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:
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:
Personalization is designed to deliver more relevant, engaging, and effective messages. For RIAs, this is important for a few clear reasons:
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.
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.
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.
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:
Personalization can help RIAs drive both organic and inorganic growth, but the strategic approach will be different for each:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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?
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:
Personalization requires a large volume of data to calibrate messages effectively, but RIAs face a few common issues with their data systems:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.