Every prospective client and advisor recruit has different hopes, fears, interests, and expectations. But with limited time and resources, most RIAs struggle to address those unique aspects of their audiences—and risk leaving them feeling undervalued or insufficiently understood.
Marketing personalization helps your firm combat those problems and gain a competitive advantage. Using data, technology, and sophisticated strategy, you can deliver hyper-targeted communications to a large audience—while making each feel seen and heard.
This article explores how that works and what it takes for RIAs to achieve it. Expect to learn:
- How personalization can drive both organic and inorganic growth
- Why most firms struggle to scale or implement effective personalization
- What you need to build a truly effective marketing personalization system
Personalization in RIA Marketing: An Overview
What is Marketing Personalization?
Marketing personalization is the practice of using audience data to tailor messages to a specific individual. Rather than sending the same generic message to every prospective client or advisor, personalization allows you to calibrate content based on specific interests, demographics, business interests, personality types, and more.
It can be difficult to define personalized marketing with precision because companies take very different approaches. Some have sophisticated technology specifically designed for personalization; others simply use their audience’s first names or company in email copy.
However, most would agree that marketing personalization should involve the following steps:
- Audience Segmentation: Data is used to identify patterns (from advisor AUM to personality types) and create sophisticated audience segments
- Tailored Messaging: Content is created to match specific audience segments (This could be multiple variations of the same core message built around a template, or entirely separate content campaigns for specific audiences)
- Iterative Testing: Performance data is studied to identify patterns in the messages that resonate with specific audiences—and then refine targeting and content over time
- Automated Campaigns: Marketing automation systems are used to deploy personalized data with far less manual effort—creating a highly efficient system to deliver personalized content at scale
Why is Personalization Important in Marketing?
Personalization is designed to deliver more relevant, engaging, and effective messages. For RIAs, this is important for a few clear reasons:
1. Audience Engagement
Wealth management audiences—whether high-net-worth prospects or advisors looking to sell their firm—are often time-poor. They will only engage with content that is highly relevant to their specific goals, which makes most generic marketing highly ineffective.
2. Personal Relationships
RIAs are built around personal relationships that foster trust and authority. Advisors are used to spending time speaking directly with clients, COIs, or other advisors—and that time builds a connection and inherent trust that is hard to replicate via digital marketing.
3. Growing Competition
While the RIA industry has surged in popularity recently, the growing number of firms makes it harder to stand out. While digital marketing is a great way to generate growth, RIA marketers increasingly struggle to properly differentiate their firm or deliver an experience that stands out.
Marketing Personalization Helps Combat These Problems
Think about it like a bridge between traditional outreach and digital marketing. Many RIAs fear digital marketing will lose the authentic, human touch of in-person meetings and networking; how could a generic marketing email make your audience feel seen and understood?
Personalization helps to make one-to-many marketing content connect with specific individuals. You can gain all the benefits of digital marketing—scale, flexibility, and resource efficiency—without sacrificing personal engagement or relevance.
When leveraged effectively, personalization therefore helps to:
- Build trust and connection at scale
- Support organic and inorganic growth
- Increase and accelerate marketing conversions
How Personalized Marketing Can Support AUM Growth
Personalization can help RIAs drive both organic and inorganic growth, but the strategic approach will be different for each:
Client Acquisition
Every advisory client wants to feel they are cared for personally—but most advisors struggle to communicate that online. They hide behind industry jargon, follow trends, and post generic advice that appeals to nobody in particular. This leads to a frustrating loop where advisors get frustrated with marketing, lack consistency, and then see weak results, which validates their belief that marketing doesn’t work.
Personalized marketing can help build meaningful connections and drive organic growth. A few simple examples include:
Segmenting Email Campaigns by Life Stage
Use personalization to send retirement planning content to pre-retirees or college savings info to young families. Rather than waiting for leads to find content that speaks to them, you immediately demonstrate your firm’s relevance—and your understanding of the audience’s problems.
Tailoring Social Media Ads by Profession
Target doctors with physician-specific financial challenges and executives with equity compensation expertise. This allows you to widen your reach and attract new prospects while ensuring the content actually connects with their specific interests and needs.
Customizing Landing Pages by Referral Source
Display different messaging for CPA referrals vs. Google searches vs. existing client referrals. This helps to track the impact of specific marketing campaigns and tailored messaging to maximize conversions.
Advisor Recruitment
Joining an RIA is a huge step for most advisors. They might be leaving behind a big-name broker-dealer and fear the risks associated with that move; they might simply worry about the transition process and want reassurance that they won’t lose clients in the process.
Marketing personalization helps you address those concerns more effectively by delivering hyper-relevant and carefully calibrated messaging. Common examples of this include:
Segmenting Outreach by Pain Point
Highlight tech integrations for advisors stuck at broker-dealers with heavy tech restrictions, but leverage messaging around partnership, community, and growth for independent practices. While your M&A process might be identical for both audiences, leaning into the perceived barriers or benefits of joining a RIA will help you generate more interest.
Personalize Campaigns Based On Career Stage
Focus messaging on legacy to senior advisors and mentorship to newer advisors. This enables the audience to “imagine” their future after joining your RIA, which is often a big question mark for advisors who have built their practice over the years—and are highly protective of their clients.
Build Tailored Education Campaigns
Create lead nurture sequences that speak to the most pressing pain points and desires of specific audiences. Some advisors may require more education around RIA models; others might need more detailed information about your transition processes. These sequences can be automated to enable highly efficient, scalable lead nurture funnels.
This is not just theoretical; we have helped lead RIAs deploy many of these tactics to drive AUM growth. One RIA platform generated $2B+ AUM in new pipeline across a single year—and personalization played a role in those results.
The question then becomes: how can your firm achieve similar results?
Best Practices: How RIAs Can Nail and Scale Marketing Personalization
Common Marketing Personalization Mistakes
The benefits of personalization in marketing hinge on execution. Firms must build a sophisticated system that combines technology, marketing strategy, and compliance to nail hyper-targeted messaging—and many RIAs do not have the necessary digital foundations.
RIA marketers, therefore, face three potential barriers to marketing personalization:
1. Disconnected Tech Stacks
Personalization requires a large volume of data to calibrate messages effectively, but RIAs face a few common issues with their data systems:
- Data silos that are caused by large, disconnected tech stacks (See here for a full RIA tech stack audit)
- Poor data hygiene that leads to errors or duplicates within your audience data
- Low-quality data analytics that produce poor outputs, such as badly segmented audience groups
When content is personalized using incomplete or inaccurate data, the effect isn’t just neutral—it can be actively negative. At best, a lead might receive irrelevant messages; at worst, it could totally erode trust and likely lose the prospective client or recruit.
2. Lack of Transparency
Audiences are increasingly conscious of data privacy and often have a basic understanding of marketing personalization. While they might not have detailed knowledge of the technology, they are usually least aware that modern digital marketing uses personal data to feed them targeted messages.
This makes personalization a tough balancing act. Some studies find nearly two-thirds of audiences say personalized messages can feel "intrusive"—a risk that is heightened within wealth management, where users rightly feel more wary of their personal information being used.
RIAs must therefore offer total transparency around their data policies and personalization efforts. This includes:
- Making it easy for leads and clients to “opt out” from personalized content
- Ensuring your use of audience data is clear and transparent
- Limiting the use of third-party data to ensure you have direct consent for all information used within your marketing
3. Increased Compliance Risk
Personalization usually increases the number of marketing messages your firm deploys. Rather than creating a single piece of email copy, your team might create 16 different variations for different audience segments—all of which must
AI will make this challenge even more important. While generative models can accelerate production and help scale personalized content, they make compliance guardrails even more crucial to avoid very costly errors.
However, each of these challenges can be easily addressed and avoided with the right personalization system.
5 Steps to Build a Personalization Marketing System
The secret to personalization is not shiny new technology; it is the right combination of existing solutions, thoughtful strategy, and expert implementation. Follow these five steps to build a systematic approach that delivers results while remaining manageable and compliant.
Step 1: Implement and Optimize Your CRM
Your CRM is the foundation of any personalization strategy. It's where audience data lives, where segmentation happens, and where automated workflows begin. However, a growing number of RIAs are dissatisfied with CRMs; they lack the integration or usability required to scale personalization.
Our recommendation is always that RIAs use HubSpot to centralize their data, consolidate their unwieldy tech stacks, and benefit from a range of specialized personalization features that will help scale effective campaigns.
Key actions:
- Audit your current CRM for data quality—eliminate duplicates, fill gaps, and establish data hygiene protocols
- Integrate your CRM with other key systems (website, email platform, advertising tools) to create a unified data environment
- Define custom fields that capture personalization-relevant data (wealth level, career stage, referral source, content engagement)
- Train your team on consistent data entry practices to maintain quality over time
- Set up dashboards that give you visibility into audience segments and engagement patterns
Step 2: Leverage Data to Segment Your Audience
Personalization is all about understanding your audience—and nothing enables that insight more effectively than data. Use your centralized CRM data to analyze behavior patterns, identify audience clusters, and develop segments that make sense for your specific marketing goals and strategy.
Key actions:
- Begin with demographic or firmographic segmentation (age, wealth level, AUM, firm type)
- Add behavioral data by tracking website visits, content downloads, email engagement, and event attendance
- Create dynamic segments that automatically update as prospects take actions (e.g., "downloaded retirement guide + high net worth")
- Test segment performance to identify which groups respond best to personalized outreach
- Avoid over-segmentation early on—start with 3-5 meaningful groups, then refine as you gather data
Step 3: Develop Core Messaging Frameworks
Audience segments are only useful if you actually treat them distinctly—but that requires separate messaging and content strategies for each group. The focus should be on emotional impact: what kinds of messages and signals will each segment respond to viscerally?
We recommend building flexible messaging frameworks that can be adapted quickly for different segments. This reduces the burden of creating content from scratch and helps you maintain your firm's voice and meet compliance standards.
Key actions:
- Identify your 3-5 primary audience segments (e.g., pre-retirees, business owners, breakaway advisors, senior practitioners)
- Map the unique pain points, goals, and objections for each segment
- Create modular content templates that allow for easy customization (swap examples, adjust tone, modify CTAs)
- Document your messaging frameworks so multiple team members can create on-brand, personalized content
- Build a compliance review process that can efficiently handle higher content volume
Step 4: Automate Email and Ad Campaigns with Precision Targeting
Automation is what makes personalization scalable. By building workflows that trigger the right message at the right time, you can deliver individualized experiences without manual effort for every interaction.
Key actions:
- Set up triggered email workflows based on specific actions (content download, page visit, form submission)
- Build nurture sequences tailored to each segment's journey (e.g., breakaway advisors get succession content; pre-retirees get retirement planning)
- Use CRM data to create custom audiences for targeted social media and search ads
- Implement lead scoring to identify high-intent prospects and route them to advisors automatically
- Start simple with 1-2 automated workflows, test performance, then expand to additional segments
Step 5: Optimize Content, Targeting, and Campaigns Over Time
Personalization is never "done." The firms that see the best results treat marketing as a continuous learning system, constantly testing and refining based on real performance data.
Key actions:
- Establish regular A/B testing for subject lines, messaging angles, content formats, and sending times
- Review campaign analytics monthly to identify which segments and messages drive the highest engagement
- Gather qualitative feedback from prospects and advisors about what resonates (and what doesn't)
- Document learnings and apply insights across future campaigns
- Adjust segmentation and messaging as your audience evolves or as market conditions change
Scale Personalized Marketing with ProperExpression
Bringing together the data, technology, and strategic execution needed to build, deploy, and scale personalized marketing can be overwhelming. From optimizing your CRM to developing effective messages for 10 different audiences, the sheer workload is daunting—let alone the expertise required.
That’s why RIAs trust ProperExpression to take the weight off their shoulders. Our full-stack team combines expert knowledge of marketing strategy, technology, and content with deep knowledge of RIA marketing across both organic and inorganic growth programs.
The result? We can accelerate, enhance, and proactively manage your marketing program to deliver personalization at scale—and drive faster growth, lower costs, and higher ROI than anybody else.
