How Much Should an RIA Spend on Marketing in 2026?

RIAs that don’t invest in marketing aren’t growing organically. The problem is most firms have relied on M&A and market performance for years, and most are unsure exactly how to approach marketing:

How much should your firm budget for marketing? What should you expect to generate from that spend? And how can you measure and optimize it?

These questions are complex and leave RIA principals and growth leads vulnerable. Underspending means risking missed growth targets and lost enterprise value. Overspending puts you in the firing line when margins erode even further.

The bad news is there is no definitive answer to these questions. Every RIA’s marketing depends on its specific context and goals, from existing marketing programs to the size and structure of your firm.

The good news is we’ve developed a complete system to develop an effective budget based on those factors, and we’re sharing it here for free.

How Much Should an RIA Spend on Marketing?

RIAs tend to allocate their budget based on a fixed percentage of total revenue or expenses. This makes it easier to manage spend as the firm scales; adding $100M AUM through advisor recruitment or acquisition could easily throw off your total marketing expenses.

However, the percentage allocated to marketing varies depending on several factors:

• Firm Type: Small teams tend to allocate less to marketing and rely on other methods for organic growth, such as COIs and referrals. As firms grow, they often develop full-time marketing teams. Research suggests the clearest cut-off is $100M AUM; once firms exceed that size, they are far more likely to have an in-house marketing team that requires a big budget.

• Existing Marketing Assets: Firms often need to calibrate their budgets based on previous efforts. If you lack basic digital infrastructure or have a very small content footprint, a larger budget might be required, at least in the short term, to fix those gaps.

• Competitive Situation: RIA marketing channels function like an arms race. If your competitors all spend the same on SEO, you will likely not gain a competitive advantage. Budgets are therefore often calibrated to gain a relative advantage, rather than hit some generic industry benchmark.

• Goal and Motivation: Marketing can support a range of goals, from aggressive organic growth to supporting M&A efforts. The budget should always reflect the urgency of those goals, as well as the extent to which marketing can influence them. For example, Broadridge finds that growth-focused firms spend 4x more on marketing than other firms.

Once all of these factors are considered, most firms end up with a marketing budget calculation that is uniquely their own. How much you spend will depend upon strategic choices that always involve some form of informed bet about the future of your market.

That said, benchmarks often help correct extreme over- or underspending, as well as setting a baseline against which more nuanced decisions can be calibrated.

RIA Marketing Budget Benchmarks: What Does the Research Say?

The latest and most reliable report, from Cerulli Associates, found that RIAs allocate an average of 5% of total expenses to marketing. That number, from July 2026, suggests that firms spend more than 50% less than the average across all industries. However, there are two important caveats to this benchmark.

First, that 5% estimate is an average across a large sample of firms with very different AUMs and operating models. Other studies find a wide variance in marketing spend, with some firms spending more than 5% and other spending less than 1%.

Second, marketing budgets don’t necessarily reflect firms’ true investment. Kitces estimates that 71% of advisory marketing spend stems from advisor and staff time, not traditional costs like ad budgets or content marketing programs.

That insight has two important implications:

• True marketing costs vary independently of budget. The value of advisor time varies greatly based upon capacity and AUM. Equally, marketing costs rise as marketing succeeds; when advisors generate more organic growth, their time becomes valuable and their marketing becomes less efficient.

• Marketing spend is often capped by capacity, not the CFO. While RIA principals and growth leads often worry about budget restrictions, the real bottleneck is often advisor time. Cerulli’s 2026 research finds that advisors spend just 7% of their time prospecting and 6% on marketing. Even if you can increase the marketing budget, the most costly component is often heavily restricted, meaning you’ll either need external resources or ways to free advisors from other tasks.

• Budget must factor in the efficacy of existing systems. If you have a well-oiled marketing automation system or work with a good RIA marketing agency, your time-related costs will be significantly lower. That means you could appear, on paper, to spend more than your competitors on marketing yet actually develop fewer resources overall.

Straightforward budget comparisons can therefore create a misleading view of your marketing program.

Another way to assess it would be the average client acquisition costs (CAC). Rather than comparing how much of your revenue gets funneled into growth, you can look at how efficiently you use that budget to generate new clients.

Kitces finds that the overall average CAC for advisors is $3,119. But yet again, benchmarking hits a limitation: these averages come from advisors across a wide range of niches, potentially distorting the math for RIAs. If you focus on high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs), for example, $3,119 would be an absolute steal, but also likely to be a big underestimate of the total marketing and time costs required to land a multi-million-dollar client.

The takeaway is simple: while research can set broad parameters, RIAs are best served by building their budget around their own specific marketing context and strategic goals.

How to Build an Effective RIA Marketing Budget

The following framework helps you build a budget that reflects your marketing goals and existing system:

1. Identify Your Marketing Goals

A budget only means something once it's tied to a result you can measure. Organic growth can be achieved in multiple ways, from acquiring more clients to expanding wallet share. Marketing can support all of them, but it works best when engineered to a specific outcome.

Key Steps:

• Determine the ultimate goal of your marketing in a broad sense (organic growth, client retention etc.) and why it’s important
• Identify the best metrics that will determine whether you’ve hit that goal (e.g. marketing influenced AUM etc.)

Note: If you use a goal-setting structure, map the target through it before you cost anything. Our GOST framework template is built for exactly this step.

2. Estimate Your Required Outcomes

Once you have the goals and metrics you’re focused on, you need to know what the concrete outcomes required to meet them will be. For example, if you want to grow AUM by $100M, you need to know how many new clients that would translate into, based on your average client.

Key Steps:

• Establish the specific outcome marketing can influence (e.g. net new leads, net new assets etc.)
• Pinpoint your strategy to achieve those goals (e.g. more COI referrals or increased lead generation)
• Estimate the volume of those outcomes required to meet your goals (e.g. 10 new clients at average $1M investible assets)

3. Evaluate Existing Marketing Spend

Use historical data to create granular benchmarks for each phase of your marketing funnel. You need to know how much it costs, on average, to produce each outcome that moves a prospect forward.

Key Steps:

• Evaluate how much it costs to generate a marketing qualified lead and convert them. This generally involves comparing the average spend versus the average outcome at each stage of your funnel.
• Use these estimates to create an expected cost per lead and cost per acquisition benchmark

Note: If you don’t have an effective marketing measurement system in place, you won’t be able to calculate your own expected costs and will have to rely on generic industry or marketing benchmarks.

4. Set Your Marketing Budget

Now you are ready to set a basic marketing budget estimate. While not a guarantee that you’ll hit your targets, if it is based upon accurate and recent data it should give you a reasonable basis for efficient marketing.

Key Steps:

• Use your benchmark costs (e.g. cost per lead and cost per acquisition) to calculate how much you should require to produce your overarching goal. If you need 10 new clients to reach your net new assets goal, and each client costs roughly $10,000, you’ll need an annual budget of $100,000 to reach that goal.

5. Allocate Your Budget

Once you know how much you’re going to spend on marketing, you need to allocate it to specific channels and campaigns. That is a complex strategic question; we would always recommend a more in-depth process to identify the most efficient use of your money, along with ongoing testing to optimize specific channels and budget placement.

However, our experience suggests the following is a good starting point for most RIAs:

In-House Marketing vs. Hiring an Agency: Which Fits Your Budget Better?

With the budget sized and split across channels, the last decision is who executes it. Most firms weigh two routes: build an in-house team or hire an agency. Each one changes your cost structure, your speed to results, and the kind of expertise you can call on.

Cost structure

An in-house hire is a fixed cost. You carry the salary, benefits, and overhead whether the pipeline is full or quiet. An agency is a flexible cost, usually a monthly retainer you can scale up or pause as goals shift, which matters most for firms with uneven demand.

Hiring cost and ramp time

Building in-house is slower and more expensive to start than it looks. One marketing coordinator rarely covers SEO, content, paid media, email, and analytics well, so firms end up hiring several specialists or stretching one generalist thin. Add recruiting time, onboarding, and the months before a new hire produces results, and the true start-up cost climbs.

Access to expertise

An agency gives you a full skill set on day one. Instead of one person's range, you draw on specialists across each channel, plus the systems and tooling already in place. For a firm that needs results before it can justify permanent headcount, that head start is often the deciding factor.

Firm knowledge vs. industry knowledge

This is the real trade-off. An in-house team lives inside your firm and knows your clients, your advisors, and your positioning better than any outsider can. An agency trades some of that depth for range, working across many firms and bringing patterns and tactics that a single firm would take years to learn alone.

Worried You’re Wasting Your RIA Marketing Budget?

Book a free, no-pressure call with our team and we can quickly review your budget against your specific growth goals. You’ll gain clarity and confidence, along with clear strategic recommendations based on extensive industry expertise, in just 30 minutes.

Frequently Asked Questions

What percentage of revenue should financial advisors spend on marketing?

There is no single figure, and most benchmarks are stated as a share of expenses rather than revenue. Cerulli's July 2026 research puts the RIA average at about 5% of total expenses, with real spend ranging from under 1% to well above 5% depending on firm size and goals. Rather than back into a revenue percentage, size the budget from your growth target and check it against that benchmark.

How much do solo financial advisors spend on marketing compared to advisory teams?

Solo and small firms typically spend less and lean on centers of influence and referrals for organic growth. The clearest shift comes at around $100M AUM, where firms are far more likely to build an in-house marketing team and carry a larger budget. Broadridge also finds growth-focused firms spend about 4x more than their peers, so intent matters as much as size.

What is the average financial advisor marketing budget?

Cerulli reports an average near 5% of total expenses, but that figure understates true cost. Kitces estimates 71% of advisory marketing spend comes from advisor and staff time, not ad budgets or content programs. A budget line alone tells you less about a firm's real marketing investment than it appears to.

How should an RIA build its own marketing budget rather than following an average?

Build from the goal down, not the benchmark up. Start with a net-new-AUM target, convert it into a client count using your average relationship size, then work backward through your funnel to the leads and spend required. Use the industry benchmark only at the end, as a sanity check on the total.

Should an RIA hire an in-house marketing coordinator or a marketing agency?

It depends on your stage and your demand. An in-house hire brings deep firm knowledge but carries a fixed cost, a slow ramp, and the range of just one or two people. An agency brings specialist depth and flexible cost at the expense of some firm-specific knowledge, which is why many firms pair an in-house lead with an agency for execution.

How much does it cost to acquire a new client as a financial advisor?

Kitces puts the overall average client acquisition cost at $3,119, of which about $519 is hard marketing spend. Broadridge reports an overall average of $609 per new client, though that rises to $742 for firms with $100M+ AUM and $997 for growth-focused advisors specifically. These numbers span many niches, so a firm focused on high-net-worth households should expect its true cost to run well above them.

Do growth-focused RIAs spend more on marketing than average?

Yes. Broadridge finds growth-focused firms spend roughly 4x more on marketing than other firms. Budget tends to follow growth intent, not just firm size.