Most advisors I talk to have tried marketing in sprints. You launch a podcast, record eight great episodes, and then client season hits, and it goes quiet. You start a monthly newsletter, and it disappears the quarter you’re hiring. Your LinkedIn posts come in bursts of three a week, followed by two months of nothing.
Sprints have their place. They’re how a lot of firms get their first real momentum. The trouble is what comes after: burnout, an abandoned feed, and eventually a pipeline that dries up right when you need it.
At XYPN Live this year, I co-presented a session with Niki Clark on a different approach. I call it firm-led marketing, and the idea is simple. Your marketing should keep running whether you’re in the room or not. It should work like a marathon, where steady effort compounds over time.
I broke it into three systems every established firm needs. Here’s my short version for anyone who missed it (or who was there and wants the notes).
System 1: Content
Content takes the longest to build, and in my experience, it brings the biggest return once it’s running.
A content system starts with a few flagship pieces. These are the evergreen articles, guides, or videos that answer the questions your ideal clients ask over and over. Everything else (social posts, newsletters, email sequences) can be pulled from those pieces, so you’re repurposing instead of starting from scratch every week.
From there, you need a calendar you can realistically keep. One solid blog and one newsletter a month, delivered every month, will do more for your firm than a weekly schedule you abandon by March.
The part most firms skip is involving the team. One of our clients is a multi-advisor firm where everyone wanted to contribute content, but it wasn’t getting done. It all fell to the founder, who was great at it but was slammed with onboarding new team members, SEC audits, and everything else that comes with running a growing firm.
So we built a system that doesn’t depend on her. Each advisor owns a topic category, like retirement or stock options. Once a month, we interview each advisor about one specific question a client or prospect has asked them in their area of expertise.
That one interview turns into several pieces of content. Their team can use the transcript as a starting point for a video. We can record the interview and cut each answer into short video clips. Or our writers can turn the transcript into a full, SEO-optimized blog post written in that advisor’s voice and reflecting their real opinions.
The founder no longer carries the content load alone, and the firm’s marketing now sounds like the whole team.
System 2: Digital Marketing and Lead Generation
This is the system that turns attention into conversations. It includes your website, a lead magnet or two, a webinar series, and the nurture emails that follow up with people who aren’t ready to book a call yet.
Before you build anything new, look at what you already have. One of our FCMO clients had a financial quiz they’d been using with current clients and prospects already in their sales pipeline. It wasn’t connected to their email marketing software, and nobody had thought of it as a lead generation tool.
We added it to their website as a sticky banner above the top menu, where it’s visible without getting in the way. Within 48 hours, two people took the quiz, and one booked a prospect call after receiving her results.
We’ve since connected the quiz to an automated drip campaign in Mailchimp that starts nurturing new sign-ups right away. With no paid ads, the quiz has averaged one to three sign-ups a week since launching this summer. That’s a big win from a tool they already had in their toolbelt.
A few other things to keep in mind as you build this system: prioritize the two or three channels your clients actually use, let automation handle follow-up so it doesn’t depend on someone remembering, and track a small number of metrics that tie to growth, like email sign-ups, webinar registrations, and booked intro calls.
System 3: Boots on the Ground (Referrals and Relationships)
Referrals are still where most advisors get their best clients, but asking for them can feel awkward. The fix is to build the ask into a system so it happens on a schedule. Here’s how we set it up for our clients.
1. Make the ask once a year, on purpose. We send an annual referral ask to clients, often as a printed, mailed letter or an email. For advisors who have a surge season, we time it right after. Another option is a Thanksgiving postcard asking for referrals or reviews, which ties the message to gratitude.
2. Give the whole team the words. We write referral ask language that anyone at the firm can copy and paste into an email or follow-up, and we save it in the firm’s CRM or shared doc system. We pair it with a use-case sheet so the team knows when it makes sense to ask.
3. Educate first, then remove the friction. Clients often want to refer people, but they get stuck because they don’t know who their advisor wants to work with or how to make the introduction. Three to five bullet points describing your ideal client can solve the first problem.
For the second problem, tell clients exactly how to refer someone. That might be “Email them and cc me so we can all grab coffee,” or “Have them book a time on our Calendly and let us know you sent them.” For one client, we built a referral form that automatically sends an introductory email to the client, their friend, and their advisor, so the conversation starts on its own.
Once the system is in place, track it. Knowing where your last ten clients came from will tell you more about where to spend your time than any marketing trend will.
Find Your Weakest Link
Most firms have one system that’s working, one that’s halfway there, and one that’s basically missing. Here’s a quick way to figure out which is which.
Content: Have you published at least one blog or newsletter every month for the last six months? Do you have two or three flagship pieces you send prospects regularly? Does anyone besides you contribute?
Lead generation: Does your website give visitors a reason to share their email? Do new subscribers get an automated follow-up? Do you know how many intro calls came from your website last quarter?
Referrals: Do you have a regular way to ask for introductions? Are you in touch with your COIs at least quarterly? Do you know where your last ten clients came from?
If you answered “no” to two or more questions in one section, that’s the system to work on first. Fixing one system at a time is plenty.