A month after we launched a new website for a $1B+ DFW wealth management firm, the bottleneck moved.
Traffic was fine. Ideas were fine. The founder has two books and a podcast with nearly 200 episodes. The problem was the thing every advisory firm lives with: nothing public goes out until compliance approves it. Every LinkedIn post, every article, every email sequence, every website change.
Most marketing for advisors dies right there. The content gets written, sent to compliance, and sits in someone's inbox. Or it gets approved and nobody remembers to publish it. So I stopped treating compliance as a hurdle and built the marketing around it.
1. Compliance as a pipeline, not a wall
Every piece of content became a ticket with one owner, one status and one approval number. I packaged each submission in the exact order the firm's review system asks for, so the advisor submitting it copies field by field instead of rewriting it.
- One tracker for every piece: ready, submitted, approved, live
- The approval number sits next to every ticket, so anything public traces back to its approval
- Live the same day it's approved, published exactly as approved
- One clear ask per email to the advisors, so a busy planner answers in one line between client meetings
Thirteen days after the first batch went in, eleven submissions were approved: social content, website updates, articles, a book follow-up sequence and a review request campaign.
2. One podcast, a month of content
The firm had years of conversations already recorded. Each episode became clips, carousels, quote cards and text posts for the founder's LinkedIn, scheduled Tuesday through Thursday. A partner's own show became a second series on his profile. November was fully scheduled before November started.
Episodes also became articles on the website, one topic per page, each one a new way for a business owner to find the firm in search.
3. A newsletter that builds the list on its own
The weekly article goes on the website with a signup partway through. Readers who want the rest enter an email, get the full piece in their inbox and join the list. No one on the team adds subscribers by hand, and every article grows the list it's sent to.
4. Books that start relationships
Download a book on the site and both books arrive from the founder's address within a minute. The whole team gets an alert. A short follow-up sequence, approved by compliance, keeps the conversation going for people who aren't ready for a meeting yet.
5. Tools business owners actually search for
The firm's best clients are business owners getting ready to sell. So the site got what those owners look for: exit planning calculators, pages for specific industries like dental practices and HVAC companies, and a business valuation page. Heatmaps on every page show where visitors click, scroll and stop.
Not every bet paid off right away. The valuation ads pulled plenty of clicks from people wanting a free do-it-yourself number, not a planner. We measured it, rebuilt the landing page and put the new version into a test. That's the job: watch what people do, then change the page.
The result: one search, one $5M+ conversation
A woman on vacation typed "financial planners for business owners" into a search bar. She was looking for help for her parents, who own a multi-location business in DFW and are getting ready to exit. The firm came up. She filled out the form on the exit planning page.
Within about a week she was in the firm's first planning meeting. The lead advisor's estimate of the opportunity: five million dollars or more.
One lead doesn't make a strategy. But it's the exact client this whole system was built to reach: a business owner, found through the content the firm already had, coming in on the right page at the right moment.
What this looks like at your firm
Every advisory firm I talk to has the same raw material: years of client conversations, a point of view, maybe a book or a podcast. And the same constraint: compliance. Here's the system I build:
- Foundation: a website that reads like your firm, not your broker-dealer's template, with tracking and heatmaps from day one
- Compliance pipeline: every piece ticketed, packaged for your review system and published the day it's approved
- Content engine: your podcast, books and articles turned into a steady schedule of posts, pages and emails
- Newsletter and lead magnets: a list that grows itself, and instant delivery with team alerts on every download
- Business-owner tools: calculators and pages for the exact clients you want, measured and rebuilt based on what visitors actually do
Launching a new firm? That's the easiest time to set this up. Build the tracker, the website and the newsletter list before the first post goes out, and every client conversation from day one becomes content you can use.