How RIAs Market Estate and Trust Planning Services

RIAs are sitting on a solution to their organic growth problem.

While nearly three-quarters of firms targeting HNWI and UHNWI clients offer in-house estate planning services, relatively few effectively market those services. Most rely on referrals to drive growth; many clients likely don’t even realize their advisors offer specialist estate planning.

That’s a problem, because clients are hungry for estate planning services. Trust and Will finds that over two-thirds (67.7%) of Americans who work with an advisor would consider switching firms for one that offered estate planning.

We call this a marketing gap: what looks, to clients and advisory prospects, like a service limitation is actually a failure of firms to properly promote their services. It’s perfectly plausible your firm could win clients from a rival by advertising services the rival firm itself also offers.

Estate planning, as a content segment, is dominated by attorneys and specialist firms. RIAs can offer a novel perspective that ties estates and trusts back to the larger financial picture.

That gap won’t stay open forever. But while the window is open, RIAs are leaving assets on the table every day they don’t invest in dedicated estate planning marketing.

The only question is how RIAs can fill that gap.

“Estate planning is the kind of service that high-net-worth clients search for a lot. That makes it the perfect candidate for more aggressive digital marketing.”

- Nick Ilev, CEO of ProperExpression

A Complete Marketing System for Estate Planning Services

The reality for most RIAs is that marketing is generally underdeveloped. Cerulli reports that firms allocate roughly 5% of their budget towards marketing, while just 14% have dedicated marketing resources. Yet a recent study found that firms that don’t invest in marketing simply don’t achieve organic growth; there is no way around the requirement for deeper marketing investments.

Firms often respond by hurling resources at generic digital campaigns. Most have relied on traditional in-person marketing and referrals to attract new clients; they are often relatively inexperienced in digital marketing, and are unsure where to start.

Our advice is always to avoid that approach: marketing works best when it’s built around a differentiated message tailored to a specific audience. While firms benefit from targeting general advisory and planning topics, the highest ROI tends to come from pinpointing your competitors' blind spots.

Estate planning represents exactly that kind of opportunity, and we’ve identified four basic steps that successful marketing focuses on:

1. Content Creation

Content is essential for almost all wealth management marketing, helping firms generate search traffic, nurture leads, and showcase their expertise. The difference with estate planning is that advisors are late to the game; estate planning attorneys and software companies have already published heavily across most topics.

That might seem like a disadvantage; search rankings for basic queries like “when should I create a will?” will probably be hard to win. But it also means that advisors can skip the slog of laying a content foundation and focus on topics where they have a monopoly on expertise.

The niches below are by no means exhaustive. However, they illustrate how advisors can create content that offers novel information and positions their services effectively:

Niche 1: Multigenerational Wealth Transfer Education

The legal and technical aspects of estate planning are best covered by people with real legal authority. Advisors can lean into the emotional element of estate planning: family legacy, passing on wealth, and communicating with the next generation.

This is the content niche with the widest top-of-funnel (ToFu) reach, because the question it answers is one that people search before they know what instrument they need:

Niche 2: Plan Coordination

Having the right documents is one thing; managing the moving parts of a complex estate, across multiple professionals, is another. Delays, miscommunication, and planning blind spots are common. Advisors have an opportunity to position themselves as the party who understands how stressful that process can be and knows how to coordinate things.

This is an important content pillar to show that advisors don’t just replace your estate attorney or CPA. Firms can easily win business from families and individuals who simply want to gain a broader perspective on the financial implications of their estate plan.

Niche 3: Life-Event and Liquidity-Event Triggers

Estate planning is often directly triggered by specific life events, whether it’s selling a business or divorcing a spouse. Each is a specific sub-niche that wants content showing you understand the situation emotionally, not just how it affects the client’s net worth.

These are great topics for bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu) content, because clients searching for advice typically need support imminently. Nobody asks ChatGPT “How to manage post-divorce finances” when their relationship is in a great place.

Niche 4: Family-Meeting Facilitation

Estate planning brings the drama at the heart of the Great Wealth Transfer to the surface: how will the next generation of HNWIs think about and manage their fortunes?

For RIAs, that makes it an opportunity to build rapport with their clients’ heirs and ultimately improve retention. Content that helps people navigate uncomfortable conversations and educate their children about wealth transfer positions advisors as an important resource for legacy management, not just budgeting.

2. Content Distribution

RIAs could produce the best estate planning content the world has ever seen; if it doesn’t find an audience, it was a waste of time, effort, and (usually) money. That makes content distribution an essential strategic lever, and it’s one many firms struggle with.

The goal is not just to generate clicks; it’s to get your content in front of the right families. That requires an omnichannel approach that hits everywhere prospects search for estate planning information:

• Search engine optimization: Build content around search terms and queries that have the best balance of high search volume and low competition. This helps you earn search rankings and appear in AI search results, generating visibility for your content.

• Socials: Post content across both individual advisor and firm profiles, using your team to boost visibility through likes and comments. Even if this doesn’t drive a lot of traffic from your ideal audience, it will increase the perceived quality and authority of your content, which will support search rankings.

• Paid Ads: Put spend behind the niche 3 life-event assets, where intent is highest and the window is shortest. Search ads on coordinator-angle terms tend to cost less than generic estate planning terms, and the audience is better qualified.

• Regular Repurposing: Each long-form guide should yield a checklist, a nurture sequence, a webinar outline, and a partner leave-behind. The Estate Planning Team checklist from content niche 2 and the family-meeting agenda from content niche 4 are the two pieces most worth co-branding with an estate attorney or CPA, because a coordination checklist does not compete with an attorney's document work. That is what earns a return referral from the centers of influence who already sit at the middle of these decisions.

3. Lead Nurture

Estate planning is extremely high-stakes; it takes the average client several months to consider their options and select an advisor to work with.

That makes lead nurture a central part of the marketing process. Firms must keep clients engaged throughout their research and consideration processes, delivering useful content at every stage to stay top-of-mind:

• Email sequences. This is the backbone. A gated guide or checklist captures the address, and a short sequence moves the reader from a useful download toward an introductory call. Build and measure toward the consultation, because the download is not the conversion.
• Life-Event Triggered Sequences: Build separate tracks for a business sale, an inheritance, and the loss of a parent, each holding the content that matches the moment. These convert late, sometimes six months or more after the download, so the track exists to keep the firm present through that gap rather than to compress it. Firms that judge this content on same-month conversion routinely cut the material producing their largest eventual relationships.
• Retargeting: Families researching estate planning visit repeatedly over weeks without identifying themselves. Retargeting keeps the firm's positioning in front of them between visits, and it is the only channel that reaches a reader who has not yet given up an email address. Keep the creative educational rather than promotional, and route it through compliance with the rest of your paid placements.
• Webinars and Family-Facing Events: A live session is the natural next step after a checklist download, and it is the format that gets a second generation into the room without asking anyone to book a meeting. Co-hosting with an estate attorney or CPA raises attendance and gives the partner a reason to promote it to their own list.
• Advisor-Led Follow-Up: Point one track inward. Content built around running a family wealth meeting is a retention motion aimed at current clients, getting heirs into the conversation years before the transfer rather than at the moment of it.
  
  

4. Measurement

Measurement is the only way RIAs can truly know the impact and ROI of their marketing. However, because estate planning is relationship-driven and slow, the obvious metrics are the misleading ones. Page views on an estate planning article tell you almost nothing about whether the system is working.

Instead, RIAs should track four factors that add up to tell a coherent story about your estate planning marketing:

• Consultations booked from the page and its lead magnets. This is the primary conversion. A firm that reports traffic growth on this service line without reporting consultations has not measured anything.
• Lead magnet downloads by niche. Download rate across the four niches tells you which framing resonates with your particular market and where the next investment should go. This is the fastest feedback in the system.
• Assisted conversions and sequence performance on the life-event tracks. These convert late, so last-touch attribution will underreport them. If the reporting model cannot see assisted conversions, the life-event content will look like a failure and get cut.
• Referral conversations opened with estate attorneys and CPAs. On a service line driven by centers of influence, a co-branded asset that starts one partner conversation can be worth more than a month of search traffic. It is a real outcome, and it should be counted as one, even though it arrives as a note in a CRM rather than a row in an analytics report.