The image of an older couple walking on a beach at sunset near a lighthouse, paired with a tagline on “guiding your financial future with confidence,” likely looked familiar to financial advisors.
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To planning entrepreneur and writer Michael Kitces, the generic advisor practice homepage, which he constructed using ChatGPT, showed the contrast between the wealth management industry’s typical approach to marketing and his team’s research, which found that consumers choose advisors based on “paths of trust.” And a website that looks like that of every other wealth management firm fails to forge any such connections, he said in the opening session of the virtual Kitces Marketing Summit 2026.
“I giggle because it looks pretty authentic,” Kitces said. “I mean, they don’t have the Adirondack chairs overlooking the beach and the lighthouse, but it pretty much got all the things in here. And I do find this is somewhat representative of a lot of our websites, right down to the, ‘We specialize in your unique needs,’ and then we list all the things. Because, from our end, like, look, if I work with retirees, young families, business owners, institutions, women, I can work with anyone, right?”
Without the right marketing, the answer to that question is, effectively, “no.” That’s according to Kitces and summit co-host, Taylor Schulte, founder of San Diego-based registered investment advisory firm Define Financial and co-founder of The AGC Community, a professional networking and coaching program for financial advisors.
The right kind of outreach begins with advisors identifying their ideal client and figuring out how to reach them in a way that stands out, Kitces and Schulte said. The pair drew nearly 1,000 registered attendees to their 11th annual marketing strategy event.
“Pretty much every pre-retiree or retiree making this transition into retirement, they’re all attached to an advisor in some way, shape or form, but the advisor that they’re attached to right now, the advisor who maybe got them to retirement, isn’t always the person they need to get them through retirement,” Schulte said. “And today that’s the door opening for us by being different and getting more specialized, going deeper, as you put it. I don’t have to win head-to-head competitions, I don’t have to prove that I’m better than the next advisor, I just need to be the right advisor for them in that exact moment of their life.”
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Standout organic growth experts
The June 4 event kicked off with an introduction by Kitces and Schulte, followed by six presentations from planners and other advisors covering video marketing, methods of online “digital discovery” and referrals. The presenters included Katherine Fox, the founder of Portland, Oregon-based RIA firm Sunnybranch Wealth, who was set to explain to attendees how her social media videos and other posts led to “70 intro calls, $19 million in new AUM, and $175,000 in added revenue over 12 months,” according to the event program. In another session, Shaun Melby, the founder of Nashville-based RIA firm Melby Wealth Management, was scheduled to outline how his local search engine optimization strategy “helped him average 25 prospects per year for the past seven years who found him via either Google or an AI search, closing an average of 10 new clients annually for his intentionally solo lifestyle practice.”
True to Kitces’ reputation for thorough analysis and highly specific professional development takeaways for planners, attendees received a packet of “deliverables” from each speaker including presentation materials and workbooks for implementing the strategies.
Any advisory practice seeking to grow could find value in that compendium of resources. Since marketing is the key driver of new or expanded client relationships — the most important metric for expansion, organic growth — the materials could aid advisors in, say, carrying out a new social media video plan or figuring out the right return on investment for the cost of client acquisition. Organic growth represents an industry-wide challenge. A study by Kitces.com and Kitces Research have found that the mean organic growth rate of RIAs tumbled to 3% in 2026 from 9% just nine years earlier.
One aspect of that problem stems from the competitive race of well-capitalized RIAs and other wealth management firms deploying resources toward the highly concentrated wealth among older generations who frequently delegate their financial decisions to planners, Kitces said. Younger generations haven’t reached that level of wealth, and they’re more likely to take a do-it-yourself mentality to much of their finances, rather than delegating their decisions.
But another part of the organic growth challenge revolves around marketing that fails to inspire trust with prospective clients.
When consumers encounter a website for a firm that supposedly serves that all-encompassing client list of retirees, young families, business owners, institutions and women, most prospects “don’t see themselves listed — they see how many others are listed who are not like them,” according to Kitces. In fact, his team’s research found that most new clients came from friend and family referrals or recommendations from so-called centers of influence — the long-standing top sources of new business. And the third largest stream of new clients flowed from consumers who “get to know us” through a podcast, seminar, networking event or online content, Kitces noted.
“The key takeaway here is that almost all the paths that consumers find are paths of trust,” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s a transfer of trust from someone I know, it’s a transfer of trust from a source that I trust, or, I get to know you, so that I can build trust in you.”
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A different type of prospecting work
That’s why, for example, Schulte said that he has “found that the deeper I focused on retirement planning specifically, the more I witnessed prospects doing the hard work for me, finding me, learning how I think and deciding if I was a good fit on their own before we had ever even spoken.” But that didn’t just come from building a website that identified retirement planning as the firm’s specialty.
It also sprouted from the “education-based marketing” Schulte has been creating for about the past eight years through his Stay Wealthy podcast and other content he made about the “pain points that retirees and pre-retirees are facing,” he noted. “By the time someone books an intro call with us, they’ve already heard me think out loud about their exact problems, sometimes for hundreds of hours, and so they’re not scheduling this call to evaluate whether I have the right expertise to help them, they’ve already decided that I can help them.”
That happened again only a few weeks ago, he continued. A prospect wrote on his company’s intake form that she already had a planner but got in touch because she was thinking about “switching to more specialized retirement planning.” In effect, Schulte “didn’t have to convince her of anything,” because “she convinced herself,” he said.
“So, Michael, to your point earlier about the growthiest firms being the ones that grow beyond referrals, this is one example of what that actually looks like in a small RIA,” Schulte said. “It’s not this clever marketing or clever marketing channel, it’s just specialization going deeper, and it’s just made visible, it’s consistent and repeated over years. And the payoff is that prospects who are technically attached to another advisor, they decide on their own that they just need someone different, and they do that before I ever even know they exist.”
None of those lessons mean that old-school sources of organic growth have completely faded away, according to Kitces. Instead, they’re part of the two main generators that “we’re seeing more and more often now,” he said, citing ways “to try to be more findable” online or through referrals, on the one hand, or methods to stand out in a crowded marketplace, on the other.
“We try to find some way to get noticed and stand out,” Kitces said. “We create videos or podcasts or other content, so they will notice us amongst the sea of other advisors out there, and maybe attach to us on something better than just our zip code. So we have some way to try to connect and begin building a relationship.”
