Marketing Matchup: Power in the Collective

For financial services marketers, there is strength in community.

The business of delivering financial advice has grown in complexity in recent years. While each advisory firm is unique, more and more professionals are starting to compare notes and realize they are independently encountering the same challenges and opportunities. Michelle Winkles, Partner and CMO at Mission Wealth, and Michelle Panzera, Director of Marketing at Evensky & Katz/Foldes Wealth Management, spoke on the latest episode of Marketing Matchup about these shared connections, and how they led to the creation of the CMO Collective.

Winkles remembers exactly how it started. After years of being the lone marketing leader in the room at her firm, she kept running into others in the same position: smart, experienced marketers navigating growth at RIAs without a roadmap or peers to lean on. “We’d connect at think tanks or industry events, and every time the conversations were the same,” she said. “We’re all solving the same problems, but we’re doing it in isolation.”

There are professional groups for CEOs, CIOs, COOs, but until recently, no community that was specifically designed for marketing leaders in wealth management. That gap stood out more with every passing year, especially as firms grew and marketing became less of a “nice to have” and more of a critical driver of new business.

At the same time, Panzera was feeling it from a different angle. Leading marketing at Evensky & Katz/Foldes, she was a team of one, building systems from scratch. “In bigger firms, you’ve got departments—brand, digital, PR. At smaller firms, it’s just you,” she said. “And it’s lonely. You’re wearing every hat, making the case for why marketing matters, and trying to learn from the ground up.”

This week at Future Proof Citywide marked the CMO Collective’s first official meetup, but the group already has ambitions to create a year-round community.

“Marketing can feel like a favor you’re asking people to do—write a blog post, show up on video, build a campaign,” Panzera said. “This group is about flipping that mindset. Marketing drives growth. We deserve a seat at the table.”

Our conversation with Winkles and Panzera produced a number of insights about the marketing experience they have earned and shared in the RIA space:

Referrals Are Still King, but Nurturing Credibility Is the Hard Part

Both marketers agreed that referrals are the best leads. But Winkles said Mission Wealth’s regional budgets now go toward deepening relationships, not just maintaining them. That means events, targeted content, and face time (not Zoom). “We’re tagging life events in our CRM so advisors can show up with content that matters,” she said. Panzera’s team takes a niche approach, focusing on major life transitions like divorce or starting a family, where financial decisions loom large. “You need to be the expert they trust at that exact moment,” she explained.

Buying Digital Leads? You Better Have a Plan to Stand Out

Lead flow means nothing without a system to nurture the leads. “The credibility gap is huge,” Winkles said. “You need to differentiate immediately or you’re just another name in their inbox.” Her team measures every step of the funnel, from lead to intro call to close. Panzera doubles down on building a digital “library” of content for each advisor—bios, thought leadership, events—to give cold leads something solid to explore.

Get Ready for the AI Search Shift

Winkles and Panzera agree: SEO is the most neglected and misunderstood tool in the RIA marketing stack. Winkles called organic search “our highest quality, highest intent leads.” But most firms, she said, rank shockingly low when you actually Google them. Panzera put it bluntly: “SEO is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s the baseline.” The next challenge, for both, is to show up in AI-generated search results. “If I get my answer from the AI box, I don’t scroll any further,” Winkles said. “How do we show up there?”

You can watch their full conversation below, or download the latest episode of Marketing Matchup on your podcast platform of choice.