Marketing Matchup: How CMOs Build RIA Brands From The Ground Up

You’re ready to go beyond DIY marketing and invest in your firm’s growth.

So what should you do first?

We asked this question to Angela Giombetti of Wealthspire Advisors and Jason Gordo of Modern Wealth Management on our first episode of Marketing Matchup. Their answers matter a great deal to an industry that struggles with growth. Fidelity’s 2024 RIA benchmarking study found an average net organic growth of 5.4%. But average doesn’t mean uniform. Some firms are barely treading water against inflation. Others have cracked the growth code.

We started Marketing Matchup to hear from the marketing leaders who have, over the past few years, taken a much bigger role in the trajectory of their firms’ success. The discipline of RIA marketing has grown from a “nice-to-have,” to become a central part of the advisor-client experience. Our goal is to get these marketing leaders in real conversations about what actually gets results.

To do that, we ambush them. Not much! Just a little.

In order to get the most authentic, unplugged conversations about financial services marketing, we make sure that each guest doesn’t know who they’re being paired with until we hit record. The result, we’ve found, is a series of genuine and unscripted insights into the business of marketing in the human, relationship-driven industry of financial advice.

We were excited to get Angela and Jason talking to each other, because both have firsthand experience building marketing strategies from the ground up. Jason is a co-founder of a rapidly-growing RIA, and Angela played a leading role in consolidating the marketing efforts of a firm that grew through a series of acquisitions.

The first step, they both agree, is defining your firm’s identity.

First Steps In Brand-Building

Before any marketing campaigns, digital strategies, or client outreach can be effective, a firm must have a clear understanding of who it is and what it stands for. When Angela joined Wealthspire, she found that there was no unified marketing message because the firm had grown through acquisitions without a centralized strategy. Her first priority was to assess what the brand should represent. That meant meeting with as many people as possible, from senior advisors to newer hires, to understand the firm’s culture, its ideal clients, and what made it different.

“It was about figuring out, ‘Who are we?’” Angela says. “Who needs to have a voice in shaping what Wealthspire is going to look like?”

Jason and his co-founders built Modern Wealth with plenty of industry experience under their belts… but they had to start somewhere. And for them, it was a GoDaddy search for available domains, and a freelancer to commission a logo and color palette. What started as a scrappy effort quickly turned into a structured marketing operation, with every piece designed to support the firm’s growth strategy.

Building that identity allows an RIA to communicate that identity consistently to clients and prospects, in every way possible. Jason likens it to the experience of buying a Porsche.

“You walk onto the lot at the dealership, and the showroom matches the website, which matches the brochure. You haven’t even sat in the car yet, and you’re already falling in love with the brand,” Jason says.

That is marketing’s role in a nutshell, he says, and RIAs would do well to give clients the Porsche experience. In other words, if your website, client experience, and advisor messaging aren’t in sync, you’re not delivering on your brand promise.

These are just a few of the insights Angela and Jason shared in our conversation together. We encourage you to listen to the full episode below, and subscribe to Marketing Matchup on your platform of choice.