Why Marketing Planning Feels So Frustrating
Earlier this week, I published a piece on Kitces.com titled Creating an Annual Marketing Strategy to Fit Your Firm (and Stop Guessing What to Do Next) about why advisory firm marketing often feels ineffective and expensive, and why that usually has less to do with the tactics themselves and more to do with how firms choose them in the first place. If marketing planning has ever felt frustrating to you, this will sound familiar.
👉 Read the full article here:
https://www.kitces.com/blog/marketing-strategy-ria-advisor-firm-long-term-budget-investment-prospecting-roi/
For many advisory firms, annual marketing planning feels like throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something sticks. Instead of a clear strategy, the process turns into a guessing game.
It often starts with brainstorming. Podcasts. Social media. Webinars. Some new tech solution. Why those ideas? Usually because they were mentioned at a conference, recommended by another advisor, or feel like something the firm should be doing.
At larger firms, this gets even harder. Each advisor brings their own ideas, and the list quickly becomes overwhelming. To keep everyone happy, marketing teams end up doing a little bit of everything or choosing ideas by consensus. The result is a collection of disconnected tactics that don’t reinforce each other and may not actually attract new clients.
When results don’t show up quickly, confidence in the process disappears. Activities get dropped before they’ve had time to work, new ideas replace them, and the cycle repeats. Over time, marketing starts to feel expensive and pointless, even though the real issue isn’t whether a specific tactic works.
The problem is choosing marketing ideas in a vacuum, without a clear framework for how they work together or what they’re meant to accomplish.
The takeaway: Marketing planning isn’t a brainstorming exercise. It’s a strategic decision-making process. When you change how you choose marketing activities, you give them a real chance to work.
