Video content is among the fastest-growing areas within wealth management marketing. The volume of video content published by wealth management firms grew nearly 300% between 2019 and 2023, while 95% of marketers recognize videos as a key tool to influence audience behavior.
But most advisors still lack a sustainable process to make video a core part of their marketing. Production costs and compliance fears mean many advisors treat videos like a one-off project rather than a standard format. And that means leaving significant value on the table.
Video marketing for financial advisors uses short, compliance-reviewed videos, explainers, client testimonials, and educational content to build trust with prospects faster than text alone.
Effective programs mix always-on formats (explainer and FAQ videos) with trust content (testimonials and endorsements, which require SEC Marketing Rule disclosures) and timely commentary tied to market or life events. Success is measured by meetings booked and conversations started, not just views.
Video content is often considered a premium product: advisors produce a handful of ‘hero’ videos that populate their key website pages, then rely on lower-cost written content to fill the rest of their marketing funnel.
There’s nothing wrong with this; strong text-based content still drives results and doesn’t require extra production costs. But it does mean firms that are able to generate a higher volume of video content gain a clear advantage.
A regular slate of high-quality video content helps advisors:
Video often (though, as we’ll see, not always) drives higher engagement. The medium is passive and therefore easier to digest; the combination of visual and audio reduce the likelihood a viewer will be distracted. While most hard data about video engagement rates is poor quality, our experience working with wealth management firms is that video often moves the needle more quickly than written text.
This is particularly true for younger investors and the heirs of existing high-net-worth (HNW) clients. These audiences tend to expect video content and find it easier to engage with; creating high-quality videos therefore gives you a head start against firms that publish one video every six months.
Every element of text-based content is shared: you use the same words and grammar as every other firm. While written content can be distinctive, with a unique point of view or tone of voice, these are rarely readily apparent. Most wealth management content therefore tends toward homogeneity.
Video content features several impossible-to-replicate factors, like an advisor’s unique voice, face, and on-screen presence. Even if you film them in a generic location (like an office) with standard lighting and framing, those factors instantly create an emotional connection with some degree of differentiation.
That’s why many advisory firms feature video prominently on their website home page: they tend to be firms’ most distinctive assets and are the easiest content format from which to grow a brand.
Video captures tons of subtle factors that other forms of content cannot. Watching an advisor’s body language, hearing their voice, and looking into their eyes gives you a real sense of their character. That makes it far easier to create an emotional connection with the audience.
Relatively few advisors have a distinctive voice in prose; prospects who spend several hours reading your blog might feel no closer to you as an individual. But listening to a single hour-long webinar can form the foundation for a trusting relationship.
That’s particularly important for advisors who are anxious about losing the personal touch that IRL events facilitate. Advisors have spent years building connections at fundraisers and on golf courses; video captures some of the skills you’ve built there and makes them scalable across the digital landscape.
But that doesn’t mean video is always the best content format for advisory firms.
Marketing blogs frequently claim that people retain 95% of information delivered via video, but just 10% delivered via text. The claim doesn’t just have questionable origins (try tracing it to an original study); it also overlooks significant nuance. We might for example ask:
Generalized claims that ‘video beats text’ are usually promoted by companies selling marketing video services or software; they are repeated widely because they make intuitive sense. Most people really do prefer to watch video than read. But that doesn’t mean video is always better for marketing purposes.
Most wealth management prospects and COIs are not consuming content for entertainment. They need specific information; sometimes reading text is the (perhaps less pleasurable, but) better way to get it.
Here are just a few ways text-based content like blogs, downloadable assets, websites, and even social posts are likely more valuable than video:
Most people can read faster than they speak. Even if you watch video content at 2x speed, the information almost definitely comes much slower than if you read. For people who need a fast, efficient answer, text-based content is likely to be preferable.
Similarly, video requires better internet access to load and usually requires audio. Even with accurate subtitles, it might not be possible to watch a video while commuting, whereas text-based content can be loaded and read in basically any environment.
Text-based content gives the audience far more control over how they take in information. They can scan the text for keywords; reread specific passages; easily highlight and get definitions for unfamiliar terms; and even copy/paste specific chunks of text into a separate document for future revision.
While video content can replicate some of this with clear chapter markings and transcripts, most people are far more adept at pinpointing the exact information they need in a large text than isolating it within a long video.
Video can certainly support SEO and GEO, but search and AI answer engines are still fundamentally built on text analysis. Written content therefore tends to offer more search value than video.
Equally, many of the authority signals advisors might use in video content (such as clothing, body language) are not visible to LLMs and Google crawlers. Text-based authority cues, like high-quality external links, are easier to embed in written content.
Video content generally requires advisors to feel confident appearing on camera, which is far from a given. While many are also uncomfortable producing written text, generative AI tools make it easier to get started with written content; it is also easily outsourceable, whereas the equivalent of ghostwriting for video content are relatively immature AI tools.
These tools could be viable in the future, but currently they are a reputational risk. If video gains its value from showcasing your personality and authentic character, posting AI-generated content will be counterproductive.
So text-based content serves financial advisors better when:
“Video content” spans everything from webinars to TikTok clips; clearly wealth management firms don’t need to cover the entire spectrum. Instead, our team suggests most advisor will use just four core video formats:
Explainer videos are basically short, simple videos designed explicitly to educate on a specific topic. Advisors often create explainers for basic financial planning or tax topics; these can be very effective for building a following amongst younger prospects, though they are most likely to appeal to retail investors.
Client trust content is our catch-all term for videos like testimonials and endorsements that build credibility, authority, and trust. Hearing somebody personally vouch for an advisor is powerful; firms should feature these videos prominently on their website.
However, the SEC’s Marketing Rule makes them feel like a regulatory minefield. Such content should therefore always be produced with help from a team that properly understands exactly what kind of disclosures are required.
FAQ videos are really another branch of explainer videos that include content aimed at demystifying the advisory experience itself. Firms can significantly reduce the friction that stops many prospects booking an initial meeting by creating videos that explain exactly what the meeting will involve or what the meeting requires from a prospect.
Real-time commentary videos feature an advisor speaking to specific ongoing events. That usually means something in the news, such as market events or tax policy changes. However, it can also involve speaking about specific client case studies, as long as you confirm that the client is comfortable with their story being shared.
The SEC's Marketing Rule (Rule 206(4)-1) governs how registered investment advisors advertise, and it makes no exception for video. A testimonial is a testimonial whether it is written on a landing page or spoken on camera. What follows is general context, not compliance advice; your CCO or counsel has the final word on any specific piece.
Three points matter most for video.
This can make video feel risky. Video already requires more resources to produce; adding compliance bottlenecks can lead to a prolonged production process where expensive content gets stuck in purgatory.
However, firms can avoid most of these problems with a simple compliance process. With a proper production schedule and a team that understand the regulatory restrictions, you can develop video content consistently without creating undue compliance vulnerabilities.
Most advisors overestimate what video costs because they picture a film crew for every clip. The reality is video can be amongst the fastest and simplest content formats to produce; the challenge is simply to match the production video to the strategic goal:
Timely commentary and FAQ answers do not need a studio; a recent phone, a clip-on mic, and a window for light will clear the bar, and over-producing them wastes money on content with a short shelf life.
Save professional production for the assets that live on your homepage for years: the firm's hero video and its client testimonials. Spending studio budget on a two-week market update is the most common way firms overspend.
Once you have a repeatable setup, filming in-house is the cheapest way to hit the volume that actually moves results. A partner earns its cost on the high-stakes assets, and an advisor-focused partner earns it twice over: a team that already understands the Marketing Rule will not hand you a testimonial edit that compliance has to reject, which saves the review cycles that quietly make video expensive.
One hour-long webinar recording becomes a dozen short clips, a blog post built from the transcript, and a week of social content. You are not producing thirty pieces; you are producing one and cutting it thirty ways. This is how a firm goes from one video every six months to a regular slate without a proportional jump in cost.