RIA aggregators and platforms have experienced unprecedented growth in recent years and now account for more than $1.5 trillion in assets under management (AUM).1 But such growth has led more firms to flock to the model, leaving you with a serious challenge: how do you distinguish your platform amongst dozens of competitors, all fighting over the same high-value advisors?
The answer is using marketing to boost your message and build your brand – and this article will show you how. We’ll look at eight different channels that have proven results for RIAs looking to acquire new advisors with a valuable book of business, based on our experience helping one platform generate $2.2 billion in new pipeline across a single year.
But first, let’s address some initial scepticism: why would you even need eight different marketing channels?
RIA Growth in 2025: The Power of Multi-Channel Marketing
Traditional growth strategies within financial advisory circles have focused on in-person networking and referrals secured through centers of influence (COIs). But while those methods still drive results, a new landscape is emerging where advisors increasingly use the internet to research RIA aggregators and explore their professional options.
Imagine a single browsing session:
- The advisor searches Google for ways to grow their business
- Then scrolls LinkedIn for half an hour
- Before reading a few blogs
- And finally checking their emails
These are all opportunities to reach them and promote your platform. RIAs that want to beat the competition must seize all of them – and deliver a single, coherent message and brand image that resonates with their audience and builds trust.
The latest Kitces report finds that the fastest-growing firms are more likely to:
- Use digital marketing to supplement traditional growth channels
- Explore non-traditional channels such as SEO
- Focus on marketing ROI rather than simply revenue generated
- Leverage more marketing channels than their competitors
So, let’s explore how you can follow those findings – and drive faster growth by expanding your marketing channels.
8 Powerful Marketing Strategies that Drive RIA Growth
The following channels drive reliable results for RIA aggregators and RIA platforms:
1. Webinars
Webinars are among the most popular marketing channels – yet appear to be heavily underutilized by RIA aggregators. Many advisors will happily spend an hour learning about a topic that will help them improve their practice, making webinars the perfect opportunity for your platform to position itself as a trusted guide and source of expert insight.
It’s important to note that webinars require patience and discipline. Many firms instinctively want to use webinars as a promotional tool, but this almost always backfires. Your target advisors are likely time-poor and will only attend an event they believe will actively help their careers. Nobody wants to spend an hour watching a glorified sales pitch!
Avoid this by focusing on topics that add real value to advisors, such as advice about practice management, operational efficiency or growth - all of which can easily tie back into your platform offering without raising too many eyebrows.
Expert Tips:
- Leverage your network to promote the event. Use individual social media accounts and email lists to reach prospective attendees. This should then be augmented with a more generalized social media and warm email campaign, along with paid ads, depending on your budget.
- Simplify hosting using HubSpot and Zoom. Our experience suggests the technical aspects of webinar hosting are the most fraught for RIA aggregators, but much of this can be avoided using the right set of platforms. Combining Zoom with HubSpot enables your registrant information to be fed directly into your CRM – unlocking powerful insights for future marketing.
- Connect with attendees after the event. Create a post-webinar promotion campaign that can be launched immediately after the event. This will help turn attendees’ interest into active engagement and build on the trust you built during the webinar.
2. SEO Content
The average advisor will use Google during every stage of their process of researching and selecting an RIA aggregator. Search engine optimization (SEO) helps your firm to appear at the top of those searches and become an integral part of that process, ultimately building trust and becoming the “go-to” option when they decide to make the leap.
For example, you might produce a series of blogs that explain how different RIA models work, as this is a topic with which many advisors will struggle. They would then discover your content during their research and start engaging with your firm, maybe by subscribing to your newsletter for more updates or downloading a piece of content. This principle applies across the entire marketing funnel, meaning you could potentially reach new advisors who are actively looking for an RIA aggregator.
Note: Our complete guide to RIA SEO covers the full range of techniques you can use to rank for the terms for which your target advisors search.
Expert Tips:
- Combine keyword research with audience psychology. Using tools like Google Search Console will help you identify terms your target advisors are searching for, but this should be augmented with deep thinking about what they might need at each stage of their journey to ensure the SEO content you produce resonates.
- Give your audience somewhere to go after reading. Don’t simply produce content that ranks – ensure it encourages your audience to act. This could mean prompting them to sign up for your newsletter; it could mean pushing for a sales call. The goal of SEO should always be to not only rank but also drive qualified leads.
3. Paid Search
Paid search allows you to skip the queue and simply pay Google to list your website at the top of search rankings. This is particularly useful for firms that are less well established and may not want to wait several months for their SEO content to start ranking organically.
The only downside to paid search is that you must be very careful in managing your budget. Much of the process becomes automated and must be manually altered to avoid bidding on keywords that are irrelevant or simply not producing a strong return. We always recommend our RIA clients start small with such campaigns and slowly build upon what works over time.
Expert Tip:
- Experiment constantly to optimize your ads. Paid ads are a great way for RIA aggregators to evaluate which messages actually resonate with their target advisors and see which aspects of their offering most appeal. For example, you may find that a message about the community your platform offers actually outperforms messages about growth or operational efficiency.
4. Organic Social
When we talk about organic social, let’s be honest: we really mean LinkedIn. Roughly 90% of financial advisors use the platform3 – and many are actively using it to seek out professional advice or options for their future progress. This makes it the perfect space to promote your platform and connect with advisors on a personal level.
While it’s possible to drive leads through LinkedIn, its primary value is more reputational. Most advisors today will check out your profile when considering whether to connect with sales or join the platform. Having a strong network and clear engagement signals trustworthiness and will ultimately help move the deal forward.
Expert Tip:
- Build your team’s personal brands. While RIA aggregators can post via their official firm page – and will benefit from doing so – LinkedIn is a person-first platform and rewards individuals. Select a few individuals within your firm to focus on and build their individual brands, which ultimately serve to promote the overall platform anyway.
- Comment on high-performing posts regularly. This is a great way to reach a wider audience faster and build engagement. While posting original content several times a day is a heavy burden, producing a handful of responses is far less labor-intensive and typically produces better results, especially for firms with a less well-established online presence.
5. LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn Ads are a great way to benefit from the platform’s popularity before you have built an organic following. Using advanced targeting options, you can serve eye-catching ads to your ideal advisors with a relatively high level of precision, and use that attention to promote your brand at every stage of the marketing funnel.
Your ads could promote downloadable assets, promotional videos, or simply urge advisors to learn more about your platform or book a meeting. This makes LinkedIn ads highly versatile and a great way to amplify specific campaigns or support a larger marketing strategy.
Expert Tips:
- Develop topical campaigns to increase relevance. Our clients have seen strong results from leaning into financial news and economic trends that are directly relevant to their target advisors, showcasing their platform’s expertise and offering genuine value from which advisors can immediately benefit.
- Leverage video and high-quality visuals wherever possible. Advisors – like most LinkedIn users – are particularly receptive to images in which they can identify themselves, and content, like short videos, which are easy to consume. Simply adding the right visual component can dramatically improve your ads’ performance.
6. Gated Content
Gated content is any high-value asset, such as an infographic, eBook, or whitepaper, that advisors want so much they will give you their contact details to access it. This is a powerful lead generation tactic for RIA aggregators because gated content typically relies upon industry expertise, and firms tend to have that in abundance.
For example, one RIA aggregator we’ve worked with drove great results using a growth guide that explained how advisors could build their practice. Not only did the guide provide real value for the advisors who downloaded it – but it also allowed the firm to subtly position their platform as offering the various features advisors need to grow.
Expert Tips:
- Use HubSpot to make hosting gated content easy. The platform allows you to create landing pages, forms, and all the other digital assets you need to promote gated content, which saves RIAs a lot of headaches.
- Repurpose content to drive greater marketing efficiency. A single piece of high-value gated content could be reused to create several SEO blogs and a month’s worth of social media posts, turning the initial time and resource investment into a big win for your firm.
7. Warm Email
Joining an RIA aggregator is a potentially career-changing decision for advisors, and they therefore take a good deal of time considering their options. Warm email is a great marketing channel to maintain engagement throughout that process, helping you nurture leads and stay top of mind when they are finally ready to take the plunge.
There are many ways to approach this – from running a weekly newsletter to deploying strategic campaigns that promote your services. But all are relatively efficient due to the low cost of email as a channel.
Expert Tip:
- Build audience lists within HubSpot to target emails. This will allow you to build email sequences that are delivered to specific advisors based on their engagement with your other content. For example, when they take a particular action, such as downloading an eBook, they will receive a series of emails that are directly relevant contextually and move them closer to a sales conversation.
8. Cold Email
Cold email is far from the most reliable marketing channel, but it can be surprisingly effective at connecting with new leads, especially for aggregators that target advisors at specific firms. This is because your emails can lean directly into the most relevant pain points advisors at those specific firms experience and showcase exactly why your platform offers them a better deal.
Our experience suggests cold email must be highly strategic – it should never be the foundation of a lead generation strategy – and deployed sparingly to avoid harming your platform’s reputation within the industry. But like warm email, the costs of cold email are extremely low, and landing even a single new advisor based on the channel would likely repay all your efforts multiple times over.
Acquire More Advisors with Less Effort Using ProperExpression
ProperExpression is a full-stack digital marketing agency that helps RIAs drive faster, more efficient growth. Our team offers expertise across the entire digital marketing spectrum, allowing us to leverage the exact mix of channels your target advisors respond to – and attract more advisors while reducing acquisition costs.
One client recently drove $2.2 billion AUM in new pipeline in a single year. Want to spend 15 minutes with our CEO to immediately assess whether you could achieve similar results?
