How to Get Clients as an Advice Only Financial Planner: A Marketing Playbook
Build a practical marketing plan for an advice only firm. Use historical research as a starting point, explain your services clearly, and measure which channels bring clients who fit your practice.
If you are building an advice only practice, start your marketing plan with a specific question: who would benefit from your service, and how will they understand what you offer?
An advice only practice can earn recurring revenue through monthly ongoing relationships. Its fees do not automatically increase as client assets grow, and it can serve people without requiring a large investment portfolio. The marketing task is to explain the planning service clearly and reach the people it fits. Our guide to the advice only model explains these service and payment options.
The playbook below combines historical advisor marketing research with practical steps you can test in your own firm. If you are still deciding how to structure the business, start with our transition guide.
What Historical Acquisition Costs Can Tell You
A Kitces analysis published in February 2020 reported average client acquisition costs of $3,119: $519 in direct spending and $2,600 in the estimated value of advisor time. Its underlying marketing research began in 2019, as described in Kitces' 2022 follow up.
The original chart reported these costs by channel:
| Marketing channel | Reported client acquisition cost |
|---|---|
| SEO | $338 |
| Paid advertising | $3,805 |
| Networking | $4,494 |
| Client appreciation events | $4,933 |
| Radio | $7,855 |
| Centers of influence | $9,144 |
| Social media | $11,937 |
These are historical results across the study participants, not current prices or forecasts for an advice only firm. The same chart listed blogging separately from SEO, with blogging at $3,026 per client. It does not establish that writing articles alone produces the SEO result.
Use this history to frame a question for your own practice: how much money and time am I spending to bring in a client? Set a consistent value for your marketing time and track it alongside direct expenses. Decide what counts as an inquiry, a qualified prospect, and a signed client before comparing results.
Match Marketing Spending to Your Service Model
Avoid setting a marketing budget from another firm's revenue model. Estimate what your own clients are likely to pay, what delivering the service will cost, and how long you can wait to recover acquisition spending. Kitces' discussion of marketing efficiency emphasizes that acquisition costs need to be considered alongside the revenue generated by the relationship.
For context, the March 2026 dataset covering 97 planners on the Advice Only Network recorded a median fee of $3,000 for a single plan (n=76), $300 for an hour of advice (n=75), and $250 per month for monthly ongoing service (n=48). Those are dated sample medians, not recommended prices. Our pricing guide discusses how to build your own service menu.
Model a standalone project separately from a monthly ongoing relationship. For a project, include preparation, meetings, follow up, and overhead before deciding what you can spend to acquire the work. For ongoing service, consider different retention assumptions and the cash you need while recovering the initial costs.
Do not assume a new client will stay indefinitely or purchase additional work. Equally, do not assume advice only clients generate revenue only once. Use scenarios that reflect your actual contracts and service capacity.
Make Your Offer Easy to Understand
Before buying advertising or adding another marketing channel, review your website as if you were a prospective client. Could you answer these questions without booking a call?
What does the service cost? Publish a fee or a clear explanation of how you determine it. Describe what changes the price and when a client will receive a firm quote. Treat transparent pricing as useful information, rather than a promise that every visitor will become a client.
What will the client receive? Explain the meetings, analysis, written recommendations, and implementation support included. State what is outside the scope. If you offer monthly ongoing service, describe the continuing work and the cancellation terms in the actual agreement.
How are you compensated? When you earn no product commissions or percentage of assets, those particular incentives are absent. That does not eliminate every potential conflict. Explain how you are paid, disclose relevant conflicts, and describe how you address them. Our guide to what the fee labels mean can help you explain the differences.
Who is a good fit? Describe the planning needs you serve, your minimum fees or engagement requirements, and whether clients must transfer investments. If you have no asset minimum, say so. Avoid implying that every household will qualify for every service.
A Practical Marketing Playbook
1. Choose a Problem You Can Explain Well
Define your audience around a planning problem you understand. Possible starting points include equity compensation, retirement decisions, or planning during a business transition. Choose an area where you can describe your experience and the limits of your service accurately.
Write down the questions you hear in introductory meetings. Then compare that list with the questions your website answers. Our articles on stock options and RSUs and Roth conversion planning illustrate how a broad planning topic can become a focused explanation.
A niche is a positioning choice, not a guarantee of little competition. Test whether prospective clients recognize themselves in your description and understand the help you offer.
2. Test Search and Content Together
Choose a small set of relevant questions and write useful answers. Explain the decision, identify the tradeoffs, link to credible sources, and give readers a clear next step if they need individual advice.
Treat publishing as an experiment. Track which pages attract relevant inquiries, how much time you spend writing and maintaining them, and whether those inquiries become suitable engagements. Avoid setting an arbitrary article count as the definition of success.
Review older pages for accuracy and usefulness. If a page gets visits but no relevant inquiries, revisit the topic, the service description, and the next step you offer. If the approach consumes more time than you can sustain, narrow it before expanding.
3. Evaluate Directory Listings Deliberately
The 2022 Kitces discussion identified paid web listings as an efficient channel in the earlier research. That is a reason to investigate relevant directories, not evidence that every listing will work for your practice.
Start with the Advice Only Network, then evaluate other relevant directories where your intended clients might look. Keep each profile complete, current, and consistent with your website, including your pricing.
Before paying for a listing, check eligibility, costs, profile requirements, and whether its audience fits your service. Ask new prospects how they found you and review the results before renewing or adding another directory.
4. Make Referrals Easier to Understand
In its 2022 review of the earlier research, Kitces reported that 93% of participating advisors had received new clients through referrals in the preceding year. That finding supports including referrals in your planning; it does not promise a particular flow of introductions.
Give clients and professional contacts a concise description of whom you help. For example, explain the planning question, the type of engagement, and how someone can explore whether it is a fit. Do not ask a contact to promise outcomes on your behalf.
When meeting another advisor, accountant, or attorney, ask about the needs they encounter and explain your own scope. Track the time you invest and the fit of any introductions. Cultivate useful professional relationships without treating every conversation as a sales opportunity.
5. Choose Channels You Can Evaluate
Do not dismiss a channel solely because its historical average cost was high. Start with a defined audience, a spending limit, a time budget, and a plan for measuring the outcome.
For each experiment, record inquiries, suitable prospects, signed engagements, revenue, and the work required to serve those clients. Review what you learned before repeating it. A channel that produces few suitable prospects may need a different message, a smaller scope, or a pause.
If you hold CFP® certification, describe it accurately. Kitces' 2023 article reported an association between the certification and lower acquisition costs in its 2022 research. Treat that as an observed association, not a guarantee of your own results.
A Suggested First 90 Days
Days 1 to 30: Define the audience, clarify your service and fees, review directory options, and set a marketing budget that includes your time. Establish a simple way to record where inquiries originate.
Days 31 to 60: Publish a manageable first set of answers to relevant questions. Explain your service to selected professional contacts. Check whether prospects understand the offer and note where conversations reveal confusion.
Days 61 to 90: Review inquiries and signed work against your spending and time. Improve what seems promising, investigate weak results, and decide which experiments deserve another cycle. Treat this as a review point rather than a deadline for a full pipeline.
Build the next cycle around your evidence. The goal is a repeatable way to reach people you can help at a cost your practice can support. If the network fits your firm, explore joining the Advice Only Network and explain your service to consumers looking for that model.