RIAs stand to drive significant AUM growth across organic and inorganic in 2026. From Goldman Sachs to CityWire, virtually every expert agrees that wealth management is moving in this direction—the question is how individual firms can increase their piece of the pie.
This article explores how digital marketing will help RIAs generate more growth in the new year. Using a comprehensive six-step process, we’ll help you build the foundations and scale campaigns to win more clients and attract more advisors—all while driving higher marketing ROI.
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4 Factors that Will Define RIA Marketing in 2026
Based on discussions with countless RIAs at industry conferences—along with our daily experience and expert knowledge—we’ve identified four key trends to expect in 2026:
1. Investment in GEO
The rise of generative AI has transformed how people search the internet—and that includes how prospective clients and advisors research RIAs. While traditional search engine optimization (SEO) still holds value, many RIAs will be more concerned about whether they appear in Chatbot and AI Overview (AIOs) in 2026.
Generative engine optimization (GEO) will therefore be a major theme throughout the new year. Any emerging field attracts snake oil, and we expect RIAs may struggle to identify which apparent “experts” can actually help them rank. But those who find the right partner and strategy will generate significant gains.
2. Faster AI Adoption
We’ve heard a lot of talk about AI within marketing, but proven use cases are limited. This will change in 2026, as marketers start to scale programs they have either piloted or planned in the last 24 months.
Our team believes personalized content will be a key driver here. RIAs with the right marketing technology and messaging frameworks will be able to scale hyper-personalized communications to both clients and prospects—all at very low cost.
This is not about using email recipients’ first names; it’s about deploying specific messages tailored to their specific audience segment and stage in the marketing funnel. The only challenge will be managing the compliance challenges such automation presents.
3. Growing Compliance Risk
Several high-profile fines throughout 2025 highlighted the risks associated with the SEC’s Marketing Rule. The new year will continue this trend, with RIAs struggling to find ways to adopt new tools like AI without creating extra compliance risk.
However, regulatory changes may also benefit firms in 2026. Proposed amendments from the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA) could see RIAs registered in states like California and Ohio allowed to use client testimonials in their marketing—finally putting them on a level playing field with firms in other states.
4. Reduced Reliance on Referrals
Traditional referrals and networking are still a strong growth channel, but most firms know they are not scalable enough. RIAs that rely exclusively on COIs and client referrals will not only miss out on growth opportunities—they will have less control over their growth.
This will be a gradual transition; most RIAs will still expect referrals to supply a good chunk of growth in 2026. But they will start to replace these unpredictable, passive channels with a more proactive, scalable approach to growth—and that will be built around digital marketing.
Marketing for RIAs in 2026: A 6 Step Roadmap for Scalable AUM Growth
The following six-step process will help RIAs build a scalable growth engine in 2026:
1. Develop Messaging Frameworks
RIAs face growing competition for both organic and inorganic growth—but most are missing a foundational pillar.
Marketing requires clear, repeatable messages that capture your value to a specific audience, including why they should pick you over other firms. Yet as a recent CityWire commentator said, “the differentiators most RIAs rely on to set them apart aren’t differentiators at all.”
Your roadmap must therefore start with a more effective messaging framework. Not only will this help you capture more attention and build more interest from prospects, it also helps you to scale digital comms—because you’re not starting from scratch with every email, ad, or whitepaper.
At ProperExpression, we use a four-step process to build highly effective RIA messaging frameworks:
- Marketing Audit: Evaluate your existing marketing and advertising to see what resonates and how it can be more effectively leveraged.
- Audience Research: Explore everything from demographics and psychographics to internet habits to understand your target audience.
- Competitor Research: Assess your direct competitors to establish what they do well and identify weaknesses where you can gain an advantage.
- Audience Personas: Develop detailed profiles of your ideal prospects, including their pain points, aspirations, and how they engage with advisors.
- Messaging Framework: Use deep knowledge of your audience and offer to develop an Ability, motivation, opportunity (AMO) framework that contains key messages for each key audience.
The process is relatively quick and pays dividends over the subsequent months—making every element of your marketing more impactful.
Resources:
- Dr. Joshua Wilson on what makes RIAs magnetic
- Nick Ilev on best practices for competitive analysis
2. Plan Multi-Channel Campaigns
Kitces’ research shows that fast-growing RIAs invest in more digital marketing channels—but that requires complex expertise.
There has never been a stronger appetite for high-value information about wealth management topics. But the average RIA probably doesn’t leverage half of the digital channels their ideal clients and advisors use. This renders them functionally invisible across all other channels.
Firms that build effective content funnels focused on their target audience’s interests—from tax strategies for HNWIs to transition strategies for advisors looking to sell their practice—will drive huge organic traffic and leads.
Budget limitations need not limit these efforts. Use the following steps to make multi-channel campaigns more cost-efficient:
- Repurpose Content: A single piece of high-value content (industry reports, whitepapers, or webinars) can be repurposed across multiple channels to reduce production costs.
- Expand Slowly: Test new channels and evaluate the results before committing a large spend to them. The budget requirements here vary. While SEO takes multiple months to produce results, specific PPC platforms can be trialed with just a few hundred dollars’ investment.
- Prioritize Quick Wins: Most RIAs can generate significant “easy” gains through strategic improvements to their digital marketing. Start your campaigns with the low-hanging fruit that will immediately drive ROI—and keep finance and the C-suite happy.
Resources:
- Nick Ilev on the complete content marketing funnel
- Caroline Lane on digital growth strategies for RIAs
3. Improve Advisor Enablement
RIAs struggle to ensure individual advisors leverage marketing materials—but the right process can solve that problem
Firms often report a frustrating experience: they invest in marketing materials, but advisors don’t use them enough to drive real AUM growth. Our experience suggests three core factors drive this dynamic:
- Disconnected Tech: Many RIAs have built a “frankenstack” of software solutions that either lack interoperability or create more manual effort than they’re worth. Data silos, underutilized tech investment, and internal friction soon follow.
- Time Constraints: The average advisor has just 2.1 hours per week to spend on marketing, making it difficult to scale activity or drive substantial results.
- Lack of Processes: Marketing is often an “unofficial” requirement, meaning advisors don’t have clear processes to follow—and relatively little accountability for driving AUM growth.
All of these problems can be solved through the right advisor enablement program. At ProperExpression, we have seen significant improvements to advisor marketing adoption through:
- Centralized CRM: Use HubSpot to centralize marketing, sales, and service processes—and create a single source of truth.
- Improved Automation: Leverage sophisticated automation tools to reduce the time and manual effort required to send marketing emails, post on socials, or build more complicated promotional campaigns.
- Measure Results: Develop reporting dashboards to showcase how marketing influences pipelines—both incentivising advisors and creating real accountability.
Resources:
- Nick Ilev on best practices for marketing automation
- Caroline Lane on HubSpot for financial advisors
4. Develop Compliance Processes
Compliance checks can delay marketing and create bottlenecks—but not if you build it into your campaign processes
Many RIAs find compliance a significant strain on both time and resources. A single piece of content being flagged for potential SEC violations can lead to weeks-long delays that create marketing backlogs and force you to miss your goals.
The solution is to bake compliance into your marketing process—rather than seeing it as a hurdle to jump. At ProperExpression, we leverage compliance templates, along with pre-approved terminology and definitions, to help content and campaigns launch faster.
This is vital in 2026 for two reasons:
- Digital marketing is a fast-paced environment. From new regulations announcements to important industry news, being the first to post content delivers substantial benefits.
- AI presents the potential for personalized content marketing (especially via email) at scale, but compliance concerns are a major potential roadblock.
Resources:
- Caroline Lane on using HubSpot’s Operations Hub for compliance
- Nick Ilev on crafting compliant content for financial services
5. Enhance Marketing Attribution
Digital offers a unique opportunity to measure and optimize your marketing—but this requires the right definitions and tech
RIA marketing leaders often express concern about their marketing: they lack visibility and clarity about exactly what is going on and how it is actually influencing AUM growth. It’s difficult to unlock more budget or justify the investment when there’s no reliable data about marketing ROI.
Accurate attribution will help combat these problems and ensure marketing is prioritized in 2026. The challenge is building systems that all parties accept and making the data easy to present during key meetings.
Our experience suggests two key factors are required to enable trustworthy attribution:
- Shared Definitions: Your finance department must sign off on all marketing attribution—otherwise you won’t get proper credit for pipeline growth. You therefore need universally accepted definitions for what is “marketing created”, “sourced”, “influenced”, and other key terms.
- Reliable Data: Data silos and data hygiene issues limit the reliability of attribution. Focus on using a single source of truth—ideally, your well-integrated CRM.
Resources:
- Caroline Lane on the building AUM dashboards in HubSpot
- Nick Ilev on understanding U-shaped marketing attribution
6. Leverage Revenue Operations (RevOps)
RevOps enables RIAs to continuously improve the cost-effectiveness of their marketing and sales—and build a reliable growth engine.
The gold standard for RIA marketing is not just generating AUM growth; it’s consistently acquiring more clients and advisors while making those acquisitions more cost-effective. That’s what RevOps delivers through systematic optimization of the processes that drive growth—and it is something almost every RIA should shoot for in 2026.
As the only agency that delivers RevOps specifically geared toward RIAs, we have found a handful of key measures that deliver immediate benefit:
1. Properly mapped marketing and sales funnels
Many RIAs are used to traditional methods like referrals and networking that are not easily “mapped”; simply outlining the ideal digital client acquisition process helps clarify what is missing from their existing strategy.
2. Better lead scoring to enable smooth sales handoffs
Traditional processes also leave many RIAs without clear definitions for what is "marketing qualified” or processes to effectively hand leads over to sales. As a result, good leads are often either lost or neglected—but RevOps can build data-driven processes to avoid those problems.
3. Allocate budget to optimize ROI
Marketing and sales are like investments; if you look at the data correctly, you’ll see some ads or content tactics deliver far better results than others. RevOps helps you identify those high-performing elements and reallocate budget to ensure you only spend on what actually drives returns.
Resources:
- The Ultimate Guide to RevOps
- Caroline Lane on Choosing a RevOps Framework
