Top 6 marketing channels for financial services firms

Over half of financial advisors are actively pursuing new clients, but 85% of advisors report that finding time for marketing is a major challenge.

If you’re like most advisors, you probably rely on referrals and networking for clients. This can be effective in bursts but are hardly scalable sources for leads.

Sure, you can hustle for 10 new introductions, but if you have your eyes set on a $1M+ firm, you need a scalable source of leads, which can only come from marketing.

Here’s the problem: marketing is hard, and the way most people approach it is a waste of time.

In this guide, I’ll share six digital marketing channels along with practical tips to put them to work for your firm.

I’m also going to share our organic growth guide that we wrote after working with over 100 companies to help them use content to grow their businesses.

Why digital marketing (probably) isn’t working for your firm

From experience (10+ years in digital marketing, 6 years at HubSpot, and over 100 clients), there are three reasons that your digital marketing strategy (probably) is not working:

• Your message is not clear: If you confuse, you lose. It’s that simple. You need a crystal-clear message that differentiates you and cuts through the noise.
• You do not have enough traffic: You could have the best message in the world, but no traffic means no one will see you. You need to make sure you have enough traffic to consistently get eyeballs on your content.
• You aren’t top of mind: As they say, out of sight, out of mind. You need to nurture the audience you build in order to build trust, familiarity, and respect for your brand. Then, and only then, will you have a steady stream of leads ready to buy.

The rest of this guide will focus on channels you can use to build traffic, trust, and familiarity. Read on for the best marketing channels your firm can use to grow.

The 6 best digital marketing channels for financial advisors

Having worked with many financial services and fintech clients over the years, I find the following six digital channels to be the best for growth:

1. Video
2. Google (SEO)
3. Paid ads
4. Social media
5. Email
6. Webinars/live events

Let’s break down some practical examples of each next.

Video (YouTube)

Let’s face it: finance can be hard to understand.

People love to obfuscate anything related to Wall Street to make their firms seem necessary (along with their fees).

While that has ingrained the impression that finance is impossible to understand for generations of prospective clients, it’s also an opportunity: people are trained to ask questions and will trust someone who gives them a confident answer in plain English.

Video can be especially effective as a medium for creating content, and it does not need to be an overly complex or sophisticated setup to be done well. With an iPhone and a good microphone clipped to your shirt collar, you have everything you need to make brief, effective videos that can make a strong impression on your audience.

This is far from an exhaustive resource on video (not to mention the fact that we specialize in written content so I’m not qualified to give you that resource), however I can say that the best time to start is now, and consistency can/will pay off if your content is good enough and authentic.

From experience, your first video will not drive loads of traffic to your site; neither will your 10th. But if you are comfortable on camera and consistent in creating videos as a part of your content strategy, you can build a loyal following and have plenty of content to cross-post on LinkedIn or your newsletter.

Google (SEO)

SEO (search engine optimization) is the practice of creating content and optimizing it so that it ranks on Google. When done well, SEO takes a bit of upfront work and can lead to free traffic as long as your content continues to rank. That means one blog post could be seen by hundreds of thousands of prospects, and bring in thousands of new visitors to your website.

But that’s if the content can rank. SEO is a complicated marketing discipline, so check out our guide to building an elite SEO strategy for a further breakdown.

Financial advisors that do SEO well take care to focus on a few key areas of their website:

• Creating thoughtful and helpful blog content that answers questions their target market is asking
• Creating useful tools and calculators to provide extra value to their audience (we’ve seen these perform very well for clients)
• Optimizing their website for local search if they want to serve clients locally. Mainly, this means having a Google Business Profile, plenty of consistent reviews, and mentioning the areas you service on your website.

SEO is a fantastic channel, but as I said, it takes time to build momentum and get going. There are faster ways to speed up your path to traffic that we’ll explore next.

Paid ads

No time for SEO? You can get immediate traffic to your website through ads.

We run Google Ads for our clients to drive immediate traffic from their target audience. This is especially useful if you need a lot of traffic quickly or want to test and compare different versions of your site (called AB testing).

There are a few ways we’ve run Google Ad campaigns for our clients:

• Bottom-of-the-funnel ad campaigns to their home pages and sales pages. These ads target members of your audience who are actively shopping for your services.
• Lead magnet campaigns to drive visitors to your site to download free guides and resources. These are very effective at turning traffic into leads you can nurture (we’ve seen conversion rates as high as 20% for these).
• Supporting blog content that is not yet ranking. We do this for free for our clients to ensure the content we write for them gets traffic, whether or not it ranks.

Ads are highly effective at getting you more traffic, but getting leads will depend on how targeted your ads are, how well your landing pages are written, and how enticing your offer is. That is to say; you can easily waste a lot of money on ads if you do not have a great offer or landing page.

While Google Ads does promise instant traffic, it’s not always automatically better than SEO. Check out our guide to comparing SEO vs. Ads for more information on which to choose.

Often, people need more nurturing before they are ready to commit from a Google Ad. I’ll cover email and social media next to build familiarity and trust.

Social media

Social media can be a growth paradise or a minefield and time suck.

Facebook usage is gradually increasing and projected to continue to increase through 2028, LinkedIn has picked up momentum after a slower period of growth, and Twitter/X has been on a three-year decline (as of 2025).

That is to say, since their inception in the mid-2000s, social media platforms have ebbed and flowed in popularity and can be a fantastic place to grow or a wonderful way to waste time. To decide which path you’ll go, you need to determine:

• Where is your target audience most likely to be found and receptive to your message
• Where can you invest the most time (and dollars)
• Where do you feel most comfortable spending time

Social media serves two purposes for growth:

1. Gathering information on your target market
2. Building familiarity through direct contact or being seen in their feeds

It’s only worth your while if you create quality content that gets noticed by your target market; otherwise, it’s just noise.

Personally, I’ve found LinkedIn to be one of the best platforms of late due to a resurgence in “founder-led” marketing. As a founder, you represent your brand and can build a following as a person that people trust and look up to. By posting regularly on LinkedIn and interacting with your audience, you can build solid momentum for your brand.

Email

Like social media, email can keep your firm top of mind, except it is far more powerful than social media could ever hope to be.

Social media platforms have usage levels in the hundreds of millions, while there are 4.2B people in the world with an email address, people check their email while watching TV, in bed, and even on vacation,  and 99% of people check their email every day (source for all these amazing facts).

While a social post might “go viral,” once the excitement has faded (and the clock has moved on a few hours), it won’t be seen again. Email allows you to broadcast to your audience and stay there… assuming your email is not deleted.

Email is the very best way to stay top of mind and build trust with your audience. There are a few keys to being successful with email that you need to be aware of, though:

• Warm up new subscribers with a welcome sequence; this allows you to introduce your brand and make a good first impression
• Share valuable content, along with stories, case studies, and other special offers. No one is going to “subscribe to your blog,” so don’t limit your emails to your latest blog posts.
• Call your readers to action. Every email needs a clear call to action (something you want the reader to do). Choose one per email, multiple calls to action will confuse your readers.

Email is the #1 way to get in front of your audience and warm them up to a sale, so respect it as a channel and use it wisely. Allow people to opt into your list from your website (lead magnets are great for this) and earn their trust by delivering them valuable content.

Webinars/live events

About those “special offers” I mentioned, there is nothing better than a webinar to grab your audience’s attention, make a strong impression, and get them ready to take the next step toward becoming a client.

Webinars work great as a “soft” offer that can pack a ton of value and nurture a lead into a qualified prospect. Webinars are presentations you give on the web; you can run them live or pre-record them to run them at scale for your list. As you close the webinar, make a pitch for your firm and follow up with everyone who registered, whether or not the attended.

You can run webinars with Zoom or a paid platform that supports everything from signup forms to automated messaging.

Digital marketing will only work if you create content that engages and interests your audience

The internet has no shortage of websites filled with generic and bland content.

Having a blog, newsletter, or YouTube channel is nothing new. There are dozens of firms just like yours that may have a massive head start.

I don’t say this to scare you; there’s an opportunity because many of those same firms create incredibly bland and generic content (or they use AI to do that for them).

My best marketing advice is to pick one or two channels you can commit to, and then grow from there. By creating content that actually helps and engages your audience, you will stand out. Through SEO or ads, you can drive traffic to it, and through email and webinars, you can nurture it.

Ready to grow your firm? Download our organic growth guide

The framework I gave you is simple, but it takes work to implement.

Building a seven-figure business does not happen by accident or overnight. But by nailing these key elements:

• Your ICP
• Your offer
• Your traffic
• Your nurturing

You will build traffic and turn that traffic into clients. I have one final gift for you: a free eBook that breaks down this process with a few extra steps to show exactly how we’ve helped firms like yours.

Click the button below to get your free copy and put your firm on the path to success in the months ahead.