Kitces Research released a study this week aimed at helping advisors understand "what really works" when it comes to marketing.
The study found that successful marketing results from a combination of actions that are both aligned with the growth strategy of the practice and in sync with practice owners' preferences. Good marketers constantly refine their marketing approach as the practice and the markets it targets evolve.
Kitces Research based the study on data it collected online from April 18 through May 20 from more than 1,000 advisory practices, resulting in 457 usable responses. To be included in the study, respondents were required to represent a business that provided financial advice or implemented investment products. The practice had to have been established in 2020 or earlier and actually served clients and earned revenue in 2021.
Client Acquisition Costs
The survey findings showed that bringing a new client on board in 2021 cost a financial advisor a median $2,167, of which about 70% was the cost of the advisor's time spent on marketing and sales activities, and just 30% on hard-dollar marketing expenses.
The cost rose to $4,056 per client for firms with upward of $250,000 of revenue, as the cost of the advisor's time rises as the practice grows.
The typical advisory practice spent 7.1% of its 2021 revenue on time-based and dollar-based marketing, rising to 8.8% among practices with more than $1.5 million of revenue — again, because the advisor's time is more valuable as the practice grows.
Among the 25 different advisor marketing tactics researchers examined, a successful one attracted at least one new client for 55% of practices on average. The success rate was 100% for custodial referral programs, and 96% for client referrals, while blogging and social media had success rates of only 20% and 39%, respectively.
Successful tactics had median first-year revenue per new client of $4,000.
The typical practice invested $1 in marketing to generate $1.20 in new client revenue, for a marketing efficiency measure of 1.2, according to the study. However, marketing efficiency was 2.5 for practices with less than $250,000 in revenue, compared with just 0.8 for practices of $1.5 million or more.
Sustainable Growth
Kitces Research noted that increasing costs and decreasing efficiency as practices grow result mainly from reliance on tactics that are hard to scale, either because of the advisor time required or the finite opportunities some tactics represent. "These results highlight the importance of evolving marketing tactics as the practice grows," the study said.
The research found that many advisors may not fully understand a tactic's costs and returns. Take search engine optimization, the top-ranked tactic in terms of the highest return in new client revenue versus the cost to implement. Just 29% of practices in the study deployed SEO, and only 20% used drip marketing, the second most efficient tactic.
In contrast, consider client referrals, the marketing tactic that 93% of practices rely on. Referral marketing does not scale well, according to the research. The acquisition cost is low, but the cost is almost entirely advisor time, a finite resource. Not only that, a client will make a referral only so many times.
The study found that high-growth practices rely much less on client referrals than other practices at every practice development stage.
