the firm.

What About YouTube, TikTok and AI?

The results for digital marketing were more nuanced than simply "social media doesn't work."

YouTube stood out because it functions as a discovery engine. Content can be shown to people who have never heard of the advisor. The potential upside can be enormous—but Mark emphasized that relatively few firms successfully break through.

In the Q&A, Mark also noted that YouTube and TikTok had the strongest success rates among the social/video platforms examined, which he attributed in part to their discovery algorithms.

For newer AI and digital prospecting tools such as Finny AI, Identified and Catchlight, the research doesn't yet have enough adoption data to compare individual platforms confidently.

Mark cautioned advisors to include the time spent reviewing and editing AI-generated communications when evaluating their true cost. Kitces expects to examine these tools more closely in its upcoming technology research.

Practical Application for Financial Advisors

Rather than asking, "What new marketing tactic should we try?", the research suggests several potentially better questions:

What does our marketing really cost after including our time?

Which tactic is the anchor of our marketing strategy?

Are we spreading our resources across too many disconnected tactics?

Does our marketing allow prospects to build trust with us?

Are we overly dependent on referrals?

Has our marketing strategy evolved as our practice has grown?

Are we willing to reinvest enough in growth to achieve the results we want?

Perhaps the most important finding is that advisor dissatisfaction with marketing doesn't necessarily mean marketing isn't working.

The research suggests that many advisory firms are already acquiring recurring revenue at attractive economics. The opportunity may be less about finding the next new marketing idea—and more about measuring true costs, concentrating resources on the strategies that work, and building a marketing system capable of scaling with the practice.

Research Resource

Kitces Advisor Marketing Research: Mark noted that the complete Kitces marketing research report provides additional methodology, tables and analysis beyond the findings presented during the webinar. The research also includes more detailed results across individual marketing tactics.

Research Note

The findings discussed in this webinar describe associations and benchmarks observed in the Kitces Research data and shouldn't be interpreted as guarantees that a particular marketing tactic will produce the same results for every advisory firm. Effectiveness may vary based on practice size, target clientele, execution, market, costs and other factors.