When to Market the Firm vs. the Advisor: A Guide for RIAs

Marketing in the wealth management space presents a challenge that’s rare in most other industries. While brands like Pepsi or Levi’s promote a single product or identity, financial advisory firms are marketing two interconnected but distinct entities: the individual advisor and the firm itself.

This dual identity creates a strategic tension. Should your marketing efforts spotlight the advisor as the face of trust and expertise? Or should they elevate the firm as the enduring brand clients can rely on, regardless of which advisor they work with? Each path has trade-offs. Prioritizing the advisor can build faster trust and rapport, but may limit scalability and create client retention risks if that advisor leaves. Highlighting the firm builds long-term brand equity, but may feel less personal and compelling in a relationship-driven industry.

This decision isn’t just tactical - it’s foundational. It influences how your message lands, how prospects perceive value, and how easily your firm grows. That’s why, before you launch a single LinkedIn campaign or build out a landing page, you need clarity on this core question: Are we marketing the advisor, the firm, or both - and why?

How Clients Really Choose Financial Advisors

Most advisors approach marketing all wrong - and I was one of them. 

I spent years believing the best way to win clients was by being the smartest person in the room. I flexed my knowledge at every opportunity, advertised my firm’s qualifications like a peacock, and tried to show I was the perfect advisor for every client. 

And it worked. Sort of. I won clients; I experienced growth. But the truth is, that growth was powered almost entirely by raw effort. White-knuckled out-hustling the competition at a pace I knew I couldn’t keep replicating. And even then, it was never quite the level of growth I expected - and it certainly wasn’t the kind of growth I later experienced.

What I came to realize was that every other advisor was doing the same thing: trying to show they were the most rational choice for their clients. The result? We were essentially indistinguishable. We were all saying the same things, singing the hymns - I call it the “credential choir.”

The problem is that clients don’t choose advisors using a rational framework. 

They care that you can do your job, of course. But what they really care about is that they understand and trust you, which is, at root, an emotional consideration. I was abruptly alerted to this fact when a new prospect had seen a graduation speech I gave at Brown University and wanted me to be their financial advisor. They didn’t need to hear more about my qualifications; they didn’t care about my planning or investment process. The speech had built a connection with them - it had what I call emotional resonance - and that was enough. 

My takeaway was simple: the key to growth as an advisor is building emotional resonance. The growth I experienced after this revelation was more than enough evidence; the growth I’ve since helped other advisors achieve using the same approach is icing on the cake.

But once we accept that advisor marketing is about emotional resonance, it presents a conundrum. Because there are two distinct ways to market an advisory business - and they serve two distinct emotional purposes.

Personal and Firm Branding: Understanding the Difference

As an advisory business, your marketing can either foreground an individual advisor (personal branding) or the firm itself (firm branding). You can use the same message, the same marketing channel, and the same timing, but clients will respond differently depending on whether you’re speaking as a firm or an individual.

This is true at a neurological level; personal and firm brands are processed as different kinds of stimuli. But the more important distinction is how they make the client feel:

• Personal brands are emotional and built around authenticity. Clients feel they know and like the individual advisor, trusting them at a personal level, the way you might a neighbor or friend
• Firm brands are structural and built around symbolic resonance. The brand represents a set of ideas that exist beyond specific individuals, leading clients to trust the processes and ethos that underlie the business

It’s important to note that these are not mutually exclusive. You don’t have to choose one or the other and stick to that choice. This is actually the biggest mistake most firms make: opting for an extreme - either becoming a soulless corporate entity or relying on a cult of personality. 

Instead, the most successful advisors start with emotional resonance and build something sustainable. Most early-stage companies focus on personal brand building and slowly transition to firm-focused marketing as they grow. I think of it like the Olympic torch: an individual lights the fire, but the fire becomes a larger symbol - and can change hands seamlessly without losing its purpose and meaning. 

How do you light that fire and pass it along? That’s the question I’ve spent more than a decade answering - and the answer starts with going deeper on the two kinds of advisor marketing. 

An Overview of Advisor Marketing 

The Foundation of Personal Branding

Every great personal brand is built around what makes the individual advisor authentically magnetic. 

Now, that might sound like charisma - and I’ll admit, the concepts are somewhat related. But magnetism is not about being cool and extroverted, nor is it about bearing your soul in public. It’s about being authentic and attracting people to your way of thinking. 

I believe every person is magnetic, even if they haven’t shown the world yet. Because what magnetism is, at its core, is a recognition of shared humanity. It’s a sense that this person gets me. And every advisor can make that kind of connection, even if only with a very specific group of potential clients. 

No Risk, No Resonance: How to Find What Makes Your Magnetic

The reason I believe most advisors never find what makes them magnetic - and therefore don’t build successful personal brands - is that they are afraid of rejection. They want to appeal to as many clients as possible, which means not putting off potential prospects.

This is a mistake: the worst thing you can hear as an advisor is not “no” - it’s “ I’ll think about it.” Working with a financial advisor is a big step for most people, and they are never going to be driven into action without passion. Which means you need to elicit a strong response. 

And yes - that could be a very strong no. But think about it like this: you’ve just saved yourself weeks of pointless emails and meetings. Recognizing a bad-fit lead is almost as valuable as finding a good-fit one. 

So, how do you actually find what makes you magnetic? 

If you’re a successful advisor, you’ve likely already picked up on some surface-level patterns–moments when people seem to lean in. When something you say or the way you say it seems to land deeper. Those moments matter. They’re not random.

But they’re also not enough.

They don’t solve the real problem: getting people to the meeting in the first place. The challenge in modern marketing isn’t what happens once you’re face-to-face. It’s how you trigger the same sense of fit and trust before the conversation ever begins. That’s what magnetism solves.

What I teach starts with deep discovery and goes far deeper than I can outline here. It involved identifying and aligning your natural personality, your communication strengths, and your underlying emotional posture with a narrative arch that is most natural to you, then shaping how those cues show up in your brand, so the right people feel it instinctively. Not logically. Viscerally.

If you want a place to start, begin paying attention to what makes people feel more open around you–not impressed, but safe. Then ask: how might I translate that into how I show up online in my messaging?

That’s just the surface. Underneath it is something far more exacting, more personal, and more powerful than advisors have ever been taught to see. The spark is the invitation, not the finish line. It marks the moment you start building a brand that reflects who you are in a way the right clients can feel. Finding the spark takes intention. Inner work. Honesty. Guidance. Once it is there, you’re not just marketing–you’re attracting.

An Overview of Firm Marketing 

The Foundation of Meaningful Symbols

If you’ve ever looked at the US flag or the Nike logo and felt something - you know how an arbitrary image can become almost electric with meaning. But let’s not delude ourselves: there’s nothing inherent in those images that makes them so powerful. Instead, they have become symbols for something. And that process is not quite as mysterious as it first appears.

The truth is that logos, names, and other images get loaded with meaning when they become symbolic of something more important. Your belief in freedom, say. Or your desire to “Just Do It.”

Advisory brands can work the exact same way: over time, through consistent exposure, your brand identity becomes lodged in the audience’s head. It becomes a symbol for something - your investment philosophy, your way of working, or (ideally) the feeling of safety and confidence that your service has given the client. 

Of course, this doesn’t always happen. In fact, one of the most common reasons firms fail is that they never figure out how to create this sense of symbolic resonance. The minute the CEO leaves the room (or the firm), clients don’t feel the same. They don’t have a brand - they have a name. And that makes scaling virtually impossible. 

How to Scale a Firm Without Losing Your Emotional Resonance 

The key to avoiding that fate and building a successful firm brand is to operationalize your emotional resonance. Remember when I said most firms start as advisor brands and transition into firm brands? This is how that happens.

There are two basic steps here:

• Codification: Make explicit the core beliefs and practices that your firm stands for. These shouldn’t just be empty “values” that companies list on their website; they should be attached to the real people who built the firm and drive real action throughout the firm. They should direct your hiring decisions and be understood by every person working with the firm.

• Signal Craft: Engineer every aspect of your public-facing communication - from your website to client emails - so that it reflects the same core set of values and personality. This is essentially a way of creating cohesion, so that every part of your firm appears to operate as a single unified “person”. 

For example, let’s imagine you run a firm with three core advisors. Each of you may have different strengths, and different things might make each of you magnetic. But the key to building a brand that represents your firm is to identify the shared magnetism - the traits you all have in common. 

The alternative would be to build around the strongest individual trait; lots of firms choose to do this. But this leaves you with a cult of personality. The firm might grow, but it will only be sustainable while the advisor whose trait you’ve built around is there. 

We can probably all think of examples where this is the case.

So you identify those shared traits; codify them; amplify them; and share them with the next generation. That’s really the only way I’ve ever seen a firm sustain both growth and quality service across multiple decades.

The question then becomes: how do you turn these big strategic decisions into concrete action?

Marketing the Advisor vs the Firm: A Tactical Guide 

There are some basic “best practices” to follow when choosing between advisor and firm brand–but like most decisions in growth strategy, the real answer is: it depends.:

This isn’t just about firm size or stage. It’s also about the specific humans you have to work with. For example, if you’ve got charismatic, or specifically or contextually credible advisors (or founders), they can accelerate trust in ways a firm brand can’t. 

So, think of what follows as a field-tested pattern–not a formula. You’ll still need to consider positioning, maturity, team dynamics, specific goals, the emotional signals you want to send and how best to send them, and more. Often, the best way is to blend both with strategic intention.

• Marketing the advisor works best for smaller firms and firms during the early growth stage. It is also an effective strategy during lead nurturing, because individual advisors create a human connection more quickly. You could therefore generate a lead through the firm brand but switch to promoting individual advisors during the nurture phase.
• Marketing the firm works best when your firm is relatively mature and has a stable, well-established client base. It may also be more effective when approaching high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) with a lot of complex needs, as it signals that a broader range of resources and expertise is likely to be available.

However, most firms are best served by switching between the two depending on your specific strategic goal and tactical approach. Here is a quick “cheat sheet” to help you identify which brand to use for which marketing channel, without consideration of nuance:

What Makes You Magnetic?

The advisor/firm question is always challenging, and I hope this helps you make the best decisions. But regardless of the approach you take, one thing is certain: short-term tactical plays will never produce lasting results or sustainable growth if you don’t have a foundation of emotional resonance. 

So, rather than worrying about the personal/firm brand binary, advisors need to start thinking about the emotional message you want to send – and what is the best vehicle for it. My company NeuBeFi helps advisors answer those questions and maximize their marketability.

Curious what makes you magnetic?