Your Best Clients Already Know Where You Should Be Showing Up

Over the past several years, I’ve attended various conferences with leaders from some of the fastest-growing advisory teams in the country. In those conversations, I’ve noticed one thing that keeps coming up. Leaders want to know which touchpoints are worth their time.

In the research we conducted this year with Julie Littlechild and her team at Absolute Engagement, investors who connected with their advisor through four or more touchpoints before hiring them were the most likely to refer others. They were more likely to refer than clients who had been with their advisor for decades, and more likely than the most satisfied clients. Touchpoints shape who finds you and who sends others your way.

What’s more challenging is knowing which touchpoints fit your firm. No industry benchmark can answer that for you, but your clients can.

Start With Your Top 10 Clients

Pull up the 10 best clients across your firm, beyond your own book. These are the relationships that you’d clone if you could. These are people who are great to work with, value what you do, and reflect your team’s best work.

Then look at each of them as individuals beyond their age, marital status, income, and net worth. Demographics like this tell you who someone is on paper. Psychographics tell you how they make decisions.

Why Psychographics Matter for Multi-Advisor Teams

Psychographics are the worldviews, beliefs, fears, hopes, and preferences that shape how someone makes decisions: what a person reads who they listen to, who they trust with a big decision, even how they take their coffee.

Line up the demographics of clients served by different advisors, and the commonalities can be hard to spot, since one advisor works with business owners, another with executives, and another with families nearing retirement. But at the psychographic level, patterns are more apparent. Clients usually choose your firm because they hold common beliefs about how wealth should be managed and what good advice looks like. Build your marketing around those beliefs

Ask the Questions

You and your advisors already know some of this from years of conversation. The rest you’ll only learn by asking. Start by taking them back to the moment before they hired you.

• Where were you in life before you started working with us?
• What was your biggest concern at the time?
• What questions were you asking yourself?
• What finally motivated you to reach out?
• Who did you talk to before you decided, such as a family member, a colleague, or an internet search?
• Where do you go for information today?
• What do you read, watch, and listen to?
• Which social platforms, if any, do you actually use?
• How do you prefer to hear from us?
• What questions would you like us to answer before you have to ask them?

Then bring them into the present.

Once you’ve talked with your top 10, add a shorter version of these questions to onboarding for every new client. Your picture of the ideal client will keep getting sharper with little effort.

Listen for Patterns, Then Get Curious

You don’t need unanimous answers to see trends. Say you ask 10 clients about social media. Two aren’t on it at all, one uses LinkedIn, one uses X, and five spend time on Facebook. Five out of 10 is a pattern, and a pattern is enough to act on.

When a client tells you they dislike something, lean in. If someone says they’re buried in email and ignore most of it, even great content won’t reach them through their inbox. Ask what would work better, whether that’s a two-minute audio note, short video, quarterly webinar, or in-person event.

Even clients who say they trust you and don’t need any of it are giving you useful information. After all, you’re looking to attract people just like them.

Make a Few Bets, and Measure Them

With so many channels available, it can feel like you need to be everywhere at once. You don’t. Most teams your size don’t have a full marketing department, so choosing and sequencing well matters more than volume.

Use what you learn to place a few intentional bets. If Facebook surfaces as a pattern among your best clients, commit to showing up there consistently with content built for them. Then gather feedback as you go. When clients come in, ask whether they saw the post, what they liked, and what would make the next one more useful. Collect what you hear, adjust, and keep going.

Your firm’s content should answer the questions your ideal clients are already asking, and every advisor on your team should be sharing it, since advisor carries that content into their own network, widening the circle of people who might discover your firm.

 Commit for the Long Haul

The last piece is patience. New marketing efforts typically take about 18 months to build momentum. On my podcast, Growth Leaders of Wealth Management, Joe Schmitz Jr., founder and CEO of Peak Retirement Planning, talked about building his firm’s YouTube channel. He committed to three videos a week and has held that pace for years. For the first year to year and a half, the channel barely registered, and some early videos drew only a handful of views. But Joe kept going. Eventually, the algorithm picked it up, and YouTube became one of the biggest drivers of Peak’s growth. Today, the firm’s marketing brings in about 35 leads a week.

Your top clients will tell you where to show up. Your job is to listen, choose a few places, and keep showing up long enough to gain traction.

 If you’d like help turning what your clients tell you into a marketing strategy your team can act on, I’d love to talk.