3 Marketing Priorities Every Financial Advisor Needs to Grow
By Daniel Keever
One of the biggest problems we see with marketing—ourselves included—is that activity can turn into noise. It becomes activity for activity’s sake. You’re busy, you’re posting, you’re doing the “things,” but you feel like it’s gotten detached from the outcomes that matter.
When that happens, you end up chasing the wrong metrics: traffic, likes, followers, and impressions. Meanwhile, the real goal—client acquisition, client retention, and growth—gets lost in the shuffle.
Over the last few years at Evergreen, we’ve narrowed it down to three simple benchmarks. If your strategy can accomplish these three core functions, it doesn’t really matter which platform or format you're using—the strategy tends to work. Miss one? That’s where you start seeing diminishing returns.
Let’s walk through them.
Objective 1: Predictable, Targeted Audience Growth
If you don’t have a plan for getting in front of new people, your audience will stagnate. You’ll keep talking to the same folks over and over again, and eventually, you’ll hit a ceiling.
A couple quick qualifiers on what healthy growth looks like.
You don’t want just any new eyeballs. Avoid bots, spammy tactics, or broad reach for reach’s sake.
It has to be target-market based. And that generally starts by identifying what platforms and communities are magnets for your ideal market.
Tactics will vary—maybe it’s boosting, maybe it’s COIs, or maybe it's targeted content—but in every strategy we build, we ask:
What are we doing to predictably fill our audience with fresh, target-market eyeballs?
If you don’t have a compelling answer to this question, that’s the first gap to fill.
Objective 2: Move People from Spectator to Participant
Engagement is a nebulous word among marketers. Take social media for example. Sure we want to see people liking, commenting, and sharing your content. That helps drive visibility and confirms that what we’re saying is worth noting.
That said, those kinds of “vanity metrics” (as we affectionately call them) are a poor man’s definition of marketing success, especially in financial services. Notably, we often find that our ideal high net worth clients are NOT prolific social media engagers. It seems many are more likely to send you a DM or even book a discovery call before they’ll comment on a bunch of posts.
We tend to focus on a few key engagement metrics that tell us more about consumption and intent. Here are a few examples:
Email List Growth: The holy grail, but a necessary one. Are the right people opting into your list?
Watch Time: Better than comments–how long are people sticking around to watch our content instead of scrolling? The same is true for our podcasting clients as well.
Email Forwards: We design every client newsletter to be shareable, and we see strong numbers of links engaged by people outside our email list.
Profile Viewers: Using a LinkedIn example here–we want people to stop their scroll and learn more about you. From your target market, of course.
What really matters is this:
Are the right people opting into your list?
Are they signing up for webinars or resources?
Are they seeing enough value to trade their attention or email for what you're offering?
That’s why lead magnets still matter. Not because everyone needs an email list just to have one—but because it’s one of the clearest indicators of value. You shared something that was worth someone’s time. That’s a win.
Every great lead magnet should have its own mini value proposition—something so clear and helpful that it could stand on its own.
Build a Real Nurturing Strategy
This is where most people drop the ball.
Let’s say someone opts in. Great. But that doesn’t mean they’re ready to hop on a call, hand over their portfolio, or trust you with their financial life.
That takes time. Trust builds through multiple meaningful touchpoints. And what we’ve seen—across dozens of performance dashboards—is that the more someone engages with your brand (downloads, signs up, registers), the more likely they are to become a client.
So what does nurturing look like?
It’s not a generic monthly newsletter.
It’s not a pre-written sequence you bought off the shelf.
It’s a personalized, thoughtful follow-up system that delivers your best ideas in a way that actually resonates.
That might mean email. It might mean text. It might be a series of follow-up resources. Whatever it is, it needs to feel like you. Because that’s what builds the bridge from attention to trust to action.
The Big Picture
If your end goal is new clients, stronger referrals, and better retention, focus on these three benchmarks:
Consistently grow your ideal audience.
Move them from passive to engaged.
Nurture them with real value.
That’s it. Identifying the right tactics is largely experimental, but they have to achieve those three things to move the needle into positive ROI.
This is also the philosophy we use to serve our clients, helping them build brand momentum and turn it into predictable revenue growth.
