You’re (still) doing marketing wrong.

This industry is rife with underwhelming, ineffective, and embarrassingly undifferentiated marketing.

You know this.

I suspect you are also coming around to the reality that AI, for all the hand-waving, has basically only made it faster to produce non-creative work. Even as someone who writhes while reading AI-generated content, I mean that in a completely neutral sense; it takes a lot of non-creative work to market an RIA.

Great marketing is available to you, but if you don’t have 1) a good mental model for what it is and where AI does/doesn’t fit; and 2) a way to evaluate the critical business decision on whether to build (hire), buy (tech), or partner (agency), then it’s not readily available.

This short article will help you with those two things.

What makes marketing good?

The job of marketing is to place your firm in the minds of prospects who desire the benefits of your services and then make it obvious that the next step you’re suggesting will bring them closer to fulfilling that desire.

In other words, people who want the benefits of what you’re selling need to know you exist, understand what you do for them, and believe that you actually do it. You tweak your approach based on your prospect’s awareness, and the market’s saturation and sophistication, but that’s the gist.

The job can be split into two equally important halves; there’s the creative part of marketing, and the non-creative part.

AI is not good at the creative part of marketing (and as its coding abilities soar, it seems to be getting worse).

AI is bad at writing. AI writing is easy to spot because it’s littered with (now tropish) signatures, but even worse, upon inspection, it has a very hard time making a coherent argument. The inability to write is a canary in a much more consequential coal mine: AI isn’t thinking. Which means it will very likely lead you astray as a “thought partner.”

AI is bad at copywriting. Yes, this is different from writing. Copywriting is the art of channeling desire. AI is trained on everything people are willing to publicly say and write. People are not particularly outward in expressing their deepest desires. They may not even know them. And unless you sit with them, and observe, and read into the subtext, you won’t know them either.

AI is bad at design. It might be able to “see” something, but it cannot understand what it feels when it sees it. Is it good at reformatting or spitting out branded pdfs and slide decks? Sort of! With some rigorous adherence to guardrails, AI can kind of stick to your brand guidelines. But it can’t create great ones.

AI is bad at production. Pre-production briefs? Solid use case. Capturing actual video footage? Directing? Editing video? It’s great for adding “studio sound” to talking head videos, but if you want anything higher quality, you still need a production team who knows what they’re doing.

So if you use AI for creative marketing work, you’ll talk about saving money on fees, and use words like “clarity,” and rely on phrases like reducing taxes, and bringing insurance and estate and investments under one roof. And your digital brochure will be decently representative of your services and it might not look like an FMG-templated site, but it will only be compelling to the prospect who is so desperate that they’re willing to accept the first option they stumble across.

I am not anti-AI (quite the opposite!) I just think you have to be realistic about where it shines, and it simply does not shine in the creative domains that comprise half of good marketing.

Where AI shines

You guessed it: the non-creative part. It’s all the work that goes into running an operation that can deliver, distribute, and analyze the efficacy of the creative work at a competitive speed, and in a way that doesn’t make everyone on the marketing team want to kill each other. That’s stuff like:

Plumbing and integration. Taking information from one place, like a google doc, and moving it to another, like Hubspot.

Aggregation and analysis. Research, data consolidation, reporting… It can do this work quickly and, so far as I can tell, with pretty reliable results.

Template-based work. It’s great when you need the same inputs processed the same way, every time.

Administrative work. A new year means new tax brackets to update across 25 different pages, lead magnets, blog posts, etc. I’m grateful every time this sort of thing comes off a human’s plate.

Web development. Every day I get to marvel at how fast you can move when you build your website on modern rails (Github + Astro deployed through Cloudflare is how we typically build). If you have a design system and copy, there is almost no latency in getting entire new funnels built and optimized.

In these domains, AI is extremely useful; it’s a massive unlock for firms who value pace. And it can help a team run like a well-oiled machine—but without good creative, it doesn’t matter all that much. Without good creative, it’s just more undifferentiated mediocrity.

Now what?

You might be doing the marketing yourself. You might have someone in-house who “owns” marketing but only has a few hours a week to dedicate to it (because they also own operations and HR). You might have a roster of freelancers, consultants, tech platforms, and agencies you’ve gradually accumulated but never really inspected. You probably have some combination thereof.

If you’re ready to find a few hours to do some inspection (and maybe some introspection, while you’re at it), let me outline the pros and cons of the options available to you.

Add people. RIAs who look to add staff will want a “T-shaped” marketer with skills that move the needle now but are dangerous enough to cover other domains as needed (the price tag for this kind of skill set is upwards of $165k, fully-loaded). Full-time employees add costs beyond salary but can be great for team culture, speed, and accountability. That’s assuming onboarding goes well and they aren’t coming into the role completely cold regarding financial planning and compliance. The benefit of an in-house marketer quickly wanes when this person gets spread thin across too many low-value projects.

Add tech. Hypothetically, tech is the hard dollar representation of saved advisor time. You’re not buying creativity-in-a-box, you’re buying back time that would otherwise be spent handling the operational aspects of marketing. WealthReach is doing some very cool stuff here, SageContent as well, but if you’re going to use AI for your content, I do not recommend taking your hands completely off the wheel. Take 30 extra minutes to add that little bit of personalization (even if they purport to “draft in your voice”).

Add a partner. Approximately one million marketers on LinkedIn claim to help financial advisors grow, so good luck wading through that morass (thankfully the Kitces Services Map whittles the list down to about a hundred thousand). You’re generally going to be choosing between a specialist (a point solution freelancer or specialized agency) or a full-service partner. The right fit depends on your current needs and your goals. Full-service partners may be slower to onboard vs. specialists who can slot in and start working tomorrow. In my experience, the only way to keep any outsourced resource delivering at the desired standard is to keep a boot on their neck—which is an argument in favor of the often-more-expensive “full service” model if you need expertise in more than one domain (fewer necks means less operational debt).

I don’t think this will come as a surprise

Silvy is a full-service marketing partner.

I don’t think the partner route is for everyone. It’s stage and goal dependent. But in the right circumstances, a partner can turn what was once the most laborious part of the job into something that feels easy, moves at the pace of your firm, and drives the desired results. They can deliver a quality pipeline that drastically reduces dependence on you.

Or they can be a nightmare to work with, promising the moon and accomplishing nothing, and you’ll be forever jaded by the experience.

I don’t want that for you.

So, if you think the partner route might be a fit for your firm, read on.

This is what you need to look for when evaluating a growth partner

Does this partner help us simplify? You pay a partner to take work off your plate and do it better than you could do yourself. But ideally, they’re also able to help you streamline your operations by replacing existing relationships at marginal or no additional cost. For a while, a roster of vendors can be manageable, but scale loves simplicity.

Are they able to move at the pace of our business? A good partner is responsive and collaborative, and uses AI to go faster, but not at the expense of quality. Ideally they already have a depth of knowledge regarding our industry’s compliance posture, and the needs, wants, and desires of the clients you serve. Better still is a technical understanding of the many facets of financial planning.

Will they help us differentiate our firm? This is copywriting, it’s brand design, it’s video production–critical creative skills that are not held by AI. Can they help you look and sound like the best version of you, while everyone else sounds the same? An agency (or “growth studio”) like Objective Brand is very strong here.

Is it clear that they will help us achieve our stated goals? This always requires a small leap of faith (made ever smaller by customer references and case studies). But, just like good financial planning, the strategy should be rational and easy to understand, the reporting frequency should be sensible given the channels and goals, and the optimization process should be reflective of new information as it becomes available. And just like a great financial planner, a good partner is always proactively thinking about where things can be done better.

Two things to take away

First, somebody has to own the creative half of marketing and it can’t be AI. It could be you. Or a marketing hire armed with a considered arsenal of tech. Or a partner (or combination of partners). But please make sure it’s someone with good creative judgment.

And then there’s the second truth: AI should absolutely be baked into your marketing operations. The speed and scale advantages are simply too good to pass up.

If you’ve ever said “I don’t have time to learn AI but I want to be using it” or if you’re interested to see how we’re helping our clients ship great creative and implement AI where it moves the needle, now is a good time to get in touch. Our intro call is a 30 minute evaluation on fit, and then we build and demo something specific to your firm to show you how this could work.

Thanks for reading.