Essential Digital Marketing Assets for RIAs
John Swystun
RIA organic growth systems | Fully-managed digital marketing/lead gen | Turnkey talent/software/design/ad spend/web dev/content = dead simple | Compliance focused |???Secure Your Free Exec Workshop Below ??
Does your RIA want to win? To grow? To dominate a local market or heck, even at a national scale?
A your struggling to find a foundational structure for your digital marketing that is MORE than just mashed together tactics and media?
For RIAs aiming to navigate the complexities of the digital landscape successfully, building a comprehensive suite of digital marketing assets is paramount. These assets form the backbone of a robust digital marketing strategy, enabling RIAs to attract, engage, and convert prospects into loyal clients. Below, we outline and define these essential assets, highlighting their importance and function within the broader digital marketing ecosystem.
1. Market Research and a Digital Marketing Plan
Definition: The foundation of any effective marketing strategy begins with thorough market research and a detailed marketing plan. This involves understanding your target audience, competitive landscape, and the unique value proposition of your RIA.
Your digital marketing plan should include:
(TAM/SAM/SOM = total available market, serviceable available market, serviceable obtainable market)
Importance: This plan guides all of your digital marketing efforts, ensuring they are targeted, strategic, and aligned with your business objectives and also paints the way for reporting to and collaboration with your senior executive.?
Benefits: Having a robust plan that covers these basics, and is continually updated is critical. It helps align all team members and stakeholders and provides a central document and reference to help communicate the vision, objectives, and activities.
Most importantly, the plan outlines how responsibilities will be shared, performance will be measured and evaluated, and changes are made. Critical to the plan is an outline of how senior executives, decision-makers, and budget holders will be involved. A cadence for always-live reporting, weekly reporting, monthly updates, and quarterly business reviews (QBRs), that works with the schedules of leadership, is critical to the success of any and all digital marketing initiatives.
Implementation: The development of the digital marketing plan should be a collaborative effort, but it should be quarterbacked by seasoned and professional digital marketing experts that have a wide-sweeping view and understanding of the landscape. This means that a plan written only by social experts, SEO experts, or paid ad experts will not meet the requirements for the generation of true performance. A generalist who has reasonably deep experiences in all three types of online media (owned/earned/paid) MUST lead the development of the digital marketing plan.
Additionally, modern project management tools MUST be used for both the development of the plan and project management (tasks, timelines, GANTT charts, KANBAN boards, etc.). A Word Doc or Google Doc is not sufficient for this task. A modern project management tool such as ClickUp, Notion, Smartsheet, or other must be used.
A well thought out and sufficiently thorough plan should take between 1 to 2 weeks to complete, but should be a living, breathing, always updated document. The plan should be built in an "agile sprint" (typically 2 weeks), alongside the execution of several other fundamental tasks (e.g. listings improvements, online reputation planning, technical site optimization planning, etc.).
2. Account Fundamentals, Tech Stack, IT Infrastructure
Definition: A comprehensive tech stack including Webmaster tools like Google Search Console ad Bing Webmaster, Google Analytics, Google Business Profile, Ad Accounts, Google Tag Manager, social media accounts, and other essential software tools for landing pages, client management, email automation, and more.
This also includes your domains, your email sender reputation, your IT infrastructure, your DNS records, your CRM and accompanying integrations, your iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service), your SEO software, your ad performance software, your social media scheduling and performance analysis software, your online reputation software, etc.
Importance: These tools are crucial for monitoring website performance, managing digital presence, and optimizing marketing campaigns. Based on our research, most RIAs and their offices barely have 5% of the account stack required to drive true performance from a diversified digital marketing portfolio.
Benefits: Managing, analyzing, and reporting on digital marketing activities and performance is difficult and requires a multi-platform approach PLUS senior managers with the technical ability to weave everything together into a truthful, valuable, and meaningful story, in order to assist with decision-making and goal-setting.
Particularly important are the benefits of a properly integrated digital marketing tech stack. For example, many firms attempt to run Google Ads before setting up and integrating the full tech stack, which leads to terrible performance leaks and budgetary waste. In order to drive ad performance, a Google Ad account must be configured properly, but also integrated with many other platforms that are all setup and configured properly, including but not limited to Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager, YouTube brand accounts, contact list databases, and others. Without proper setup and integration, the ad platform struggles to optimize your spend, because it cannot tell who is converting, how and why, when, and what future audiences should be served ads to maximize performance.
Failures here are the most common and ubiquitous in all of digital marketing. So much so that you have probably heard many professionals assert that spending money on online ads is like "flushing money down the toilet". Auxesys can 100% confirm that this is false. In every case where money was "wasted" on ad, either the account stack and integration was lacking (e.g. no conversion tracking), the strategy and tactics were poor (e.g. no material offers and funnels), or both.
Implementation: Again, this MUST be executed on by seasoned professionals. Attempting to delegate this to juniors without experience across all of these tools and platforms is destined to result in failure and waste.
The initial setup of the core of the tech stack can be done by professionals in as little as two weeks, or a single agile sprint cycle. Subsequent sprint cycles must be used to optimize and adjust.
Done well, the proper configuration and integration of your digital marketing tech tack is destined to become one of your RIAs MOST VALUABLE assets.
Risks and Mitigations: While poor setup and integration can lead to waste and poor performance, the largest risks are info and cybersecurity. If these accessing accounts are not properly set up, with adequate control and governance, along with "break glass" accounts for recovery should anything be compromised, then your RIA will risk having sensitive business data, or even customer data, leak on the web or even to bad actors. Proper setup, integration, and IT management is essential for mitigating these risks.
3. Digital Listings
Definition: Accurate and optimized business listings on digital directories and platforms, including local business directories. For example, your firm's and offices Google Business Profiles (THE most critical), but also profiles on social media, Yelp, Manta, Mapquest, Tupalo, Foursquare, and with key business listing aggregators.
Importance: Great online listings enhance online visibility and findability, making it easier for potential clients to discover your RIA and advisors. But more importantly, having a high volume of accurate and consistent business listings is an extremely strong signal to online search algorithms (which constantly crawl these listings in an attempt to associate them with your business). It's a signal that your RIA is likely to please search engine users, thus improving your ability to rank high and generate organic "discovery" impressions and clicks on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
Benefits: Excellent listings management boosts performance across nearly all channels. Listings are a force multiplier and waste reducer across your digital marketing portfolio. Done properly, and accompanied by excellent SEO in other areas (on-page, off-page, and technical SEO), great listings will help to more quickly build your RIA's "domain authority" and organic traffic. Great listings increase your RIA's ability to generate "discovery" search performance. Discovery search performance is realized when audiences are able to find your RIA and RIA offices by searching for your services and their benefits - as opposed to "Direct" searches, where audiences find your firm by searching for its name, employees, or specific products.
Implementation: Listings excellence is some of the lowest hanging fruit in all of digital marketing. One route is to manually identify all of the key listing locations and business data aggregators, claim your profiles and submit your data, then work to maintain their accuracy.
A simpler approach is to use software. While there are several solutions for this on the market, Auxesys uses the Auxesys Business Centre to sort out listings in less than 48 hours. First, we input an RIA's listing data in the Business Centre. If there are multiple offices, we turn on "multi-location management" in the Auxesys Business Centre and complete the input of all listing data for each of these offices. Then we turn on Listing Sync Pro, which goes out across the web, claims profiles, and pushes the centrally-managed listing data out to all of these listing locations and the key business data aggregators. From there, where possible, Listing Sync Pro continually works behind the scenes to continually keep listing data accurate and synced. If a phone number, address, website, or name changes, we change the data centrally, then Listing Sync Pro works its magic to push these updates out wherever possible. Human intervention requirements are not zeroed, but minimized.
Risks and Mitigations: Inconsistent information or neglected listings can lead to decreased search engine rankings and poor user experiences. Failing to actively manage these listings may result in missed opportunities to capture organic traffic and potential leads.
As consolidation trends continue, listing info can change, leaving a trail of digital refuse in the wake of an RIA and its offices. This risk can be effectively mitigated with the well-managed use of listing sync software.
The use of listing sync software is not without its own risks. Issues and inconsistencies can arise, each platform has its own nuances, and some platforms are unavailable for automated syncing. However, with proper management by specialists, including regular monitoring of listings scores (we do this with Listing Sync Pro and the Auxesys Snapshot Report), these risks can be largely mitigated.
4. Online Reputation
Definition: The collective perception and reputation of your RIA's brand online, shaped by reviews, testimonials, social proof, trust signals, brand identity, and overall fit and finish.
Importance: A strong digital reputation builds trust and credibility, influencing the decision-making process of potential clients. When the elements of a strong online reputation are nailed, they have a cascading effect on not only the rest of the digital marketing portfolio, but also on sales and operations.
For example, a 5-star review average and 50+ reviews on a Google Business Profile will:
These gold stars are an incredibly powerful psychological trigger, for older and younger generations alike.
Implementation: For RIAs and their offices, the SEC New Marketing Rule opens the doors for the "solicitation", "adoption", and "promotion" of digital reviews on first and third party sites. However, each RIA must work with their compliance team to understand the nuances of FINRA and local state securities regulators. In preparing to launch a review solicitation initiative, an RIA MUST be proactive, and understand the SEC's requirements for disclosures, representation of reviews, and any comments on performance.
Solving the online reputation issue is not something that can be done in a 2-week sprint cycle or even a single quarter. This must be an ongoing initiative, with buy-in from across senior leadership, compliance, and offices/advisors, along with ongoing collaboration to push changes and continually manage the initiative.
For RIAs that get the green light from compliance, and are able to prepare their disclosures and response strategy, the difficulties do not stop there. Next comes the SEC's "no cherry picking" rule. This rule states that an RIA CANNOT begin its review solicitation of said reviews by "cherry picking" the set of clients most likely to provide favorable reviews. Unfortunate, as this tempting strategy is employed with great success by professional services firms in many other industries. The RIA must devise an approach that requests reviews from ALL clients at once. Additionally, the RIA MUST adhere to the regulation surrounding "entanglement": namely, the RIA CANNOT materially influence the content or scores of the reviews clients submit (i.e. no asking for 5-star reviews allowed, and no suggesting topics or angles for the writers).
From here, more problems arise. If your firm solicits 3rd party reviews from its entire client book (e.g. on Google Business Profile), and receives poor or lackluster grades, there is little that can be done to change this (most platforms present an average review score to visitors).
A better approach is to use a review solicitation and management tool specifically designed for SEC-regulated firms, such as Amplify Reviews (Auxesys partner and our tool of choice on client accounts). A tool like Amplify helps streamline the process of requesting first-party reviews.
An RIA can then "soft test" its entire client base. If subpar averages come back, it's back to the drawing board. It's time for quality control, and a strategy to circle back in the future. The RIA must strategize to improve the quality of their services and their clients' satisfaction. If stellar reviews are received, it's time to publish and promote those reviews on "owned media" (e.g. website, landing pages, emails, etc.).
Next, it's time to move to 3rd party reviews. Building a plan to not bother clients again too quickly, but to eventually get out a request for Google Business Profile reviews (and eventually, Facebook, Yelp, Clutch, etc.).
This can be scary. But if a firm has the alignment, the buy-in across the org, and the strategic and executional excellence...
...this can be ROCKET FUEL.
Once those first rounds of 3rd party reviews are up, it's time to work the disclosures, adopt the reviews, and testimonials across earned, owned, and paid media, and build a plan to continually request reviews from the entire client book (i.e. any new clients that come on MUST get a review request).
Essentially, once an RIA commits to this path, there is no turning back. But the fruits are well worth the efforts and the risks.
Risks and Mitigations: There are several strategic avenues an RIA may choose, each with their own inherent risks.
In summary, pursuing an excellent online reputation, committing to the initiative, believing in its benefits, and understanding its risks is NOT for the faint of heart.
This is a strategy best left to the true Hyper Boutique RIA. If your firm does not have ambitions of best-in-class growth AND service, then Auxesys would (likely) recommend that you steer clear.
5. An Optimized Website
Definition: A website optimized for mobile devices, with excellent "core web vitals", that adheres to best practices in design, user interface, user experience, and conversion rate optimization (CRO).
Importance: Having a website that is optimized for mobile is critical because:
Many RIAs and wealth management offices have beautiful looking websites, many which even load very quickly on desktop devices. However, the vast majority are being punished by search engine algorithms because of slow mobile speeds.
A website's technical performance is known as its "core web vitals". Search engines score and rank websites on their core web vitals because it is critical to their success to deliver users websites that please them, and fast, high performing websites are always more likely to please users.
Great design, user interface, user experience, and conversion rate optimization are also extremely important. Most RIAs and wealth management offices have websites built with the 90s and 2000s in mind, when websites were simply viewed as digital brochures.
Nowadays, a great website is so much more. If a "discovery" user makes their way to your website (i.e. they were not searching for it directly, nor clicking on a link in your email), then the website is playing a very important role in the "modern client journey". That user is likely at the "reputation" stage of the journey, trying to determine if adding your firm to their long list or short list, for more serious consideration, is a good idea.
Modern websites are designed to do just that. They are built with language and conversion optimization principles that increase the likelihood that visitors will see value, be driven to take action, build the trust in you to take action, and have potential barriers or objections addressed or minimized.
Great design, user interface, user experience, and conversion rate optimization all work in unison to achieve this, but so much more is needed. The site needs to be designed with a journey, or flow in mind. A "discovery" user usually scans the home page, scans the about page, then scans the team page, RARELY heading to the contact page. This means that online "offers" need to be presented across the website.
Currently, the most common "offers" (if we can even call them that) are "Get Started", "Learn More", "Contact Us", and "Book a Free Consultation". The offers DO NOT CONVERT AT HIGH RATES. This is because visitors see very little up front value presented in these offers.
A great offer LEADS with the value the visitor will receive and highlights the dream outcome they might be in pursuit of. You can read more about these offers in #6 and #11 below.
For this section, it is important to understand that a great website loads fast on mobile, has brilliant design and UI/UX, and has a smart flow, with compelling offers appearing throughout.
A website with these elements is one that can actually contribute to top line growth in a meaningful way, as opposed to simply being an online brochure.
Implementation: An excellent service provider can usually solve technical issues and optimize mobile speeds in 2 to 4 weeks. Sometimes solving these issues takes a bit of coding, the use of some plugins, and/or some extra software. Other times these issues must be resolved by "migrating" the website(s) to a new website hosting environment. In some cases, rebuilding a site from scratch may even be the smartest solution.
Improving UI/UX can vary, depending on the current state of your RIA's website, taking anywhere from 1 to 3 months, with most of this time spent in back and forth, delivering design adjustments to decision makers in search of approvals. And if your RIA is in pursuit of being a Hyper Boutique RIA, these efforts are executive in unison with efforts to improve these elements for every office's website on your team, if there are multiples. This can be an arduous process, but if there is buy-in and synchronization, these efforts can be executed smoothly and rapidly.
The most difficult element of these improvements relate to the flow of and offer present on your site. Turning your website into a piece of the machine that turns cold audiences into paying clientele takes a comprehensive and strategic approach to reengineering the entire digital marketing portfolio, so that everything fits together hand-in-glove.
Risks and Mitigations: Each situation and plan comes with its own risks and mitigations.
6. High Converting Web Pages, Landing Pages, and CTAs (Calls to Action)
Definition: High converting web pages, landing pages, and calls to action (CTAs) are specifically designed elements and pages that guide visitors towards taking desired actions, such as signing up for a newsletter, scheduling a meeting, or downloading a white paper. These elements are crafted to maximize user engagement and lead conversion rates.
Importance: Web assets that actually convert users into actionable leads, and eventually clients, directly impacting growth and revenue generation capabilities. Strategically engineering a modern client journey, with multiple points of conversion, which each have high conversion rates, can be an incredibly powerful asset for an RIA.
Currently, most RIAs have a single website, with no "offer" presented in the hero section (the section at the top of the website viewable at first load - i.e. 100% of your web traffic will see this). Commonly, these hero sections consist of "clever", ethereal, jargony headlines, strange pictures of boats and handshakes, and CTA buttons labeled "Get Started", "Learn More", or "Book a Free Consultation".
THESE TYPES OF PAGES AND CTAS DO NOT CONVERT.
In order to truly generate and capture demand, your RIA needs much more than a website. It needs to strategically send traffic to offers, marketed on landing pages, with high conversion rates, with analytics and tagging/tracking/remarketing technology, and nurture activities that kick off after the point of conversion. This is essential to maximizing value and plugging leaks at each stage of the modern client.
Benefits: Well-crafted CTAs and optimized web pages increase the efficiency of online marketing investments by improving conversion rates. They effectively guide potential clients through the decision-making process, enhancing user experience and satisfaction.
Implementation: Moving from a "digital brochure" approach to websites, to a modern approach which generates serious conversion rates can be a murky and difficult process. This is the intersection of art and science, psychology and design, the left brain and the right brain.
If your RIA is already predisposed to this concept and has expert guidance, designers, and developers that can assist with the transition, then it could happen in as little as six weeks. However, if you do not have this guidance and functional expertise, this transition can take years and be marked by waste, inefficiency, and frustration.
The process begins with mapping out the modern client journey. Your firm must build offers that align with several stages of the client journey (e.g. an awareness-stage offer, a reputation-stage offer, and a consideration-stage offer). This can take anywhere from 2 weeks (with great guidance, buy in, and dedication), to 6 months (with nitpicking, trepidation, and no guidance).
Once the concepts of the offers are fleshed out, web design and UI/UX comes next. Again, this can take anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 months.
The truth here is that the design is the easy part. It's the collaboration between digital marketing service providers (or internal staff) and your senior decision makers that is the tricky part.
Risks: Poorly designed CTAs and web pages can lead to high bounce rates and low conversion rates, wasting potential traffic and reducing the effectiveness of digital marketing efforts. Overly aggressive or misplaced CTAs can also detract from user experience, potentially harming the brand's reputation.
Let's explore the risks of the three scenarios:
You're building a bucket full of holes.
The RIA channel seems nearly convinced that this is not the case, but Auxesys can assure you it is (we've proven it in many other industries). The RIA situation is admittedly bleak - after crawling and analyzing over 2,000 RIA pages across the US, we did not find a single page that meets modern best practices for high conversion.
So of course RIAs would be doubtful. Almost all have had website forms that receive barely any submissions from prospects (but plenty from Russian bots and SEO sales folks).
The mitigation is shockingly simple. Engineer offers that audiences see value in and build websites, landing pages, and CTAs that users actually want to convert on (see more on user psychology in the CRO section below).
The difference between a 0.1% conversion rate and a 3% conversion rate can indeed have a shocking effect on pipeline and top-line growth.
2. Project to implement high-converting pages: Speed matters more than quality (see the CRO section). This work should be a sledgehammer blow, not fine finishing work. Get something decent up fast, then continuously improve it in iterations. Doing this work comes with two primary risks:
3. High-converting pages in place: The problem-solution cycle of business is real (solutions to old problems create new problems). With high-converting pages and a modern client journey, the problem of "what to do with the leads" rears its head. If your team isn't completely aligned and in unison here, you can completely shoot yourself in the foot.
Reaching out to leads with outbound email or a phone call, too early in their journey can be off-putting. It's as though you were shopping for a TV, pleasantly surprised when the salesperson left you alone when you said you were "just browsing", only to have them descend on you when you found a TV you were interested in. With digital marketing leads, you need to stay top of mind and ready to support, but avoid overt pressure. The TV salesperson who stays on the floor and is easily findable when you do decide you have a question for them, is the one who gets the sale.
Failing to monitor CRM or marketing automation tools, and not following up quickly enough can lead to missed opportunities and waste.
And poorly engineered sales handoffs and RevOps (Revenue Operations) can suck the value and momentum out of any previous conversion events.
The mitigation here is to develop a sales approach that is integrated with the digital marketing approach. This involves coaching and training advisors on the differences between digital marketing leads and referral leads, the differences between an MQL (marketing qualified lead) and an SQL (sales qualified lead), and the manner in which marketing leads will enter the sales pipeline, and how they should be handled, by which advisors (RevOps).
Process flow design and diagramming is incredibly important here, to help understand the touches and their order, especially as a prospect enters the sales pipeline. For example: was the lead generated by an advisor's pages and therefore handed off to him or her immediately? Or were they generated by the RIA's digital assets? If so, do they get screened, qualified, and matched with an advisor for a meeting? Or do they simply get assigned to an advisor in the CRM?
THIS is the actual hard work. Building web assets that actually convert is the easy part.
In client engagements, Auxesys has arrived at this problem often. We have worked with many client firms who were impressed to see so many conversions and leads come in, but were unwilling to put in the difficult work required to build a RevOps program and process. A great marketing service provider can certainly help your conversion problems, but building a serious RevOps program is something an external service provider can only assist slightly with and make recommendations on. At the end of the day, this transformation takes buy-in, vision, grit, and hard work from senior leadership, down through every element of the organization. And even one advisor or office, who is not willing to learn how to manage pipeline deals or make proper notes in the CRM, can have a terrible effect on performance.
These are the nuts and bolts of "enhance synchronicity and foster independence", two of the key features of a Hyper Boutique RIA (from the introduction section). How does an RIA build a program that doesn't feel tyrannical to advisors, but still ensure advisors are handling leads from digital marketing properly? This is no simple feat. For inspiration, we would recommend looking to the SaaS (Software as a Service) space and the history of RevOps for inspiration. This industry has applied your "money brain" to their digital marketing and it has brought them to this problem: high conversion rates and a too manly leads problem. They had to invent RevOps to solve this problem and have been working on the theory and practice of RevOps ever since.
7. SEO, Blog Content, and your "Domain Authority"
Definition: SEO strategies involve optimizing your website (and increasingly social media, and other online assets) and its content to rank higher in search engine results. This includes producing high-quality blog content that targets relevant keywords and topics, enhancing both the breadth and depth of your site's content.
There are three main types of SEO:
Importance: SEO and content are fundamental for building your RIA’s "domain authority," which is a measure of credibility and relevance in your industry, affecting search engine rankings and visibility. Without solid SEO and search performance, you will be unable to fill your modern client journey with enough prospects to drive performance. Great SEO is one of the primary ways to drive awareness for your RIA and its advisors.
The two most critical things to understand here are:
However, RIAs can move much faster than the giants and they have the ability to hone in on market needs and desires that banks and wirehouses simply cannot activate.
RIAs can master the fundamentals of great SEO (digital listings and online reputation) and create content that speaks to:
The thought process of audience members in the earliest stages of the modern client journey (namely the awareness stage, which breaks down further into unaware>problem aware>solutions aware>solutions provider aware). An RIA can use SEO to hyper target audiences exhibiting behaviors that indicated they could be RIA prospects, in a way that a bank or wirehouse never could. For example, an RIA could produce a blog post and supplementary video about the problems caused by inheritance, targeting long tail keywords like "what to do with a big inheritance".
The differentiating value of working with an RIA and independent fiduciary advisor. RIAs and their IARs have an opportunity to really drive home, through content and through search channels, the fact that their practice is based around a real, human relationship with a dedicated advisor.
2. Discovery search: Discovery search is when a user finds you by searching for your services, approach, or even the problems you solve. Users are either performing a "navigational" search (looking for information on problems and solutions), or a "transactional search" (looking for information on products or services they may purchase).
Currently, most RIAs generate almost none of this sort of search performance, almost exclusively generating "informational" search performance: the result of audiences searching for your firm name, advisor names, or specific product names.
It is easy to generate "informational" search performance. Much harder to generate "navigational" and "transactional" search performance ("discovery" search performance). But it is not so hard that it cannot be done.
Most RIAs are spending some money on "SEO", without the fundamentals nailed and with poor technical and on-page SEO (this gets into the weeds, subscribe to our YouTube channel for more detail on these). This results in almost zero "discovery" search performance.
Done well, discovery search performance can far outshadow direct search performance. For example, Auxesys recently worked with a $3B AUM RIA to analyze their search performance. On the surface, their website had seemingly decent performance. It was gorgeous, had TONS of content on it, a LOT of money had been spent on it, and it seemed to be generating performance. 9,000 users in 5 months!
What we found was that most of those users were from direct traffic (clicks on emails and newsletters). All said, the website was generating about 600 clicks per month from the search engine (known as organic traffic). And 99% of those clicks were "informational" (users searching by firm or advisor name). In other words, these visitors were folks that already knew who the firm was.
This means that for all that effort on the website, and all those impressive metrics, the website was actually doing next to nothing to generate awareness with new audiences and contribute to new client acquisition.
With a very reasonable effort on SEO: nailing the fundamentals (listings and Google Business Profile reviews/testimonials), solid technical SEO, and on-page SEO work (ensuring that blog posts are updated to include discovery search terms in a way that pleases the search engine), then this firm could easily generate 5X, even 10X more "discovery" search than "informational" search.
In other words, it IS possible to turn your website into an awareness driving machine. A key tool for filling up the tank of your growth engine. The firm in question could EASILY generate 3,000 clicks per month from audience members becoming newly aware of the firm, because they were searching for the problems, solutions, services, and style the firm had to offer.
Instead, the firm in question burned through digital marketing dollars, only to generate almost zero meaningful performance. This is the "Matthew Threshold", from the introduction, in action. With a relatively small change in approach and investment, RIAs can break through the threshold, and turn their websites from net negatives, to net positives.
Benefits: Effective SEO and regular, optimized blog content attract more organic traffic to your site, reduce acquisition costs, and establish your firm as a thought leader in the financial industry. This leads to increased trust and client engagement.
Serious discovery performance especially, along with a strategic approach to the ongoing management of the website, can make a serious impact on the awareness stage of the new client journey, introducing many new potential clients to your services. If handled well, this large increase in the number of people made aware of your firm can have a serious positive impact on its ability to generate new business.
Implementation: SEO is multifaceted and cannot be "implemented" on a whim. Let's break down implementation piece by piece:
This is the effect of digital marketing compounding, and why it is so sad that RIAs have failed to apply their "money brain" to their digital marketing (they are expert in the concept of compounding, but have failed to understand its importance in digital marketing).
A firm that nails its fundamentals, nails technical/on-page/off-page, and commits to ongoing "deposits", chipping away at building backlinks and slowly improving "domain" authority, will be a firm that wakes up in a decade to find that outsized traffic, awareness, and ROI are stacked and compounded over time.
Risks and Mitigations: Let's walk through the most common risks and mitigations:
1. Skipping SEO fundamentals: Failing to get digital business listings in order and proactively improve online reputation result in serious punishment from search algorithms. This is a huge risk because many RIAs inadvertently believe that they can still chase "SEO" without these (see the image below from a recent Auxesys strategy session request). Below is an example of a question we ask on our lead gen forms, along with a common answer.
Unfortunately for this firm, search engines don't care about case studies like they care about reviews and testimonials. If they do not change their tune and get serious about online reputation, they are likely to dump resources into digital marketing with poor, or even negative ROI.
The sad but honest truth is that, for most RIAs, unless they are going to get serious about these two fundamentals, no other digital marketing efforts will have a serious impact (admittedly, there are outliers like Ritholtz Wealth Management, who have poor listing grades and online review grades - but firms like Ritholz have been blogging and developing celebrity-like status for over a decade).
But for the "non-outlier" firms (99% of the RIA space), digital listings and online reviews are the handbrake on performance. Firms can try podcasting, paid ads, cold outbound, lead gen and appointment setting agencies, and many other strategies, but are destined to always feel like nothing really works.
This is because search engine activity is online connective tissue. If your firm doesn't generate organic search performance and come up looking like roses in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), then it will forever sit in the shadows of so many alternative options who do not suffer from these issues.
The only mitigation against these issues is to fix listings and reviews, and look compliance in the eye and say "if we want to win, we need to proactively figure this out", then roll up your sleeves, together, and get to work on figuring out the SEC New Marketing Rule, FINRA implications, and the restrictions in place from your local securities regulators.
Note from the author: There is a recent prediction, gaining popularity with many SEO laggards: AI will completely change the game and make search engines obsolete.
This is a soothing notion for RIAs who know they have been behind the 8-ball for so long. Maybe they can catch that next wave! These RIAs are excited about AI, have executed some serious post-COVID digital transformation, and feel confident about their ability to "master AI" to transform how financial services are delivered.
Unfortunately for them. SEO is so fundamental that if they missed the SEO wave, they are unlikely to perfectly catch less fundamental and much more nuanced waves, like AI-driven contextual search and chat. In other words, pleasing AIs is likely to be harder (and weirder), not easier, than pleasing search algorithms.
While I will fully admit that Google's dominance on search is likely to wane (and that they will inevitably be dethroned), and even the way we search and find online will change drastically, an important fundamental is being missed here: AI is overwhelmingly trained on Search Engine Optimized content. SEO content has permeated online content so deeply that it is inescapable. Therefore, whatever search engines reward, AI will also reward. Whatever search engines understand and assess more easily, AI can also understand and assess more easily. AI is currently being trained to recognize all the same traits that search engines reward, with a calculus which predicts how likely content, or a business, is to please its users.
So please, if you are tempted to utter "we don't need to worry about SEO and search engines, because AI is about to change the game", please, do yourself a favor and change course.
Yes, SEO and the tools for searching and finding will change. However, the need to show users (and machines) things that will please them, will not.
2. Ignoring Google Business Profile: This is a massive risk that almost all of RIA has fallen victim and not mitigated.
The mitigation is simple. Develop a tight working relationship with compliance and a shared understanding that you must collaborate to figure this out. Honestly, if your compliance cannot wrap their heads around this, replace them. Failure to get serious here could literally put the future of your firm at risk.
Author's note on Google Business Profile and online reviews: In May of 2023 I attended Wealth Management's RIA EDGE conference. It was fantastic.
However, I attended every topic on growth I could, and what I heard about the SEC New Marketing Rule, digital marketing, and compliance frightened me. It was a shocking signal that RIA has totally lost the plot on how far behind they are, the risks if they continue, and the work required to correct course.
At one point, I even heard a senior leader proclaim that you should "bring compliance cookies" to help win them over, so they will be more likely to approve your social media posts.
Pure childishness at best, an abdication of your fiduciary duty at worst.
I can say with 100% certainty that getting serious about Google Business Profile reviews and testimonials is THE #1 ONLINE RETURN ON YOUR DOLLAR (Just hit up Tim Goodwin at Goodwin Investment Advisory and ask him).
Cookies, gifts, and bribes are gonna get you walloped. What you need to do is work with compliance to help them understand the upside of nailing GBP reviews, and the downside of the "sit and wait" approach.
After witnessing the shocking performance effects of assisting clients with building fantastic GBP reviews, we are confident that this one factor is going to be the biggest predictor of future online success, and firms who manage to break free of the organic growth issue currently gripping the RIA space.
3. Ineffective/insufficient SEO investments: The primary risk of ineffective SEO investments is one of waste. The primary risk of insufficient SEO investment is poor performance in the awareness and findability stages of the modern client journey. And the hallmark risk of this scenario is that new client acquisition and growth is greatly diminished, because prospects with the intention to find solutions, find your competitors and not you.
The best mitigation for RIAs is to develop an integrated SEO strategy, with the help of seasoned experts, and commit to its continuous improvement, over the long term.
4. Intelligent SEO investment: The primary risk of intelligent SEO investment is a lack of integrated strategy. Yes, great SEO can drive reach and traffic, and even influence conversion. But without CRO (conversion rate optimization), high-converting landing pages, serious offers, funnels, email and SMS nurture sequences, and RevOps (the integration of marketing, sales, client satisfaction, and operations), even the most intelligent SEO efforts will struggle to make a serious positive impact on business.
The best mitigation here is to have a robust and integrated digital marketing strategy, and to master the elements of the micro environment as laid out in Section 2.
8. Social Media Accounts and Content
Definition: Active presence on relevant social media platforms, complemented by a strategy for regular content publication and audience engagement.
Importance: Enhances engagement and brand awareness, providing a channel for direct communication with your audience. Social media is also key to building trust and likability with modern prospects.
Benefits: Done well, great corporate social media expands your RIA's reach, allowing you to be introduced, organically, to audience members who might not otherwise have found you. In this manner, excellent social media increases trust and the likelihood that your firm and advisors win the "Zero Moment of Truth". When integrated with a great downstream client journey, excellent social media can increase meeting requests, show-up rates, close rates, and average time-to-close, which in turn, can seriously impact new client acquisition and organic growth.
Implementation: If your RIA already has a social media presence, bringing it up to best practices can take as little as two, two-week sprint cycles. This effort includes auditing of profiles, auditing content and engagement, adjusting and optimizing each of these, and improving scheduling and publication processes.
If your RIA does not already have a social media presence, getting up to speed can take anywhere between two and six months. Your initial foray into social media can be arduous, as many stakeholders (from compliance to senior executive) weigh in (everybody LOVES to have an opinion on social media, while almost no one is expert in it).
Regardless, implementation is continuous and requires the development of a consistent posting schedule that aligns with your audience’s most active times. You will also need a content generation approach: The ability to continuously craft and repurpose content that adds value, and that encourages interaction and sharing.
Risks: Inconsistent or poor-quality content can damage brand reputation. Neglecting user engagement on social platforms can lead to missed opportunities for connection and feedback. Mismanagement of social interactions, especially negative comments or reviews, can rapidly harm your firm’s reputation. And excellent social media can be offset by habits that algorithm's constantly punish (for example, regularly posting links to competing platforms.
The central mitigation for these risks is to align your RIA's social media activity with the goals of each social media platform. And generally, the goals of each social media platform are simple: to keep users on the platform for as long as possible, and coming back as often as possible.
Too often, we see RIAs endlessly sharing market update links, canned articles, and technical content. This habit results in diminished reach and poor performance, as the algorithm learns that its goals are not supported by the content or platform's use. A great rule of thumb: "Write for people, optimize for the algorithm".
As an additional mitigation, your firm needs a variety of content types. Posting too much about your business and services and suggesting that audiences connect with you to learn more or schedule calls is likely to hurt your reach (because audiences often skip over this content, which tells the algorithm that its goals are not supported). Your RIA needs social content that:
9. Tagging, Tracking, and Remarketing
Definition: Tagging and tracking involve the deployment of technology to monitor interactions on your website and digital properties. This data is then used to retarget previous visitors with tailored advertisements based on their behavior and interests.
Importance: These tools are essential for personalizing marketing efforts, leading to more efficient ad spend and improved campaign performance. By understanding user behavior, RIAs can craft more relevant and impactful marketing messages.
Benefits: Proper implementation of tagging, tracking, and remarketing significantly enhances the effectiveness of digital campaigns. These strategies not only boost conversion rates by keeping your brand top-of-mind but also increase customer engagement by providing relevant content that addresses the specific interests and needs of potential clients.
Implementation: While setting up all the accounts and integrations required for tagging, tracking, and remarketing can be accomplished in a two-week sprint cycle, it's the ongoing management and continual improvement that is key.
This element of your marketing portfolio needs to be tightly integrated with other elements of your strategy. For example, if you have no way to drive traffic at scale to your tagged owned media, then the true benefit of the technology will be lost. It takes significant traffic to websites and landing pages in order to assist the machine learning of the ad platforms with audience expansion and "lookalike audience" building.
So while you should have a tagging, tracking, and remarketing strategy in place, it can take months to drive value from it. But it compounds. Once you have regular traffic visiting tagged pages with high conversion rates, along with a mechanism to rotate ad creative (to reduce "audience fatigue"), the power of conversion tracking and remarketing begins to snowball.
Risks: While powerful, these strategies come with privacy concerns that must be navigated carefully. Users are increasingly sensitive about how their data is used, and failing to adhere to privacy laws can result in significant backlash and legal challenges. Additionally, without precise targeting and constant monitoring, remarketing efforts can lead to ad fatigue and wasted expenditures.
Furthermore, best practices and regulations in this area are constantly changing. For example, you may be aware that 3rd-party "cookies" will soon be no longer allowed.
The best mitigation against these issues is to ensure that you have technical expertise on your team, whether it be internal, contract, agency, or growth partner.
Unfortunately, this is a realm where explaining the fine details to senior leadership and compliance takes unfeasible amounts of bandwidth. You will need to ensure you have experts who can assure compliance and legal data use, can continually update and improve your data strategy, and explain the high-level basics of your RIA's tagging, tracking, and remarketing to almost anyone on your team.
10. Basic Local Ads
Definition: Local ads are targeted advertising campaigns specifically designed to reach the geographic vicinity around your RIA’s physical locations to boost local awareness and client engagement.
Importance: For RIAs with physical offices, local ads are crucial in driving foot traffic, phone calls, website visits, and form submissions, while also enhancing local brand visibility, directly contributing to local client acquisition and community presence.
Benefits: These campaigns increase local visibility dramatically, making your firm a well-known name in its vicinity. Effective local advertising can quickly generate leads and clients from the community, providing a quick return on investment.
Implementation: Getting local ads up and running can be done in less than an hour. However, Auxesys recommends several important items are covered off first, if you want to avoid waste.
First, local ads should only be launched after tagging, tracking, and remarketing technology and best practices are in place.
Next, local ads will only perform to their full potential if they are accompanied by a fantastic online reputation. In other words, if you have no reviews or testimonials on your RIA's Google Business Profile, we recommend that this is handled first. And as outlined in previous sections, this can take anywhere from one month, to well over a year.
Risks: Local advertising requires careful budget and bid management to avoid overspending. Without proper setup, these ads can attract clicks from non-relevant audiences, increasing costs without yielding beneficial results.
The best mitigations here are to ensure that your fundamentals are in place (e.g. tagging/tracking/remarketing and online reviews) and that your ad accounts and campaign types are configured and managed by experts.
Online reputation also represents a massive risk to ad performance. Auxesys has identified this pitfall as rampant in the RIA space - where offices pay for sponsored local ad spots, while having few or poor review ratings. These firms are actually paying to actively erode their firm's goodwill and public perception.
Take a look at this screenshot from Los Angeles for example. MAI Capital is paying to run local ads, connected to a Google Business Profile that has been configured to show the business as closed, while also only having 1, 5-star review. This is a shockingly common scenario.
The mitigation here is to ensure that ad spend is not wasted by properly configuring the Business Profile, ensuring that it is optimized, and by executing a playbook to furnish it with high quality reviews and testimonials.
11. Digital Offers
Definition: Digital offers, specifically designed for different stages of the modern client journey, such as whitepapers, ebooks, webinars, or "strategy sessions".
Importance: These offers are pivotal in an effective lead generation strategy, serving as a gateway for prospects to engage deeper with your RIA, providing their contact information in return for valuable content.
Ideally, your RIA will develop an "offer suite". These are rinse-and-repeat, value first offers, put in front of an online audience, each designed for a different stage of the modern client journey. Together, each of these "funnels" together with the traffic sources and nurture sequences, form a "full funnel".
But the key to a performant funnel is individual pieces that work to drive conversion rates up. Hero sections, headlines, subheadings, calls-to-action, and other pieces all work towards this goal.
Done well, these funnels:
Benefits: By offering high-quality content, RIAs establish themselves as authoritative and knowledgeable, enhancing brand trust. These assets aid in nurturing leads through the sales funnel by continuously providing value, increasing the likelihood of conversion.
Implementation: Develop comprehensive content that addresses the specific needs and pain points of your target audience. Utilize engaging landing pages with clear, compelling calls to action (CTAs) to encourage downloads or registrations. Ensure the content is high quality and reflects your firm's expertise and values.
Building and launching digital offers can take anywhere from two weeks to two months.
Risks: The key risk here is misalignment between the content offered and the audience’s needs or expectations, which can lead to poor conversion rates and potentially damage the firm's reputation. In order to perform well, the entire digital marketing strategy and portfolio must be integrated. Your audience needs to feel a strong sense of "congruence". For example, the landing page must deliver on the CTA in the ad or social page that got the click. The webinar must deliver on what was promised at the point of signup. And the initial meeting with an advisor must fit hand-in-glove with the online journey that brought your prospect to that point.
The mitigation here is daunting. It requires a massive step change in how RIAs view, and invest in, their digital marketing efforts. Driving serious traffic to and conversion from online offers is no simple feat, and even small degrees of disharmony can cause waste and poor performance. Serious budgets, integrated assets and activities, and the assistance of seasoned experts is required.
12. Advanced Ad Accounts with Advanced Configuration
Definition: These are sophisticated ad setups that use advanced features within advertising platforms to target and optimize campaigns more effectively than standard options allow. Google, LinkedIn, Meta, X, and others have extremely robust ad management software and configuration options. In fact, this software is the core of their business model and monetization (if you wonder what they are monetizing, they are monetizing YOUR organic social activity!).
Leveraging advanced ad types (like Google Performance Max), advanced features (like audience expansion and "lookalike audience" builders, advanced tools (like keyword building and analyzing), advanced data integration, and advanced targeting tools are all central components of building a highly performant, long-term ad strategy.
Importance: Advanced configurations are critical for maximizing the impact and efficiency of an RIA’s paid advertising efforts, allowing for better targeting, ad placement, and budget use.
Benefits: Enhanced targeting capabilities ensure that ads are shown to users most likely to convert, thereby improving overall campaign performance and ROI. Advanced settings also allow for detailed performance tracking and more effective budget allocation.
Implementation: Building up to the effective use of advanced ad takes time, and is wrought with potential pitfalls. For example, many ad agencies will jump straight to advanced ad products like Google Performance Max. However, to avoid waste, experienced agencies and ad professionals will tell you that you need to build and prime audiences AND the ad platform machine learning, before moving into more advanced tactics.
Based on our experience at Auxesys, moving through all the key stages of a well-executed, multi-platform ad playbook, and arriving at a steady state for performance (cost-per click and cost-per lead optimized, steady number of daily conversions, predictable return on ad spend etc.) takes between 4-7 months, and is dependent on many variables.
Risks: The complexity of advanced ad configurations can be daunting and may require specialized knowledge or external expertise. Incorrect settings can lead to suboptimal outcomes and increased costs without commensurate returns.
13. A Full Funnel Build
Definition: A comprehensive marketing funnel that integrates ad traffic, landing pages, remarketing, conversion events, email nurture sequences, and consultations towards the goal of moving audiences towards client acquisition.
Importance: Ensures a seamless journey for prospects from initial awareness to becoming a client, optimizing each touchpoint for conversion. Done well, a full-funnel build has all the assets and activities required to meet audience members wherever they are in the modern client journey, and persuade prospects to allow your RIA/office/advisor into the ongoing conversation inside their mind.
Perhaps most importantly, almost no one in the RIA space has anything close to this (transparently, we are still conducting research and have yet to turn over every stone, but so far, no luck).
The RIA space, and wealth management vertical in particular, seem to aggregate into two buckets. Most RIAs have no serious offers, landing pages, or modern funnels fed with multiple traffic sources.
A few RIAs seem to have read a sampling of digital marketing theory, and have assembled some tactics together. But tactics do not make up an integrated strategy, and integrated strategy is a requirement of online performance. For example, we have found many RIAs and wealth management firms with "lead magnets", guides to retirement, online calculators, regular webinars and online events, and more. However, upon deep investigation (pretty cool what we can uncover with digital marketing analysis tools), we find several problems:
a) Too many offers to drive meaningful traffic. Offers need healthy levels of traffic to be validated and continuously improved. Eight separate guides to financial management on your website, with no landing pages and CRO principles, will spread your marketing efforts thin.
b) No paid ad supporting the offers.
c) Paid ad, but ad copy and visuals that are missing principles of conversion (i.e. we've analyzed this ad and based on our experience, we know it is missing the core components which drive conversion and performance).
d) Insufficient follow-through and nurturing.
e) A "Minimum-Viable Marketing" approach consisting of thinned out copy, short landing pages, confusing emails, lack of congruency and harmony, and no continuous improvement. Many junior and inexperienced digital marketers adhere to a "coats of paint" approach to digital marketing: do a little bit, see if that is good enough, and if not, do a little bit more. Experienced digital marketers with deep experience in modern professional services marketing can tell you with firm resolve: this approach simply does not work.
Benefits: By building an offer suite and supporting it with a full-funnel build, RIAs can improve conversion rates at every step, enhance overall client experience, and ensure a steady flow of new leads and clients (so long as their marketing engine is well integrated with sales efforts and operations). A full funnel approach also helps in understanding client behavior and refining marketing strategies over time.
Implementation: Building out a full-funnel, like the one in the diagram below, can be executed in as little as 30 days - but it can be a BIG push (a large component of the digital marketing cliff-change outlined in the introduction above).
However, in professional services, a great full-funnel can never live up to its full potential unless it is well-supported by rock solid fundamentals (digital listings, online reputation, core web vitals, optimized social, etc.).
And unfortunately, many RIAs are lacking in the fundamentals.
So if your RIA is ready for a digital marketing cliff-change, and you can build buy-in and alignment between ownership, executive, middle-management, compliance, functional staff, and vendors, then executing this entire "cliff-change", with a full funnel build being the crown jewel, nested upon a foundation of rock-solid fundamentals...
...Implementation can be done in as little as two months.
RIAs who struggle with this buy-in, alignment, and confidence may experience a "failure to launch", or should we say "failure to surf" effect, forever attempting to paddle out to the break, but being pushed back to shore by insurmountable waves.
Risks: The biggest risk of building a multi-stage funnel like the one in the diagram below, is failure to adopt a "lean" mindset and commit to continuous improvement. To build a machine like this, you need some wicked blows with a "sledgehammer": strong intuition, fast and effective research, quick concept ideation, fast design and development, and a swift launch. But a sledgehammer will only get you so far. In order to truly generate performance, you need to move immediately to the "finish work".
This work involves continually analyzing each step in the process flow with a "min-max" mindset. Where are the opportunities to maximize performance? And where are the leaks which must be minimized?
This iterative approach can be resource intensive, but comes with two primary benefits:
Risks: A full funnel build like this is admittedly complex and requires constant oversight and management and professionals. Left unchecked, minor performance leaks can eat away at ROI and budgets. Every single touch point, landing page, click thru, email, call-to-action, and more, represents a point that MUST be continuously optimized to get the whole machine working properly.
Many agencies and businesses attempt to build such funnels, but adopt a "set it and forget it" attitude. Then, after enough time has elapsed to gauge ROI, they decide that the approach doesn't work. Simply put, they are wrong. The approach works, to that we can attest. But it requires the utmost care and respect.
The best mitigation against these risks is to ensure you have a dedicated team of technical and creative experts building and managing your offer funnels, and that you have an exec-level interface that can help your leadership team understand what is being done and why.
14. And Beyond - State-of-the-Art and Advanced Assets
A digital marketing portfolio must be dynamic, adding new assets and adjusting the balance as the state of the industry and best practices evolve. Advanced assets include online events, high-caliber rich media (extensive corporate photo and video), complex automated cold outbound, leveraging 3rd-party data sources, and relationships with hyper-focused service providers.
Part of the reason why RIAs have struggled to master digital marketing transformation, despite their successful digital transformation in the realm of operations, is the sheer pace with which the industry advances. Balancing between strong fundamentals, fad avoidance, and keeping current is a skill which requires deep experience. Advanced assets can be incredibly high-performing and valuable, but rarely do they produce positive ROI when assets 1 through 13 are not in place and well-optimized. In other words, don't go spending 6 figures on corporate video if you don't have high-performing marketing channels required to drive performance from it.
Reduce Taxes, Create Passive Income, and Live a Life of Freedom | Financial Architecture for Loan Officers and Business Owners
2 天前Solid advice! RIAs need systems, not just scattered tactics. ??
Executive Communication & Speaker Coach for Wealth Managers & Bitcoiners | I help Wealth Executives inspire actual change through mastering their mind, developing their story, and amplifying their inherent confidence.
2 天前I know this for RIA, but I could use this for my own biz. Endless value here John.
RIA organic growth systems | Fully-managed digital marketing/lead gen | Turnkey talent/software/design/ad spend/web dev/content = dead simple | Compliance focused |???Secure Your Free Exec Workshop Below ??
2 天前??If you skim this guide and think "John, this is TOO complicated" - consider this: Imagine your RIA had a comparable guide for how to build out your finance department. Or your HR. Or your acquisitions. Or you legal. I'm willing to bet it would be pretty complex (if you're over $6B AUM that is). Why would marketing be any less complicated? At some point, you realized that you had to drastically increase the sophistication of your other departments. And SO MANY are right on the precipice of realizing that now is that time for RIA marketing. The bold will reap the rewards ;)
RIA organic growth systems | Fully-managed digital marketing/lead gen | Turnkey talent/software/design/ad spend/web dev/content = dead simple | Compliance focused |???Secure Your Free Exec Workshop Below ??
2 天前??Access the entire 155-page "Hyper Boutique RIA" guide here: https://growth.auxesys.com/hyper-boutique-ria-strategy
Your Tech Should Be Tasty like a Taco ?? Value-based I.T. helping businesses reach their goals ?? Cybersecurity Tech Leader | Speaker
2 天前Love me a great helpful guide!