Survey: Firms commit to marketing but aren’t tracking the results

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• Key insight: Advisors generally acknowledge that marketing can help their businesses grow. Few take the necessary additional steps to learn what can turn a referral into an actual client, but AI can help.
• Expert quote: “And then you can, all of a sudden, based upon those prospects, convert those clients and improve wallet share. And that becomes something you can measure.” — Joe Anthony, CEO and founder of Gregory

Many advisors now pour time and resources into marketing to build their businesses. But few take the necessary next step to measure if those efforts are having the desired effect.

In an email survey of 100 marketing professionals at wealth managers this year, the public relations firm Gregory found that 77% had either an in-house marketing team of two or more people or used outside marketing firms, and 64% had increased spending over the past year on efforts to get their names and service offerings better known.

Half of those surveyed from Aug. 6 to Sept. 30 said they consider growth in revenues or assets under management to be the most telling signs of success. Even so, only 23% said they do a good job of gauging where their new business is coming from, and 46% said they consider their attempts to attribute sources of revenue or new assets incomplete.

Joe Anthony, the CEO and owner of Gregory, said the results show wealth managers have embraced the idea that marketing is essential to building their businesses. Now the next step is to try to measure how well it’s all working.

“If you say the last five years is about getting a professionalized [chief marketing officer] function in place, the next two years are maybe about getting marketing analytics functions built in alongside the CMOs,” Anthony said.

READ MORE: Adapt or disappear: AI search is rapidly changing the referral game 

Missing follow-up with referrals

The trouble, Anthony said, is that wealth managers often don’t put crucial follow-up questions to clients who’ve been referred to them. Many firms learn someone came to them on the referral of an existing client or a professional contact in a related field like accounting, he said.

Then they fail to ask about what other sources the new prospect may have consulted to gain some reassurance about the recommendation. They may have become convinced only after seeing a particular advisor speak at an event, publish an online article directly discussing one of their financial needs or answer a journalist’s questions in an interview.

Many advisors simply stop asking questions after learning that a potential client was referred by a friend. 

“But if you ask further, you may learn that, ‘What I was really thinking about [was] the situation with my upcoming divorce,'” Anthony said. “And I was doing some research and I saw you have two people on your team who are doing this kind of work, and I went to an event they did.’ And all of a sudden, it isn’t just a referral.” 

Another place potential clients look to research the advisors who’ve been recommended to them is in so-called “earned media” — or articles or other content from professional journalists. 

Nearly 80% of the respondents to Gregory’s survey deemed earned media important or critical.

“If you want to have more measurability and accountability for marketing, you have to do simple things like giving people the opportunity to tell you how they found you,” Anthony said.

Many providers of customer relationship management, or CRM, systems have built-in client questionnaires designed to help advisors learn where their business is coming from.

“So you basically go through and ask, ‘Hey, have you observed our advertising campaign?'” Anthony said. “‘Have you been to any of our events?’ And you can go through and start qualifying to a greater degree. There’s so much stuff that happens with client intake.”

READ MORE: Schwab blocks unauthorized AI agents, points clients to ‘Charley’ 

Primary sources of business growth and the role of AI

Gregory’s results were corroborated by Charles Schwab’s 2026 Independent Advisor Outlook Study, released this week. Polling 1,235 independent advisors, Schwab found that 70% of the respondents expected referrals to drive their business growth over the next three years. Schwab also found that RIAs primarily look to assets under management to gauge their success. 

AUM was cited as a primary business measure by 75% of the respondents. Following it were new clients (53%), client referrals (44%) and changes in AUM per client or household (40%).

Of course, AI comes quickly into any discussion on using technology to track referrals and client leads. The advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and other large language models has threatened to make obsolete old ways of searching for business and professional help, such as searching on Google.

According to Gregory’s survey, 88% of the respondents view appearing at the top of AI search results as equally important as or more important than standing out in traditional web searches. Over 40% said a top priority is finding ways to be featured in AI-compiled results.

The survey results suggested wealth managers have a general sense of where their growth comes from. Survey takers reported that referrals from existing clients or other professionals make up 40% of their business, and just over 70% said referrals deliver the best returns. 

READ MORE: AI could take advisors back 3 decades. That’s a good thing 

Big firms fail to appear in AI searches

Yet a separate report from Gregory this week found that 84 out of 100 firms ranked this year by CNBC as leading financial advisory firms didn’t even show up in extensive AI searches for wealth managers. 

Gregory analyzed 8,389 AI-generated answers to questions about hiring a financial advisor generated by ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and AI overview and, found only three large firms appeared in most of the responses: Mercer Advisors, which was in 26.6% of the answers; Creative Planning, in 18.1%; and Mariner Wealth Advisors, in 15.4%.

Gregory used 248 questions to simulate how different types of professionals — ranging from athletes, attorneys and business owners to doctors, entertainers and media executives — might search for financial advice. Perhaps not surprisingly, it found the firms that often surfaced in the AI results were those that had names tailored toward a particular group of potential clients. The examples included Dentist Advisors, Hockey Wealth Group and Artisan Financial Planning.

Anthony said his hope is that, as firms become increasingly adept at making sure their names appear prominently in AI searches, they also find ways to use AI to track potential clients who visit  their sites and learn what brought them there.

“What you can do with AI is you can put in the system everyone who’s tagged as someone that found out about the firm due to media relations or events,” Anthony said. “Then they get notified or activated the next time you have another event, or next time that there’s a feature in Barron’s or in your local paper. So you can start using AI that way to home in. And then you can, all of a sudden, based upon those prospects, convert those clients and improve wallet share. And that becomes something you can measure.”