How to evaluate a marketing firm for your advisory firm: 5 questions that separate qualified prospects from vanity metrics

An advisor in a private industry community asked a question this week that every RIA owner asks eventually. He is evaluating six marketing firms, and he wanted to hear from advisors who had actually used them: did they deliver qualified prospects and new clients, or mostly views, leads, and engagement? What did you spend? What came back in appointments, clients, and AUM? How much work did it take from you? And was it worth it?

Those five questions are the whole evaluation. A marketing firm that survives them is worth a proposal call. A firm that gets vague on any of them has told you what you needed to know. Here is each question, what a good answer sounds like, and the math that decides the last one.

Key takeaways

• Judge marketing firms on qualified prospects, clients, and AUM - never on views, leads, or engagement. The first set is pipeline, the second is applause.
• Kitces Research puts the average cost of acquiring one client at $3,119, and 83% of it is the advisor's own time, not ad spend. Price your hours into every quote.
• Expect honest ranges, not guarantees: retainers in the low thousands a month plus ad spend, and a firm that promises specific client counts is selling, not forecasting.
• The worth-it test is arithmetic: compare your all-in cost per client against first-year revenue per client. A $2M household at roughly 1% pays back a $3,000 acquisition cost in about two months.

On this page

• Will they deliver qualified prospects, or mostly views, leads, and engagement?
• What should you expect to spend, including ad spend?
• What results should you demand - appointments, clients, or new AUM?
• How much work should the firm require from you?
• How do you decide whether it was worth it?
• What changes when you target $2M+ households?
• Where this framework has limits
• Where Spaces fits
• The bottom line
• The bottom line
• Frequently asked questions

Will they deliver qualified prospects, or mostly views, leads, and engagement?

This is the question that ends most evaluations early, because the industry runs on vocabulary. A "lead" can mean a person who downloaded a PDF in 2022. "Engagement" can mean your own employees liked the post. Neither one pays a bill.

Define qualified before the sales call, in writing: the prospect's needs fit your work, they can receive your services (right state, right fee model, any asset minimum), and they have agreed to a real next step. Our guide to what counts as a qualified inquiry walks through building that definition. Then ask the firm, in these words: "How many qualified prospects, by my definition, did you deliver to your last three advisor clients, and can I talk to one of them?"

A good firm answers with numbers and references. A weak one answers with case-study screenshots full of impressions.

What should you expect to spend, including ad spend?

For advisor-marketing retainers, the honest range most firms quote lands in the low thousands per month - roughly $2,000 to $10,000 depending on scope - plus whatever ad budget runs on top (estimates based on published rate cards and advisor self-reports; every firm prices differently). Lead-generation vendors sit in a similar monthly band with very different economics; our lead-gen cost comparison breaks that market down by name.

The number that reframes the whole conversation comes from Kitces Research's study of more than 800 advisors: the average total cost of acquiring one client is $3,119 - but only $519 of that is hard-dollar marketing spend. The other $2,600, fully 83%, is the advisor's own time. A retainer is never just a retainer. It is the invoice plus your hours.

What results should you demand - appointments, clients, or new AUM?

Report results in a ladder, and insist the firm reports the same way: qualified prospects at the bottom, appointments held above that, clients signed above that, new AUM at the top. A firm can move the bottom rung quickly and honestly believe it is winning while nothing reaches the top.

Set the bar with the same Kitces data. In that study, paying third-party marketing consultants produced $25,403 of spending per new client on average, and social media run for its own sake cost $11,937 per client. Those are averages, not destinies - but they tell you what "normal" looks like when nobody is watching the top rung. If a firm's case studies stop at leads, assume the ladder breaks right there.

Doing this math for your own firm? Request the free readiness check. A completed readiness review can show examples of how your firm appears in AI answers at the time of the check. Request a review: Can ChatGPT find your firm?

How much work should the firm require from you?

Remember the 83%. Time is the biggest line item in client acquisition, so "how much of my week does this take" is a pricing question, not a convenience question. Done-with-you programs (you record the videos, you write the posts, they edit and schedule) can produce excellent economics if you genuinely have the hours. Done-for-you programs cost more dollars and fewer hours.

Ask for the time budget in writing: hours per week for recording, reviewing, approving, and meeting. Then multiply by your honest hourly value and add it to the fee before comparing firms. The cheapest retainer on paper is often the most expensive one on your calendar.

How do you decide whether it was worth it?

With arithmetic, not vibes. Take everything you spent over a fair window - six months minimum, because advisor sales cycles are slow - fees, ad spend, and your hours at a real rate. Divide by the clients you actually signed. That is your cost per client from this firm.

Now compare it to what a client is worth. The advisor asking the original question targets households with $2M or more to invest. At a fee around 1%, one such household is roughly $20,000 a year in recurring revenue. Against that, a $3,119 average acquisition cost pays back in about two months, and even a $10,000 acquisition cost pays back in six. The same spend looks very different against a $250,000 household generating $2,500 a year - now the payback stretches past four years and most marketing math stops working. This is why the same firm can be "worth it" for one advisor and a write-off for another: the fee schedule is half the formula.

What changes when you target $2M+ households?

Affluent prospects buy differently, and the channel mix has to respect that. They rarely click ads for financial advice. They ask people they trust, they research carefully, and - increasingly - they ask AI. Surveys covered in our referral-shift piece found a quarter of investors with $5M or more already use AI to find advisors, and 96% of referred prospects research the advisor online before making contact.

For a $2M+ practice, weight the channels that survive a careful prospect: verifiable public facts, content that demonstrates how you think, presence in the places AI engines read, and warm introductions. A firm pitching you volume - thousands of leads, mass ad campaigns - is pitching the wrong physics for this market. Ten qualified conversations with the right households beat a thousand form fills from the wrong ones.

Where this framework has limits

Five questions cannot see inside a firm's delivery team, and references are chosen, not random: every vendor's happiest client sounds great. Treat this as a filter that gets you to a shortlist, then run a small paid pilot with its own measurement before signing anything long. And the CAC figures above are averages from one research program - your market, niche, and sales skill will move your real numbers in both directions.

Where Spaces fits

Spaces is testing a way for financial advisors to build a more measurable client-acquisition system across LinkedIn outreach and AI-search visibility. Request the free readiness check. A completed review can show examples of how your firm appears in AI answers at the time of the check. We are still validating the path from visibility and outreach to qualified introductions; ask us how the founding advisor program is structured. Request examples from a completed review: Can ChatGPT find your firm?

The bottom line

Evaluate marketing firms the way the advisor in that community did: qualified prospects, real spend, real results, your hours, and the worth-it math. Any firm that answers all five with numbers earns a pilot. Any firm that answers with adjectives earns a pass.

Frequently asked questions

1. How much do advisor marketing firms cost?

Most retainers land in the low thousands per month - roughly $2,000 to $10,000 depending on scope - plus ad spend on top (an estimate from published rate cards and advisor self-reports, since every firm prices differently). Add your own hours: Kitces Research finds 83% of the average $3,119 client acquisition cost is the advisor's time, not dollars.

2. What is a good cost per client for a financial advisor?

Kitces Research's study of 800+ advisors puts the average at $3,119 per client. Whether a given cost is good depends on client value: a $2M household at roughly 1% generates about $20,000 a year, so a $3,000 acquisition cost pays back in months, while the same cost against a small household may never pay back.

3. How do I know if a marketing firm's leads are qualified?

Define qualified in writing before you buy: the prospect's needs fit your work, they can receive your services, and they agreed to a real next step. Then ask the firm for qualified-prospect counts against that definition from their last three advisor clients, plus a reference you can call.

4. Should an RIA hire a marketing firm or do marketing in-house?

Price both honestly. In-house looks cheaper in dollars and is usually dearer in hours - and hours are 83% of acquisition cost. A firm makes sense when its all-in cost per signed client (fees plus your time) beats what your own hours would cost to produce the same client, and when it can prove that number with references.

Want examples of how your firm appears in AI answers? Request the free readiness check. A completed readiness review can show examples of how your firm appears in AI answers at the time of the check. Request a review: Can ChatGPT find your firm?