In this episode of Craft on Tap, Stephen Beach and Faustin Weber sit down with Kendra Wright, founder of Rebel Media Agency and host of Advisor Marketing Made Simple, for a candid chat about what is working for their RIA clients (and what isn't).
👇 Watch the full discussion below:
One of the most common break points in an underperforming advisory marketing funnel is speaking to more than one type of client on the same channel. Kendra Wright from Rebel Media Agency sees it across every level of AUM. The fix is straightforward: one ideal client type per funnel. On YouTube, that means pre-retirees or tech professionals, not both. On LinkedIn, it means tailoring your content, offers, and profile to a single avatar.
The Thomas Cook case study illustrates the stakes. Thomas was doing everything right on paper, including YouTube videos, community events, email marketing, and active networking. But he was speaking to both retirees and young professionals on the same channel, and despite pulling 150 to 2,000 views per video, he had zero new clients to show for it. After narrowing his YouTube content exclusively to retirees, some videos now reach 100,000 to 150,000 views. More importantly, he landed 10 new clients and had 60 prospects in his pipeline when Kendra caught up with him at XYPN in late 2025.
Craft Impact has seen the same dynamic play out with our own clients. For one firm, Faustin and Stephen assigned one partner to build a YouTube funnel targeting pre-retirees and another to build a LinkedIn presence targeting corporate executives. Once the audience-channel alignment was locked in, both channels improved. LinkedIn's Brew 360 algorithm now clusters content by topic expertise, which means posting across multiple unrelated client types actively suppresses how far your content reaches.
Kendra extends the principle to the website, and it's a detail that often gets missed. A simple "who we serve" dropdown with individual pages for each avatar keeps the funnel consistent from initial awareness all the way to the contact form. If someone finds you on YouTube as a retiree specialist and your website looks like it serves everyone, you risk losing them right at the bottom of the funnel.
When it comes to how many funnels to run, both Kendra and Craft Impact land in the same place: most firms can only realistically build and maintain one or two at a time. Kendra's approach is to pair one subject-matter expert with each funnel. One advisor owns the SEO content for retirees, and another owns YouTube. It splits the workload and keeps each funnel sharp. Stephen and Faustin apply the same logic with their clients, matching the advisor's strengths and interests to the channel and audience most likely to respond to them.
Once marketing starts working, a new problem tends to surface quickly - too many unqualified leads eating up the team's time. Kendra's solution is what she calls a right fit call booking process. Using a tool like Typeform or Jotform with logic routing, qualifying questions, including asset and income thresholds, are woven into the normal call booking flow. Qualified prospects get calendar access and unqualified prospects are redirected to a thank-you page with resources like NAPFA or fee-only directories.
This approach is not right for every firm. If you are newer or still building lead flow, you want every at-bat you can get. But for a firm that is drowning in unqualified calls, the numbers can be significant. One 800M firm Kendra worked with was fielding around 170 prospect calls per year and closing roughly 30 of them. After building the qualifying form, they removed over 100 unqualified leads from the calendar in a year, added $160,000 in revenue, and raised average client value by $2,800.
Craft Impact has seen the form question play out differently, depending on the firm. For one client, removing a fee disclosure from the form rather than adding an asset minimum doubled discovery calls from 151 to 305 in a single quarter. The close rate dropped, but revenue increased, and the number of new clients grew by nearly 20%. It worked because that firm had junior advisors who needed the sales experience and had the capacity to handle the volume. Stephen and Faustin used the asset question to route prospects to the right advisor rather than to screen them out entirely, which kept the pipeline full while protecting the senior partners' time.
The broader takeaway both sides agree on is to test your own form. The right configuration depends on your firm's capacity, your growth goals, and where you are in your marketing journey. What creates valuable friction for one firm creates an unnecessary barrier for another.
Kendra also recommends building source tracking into the booking form with a simple "how did you hear about us" dropdown. For firms running multiple funnels, that data across a full year tells you which channels are producing qualified leads versus just volume.
This is where the conversation gets interesting, and where Kendra and the Craft Impact team have a productive disagreement.
Kendra's position is that referrals are the icing, not the cake. The fastest-growing firms, per Michael Kitces' research, are those that rely on referrals the least. She aims for 10-15% household referral rates per year, but her primary growth levers are scalable channels like YouTube, LinkedIn, and SEO.
A 2024 consumer insight study by Ficomm adds weight to her argument, stating that 60% of clients aged 60 and above hire on referral, but that drops to 29% for those in their 50s and 17% for those under 44. For firms trying to build a growth engine that holds up over the next decade, that generational shift holds weight.
Stephen and Faustin see it differently. Their experience is that client-focused marketing, including well-crafted newsletters, segmented email campaigns, advisor-to-client content sharing, and client-facing webinars, can drive referrals systematically without the awkwardness of a direct ask.
A Florida firm they work with grew from $377M at the end of 2024 to $497M at the end of 2025 and is already at $550M in 2026, with over 80% of new clients coming through referrals. The growth came from taking marketing off the founder's plate, improving client communications, and giving advisors relevant content to share directly with clients. The result was more engagement, more referrals, and a founder who could focus on advisory work instead of marketing.
Kendra acknowledges that this approach can work exceptionally well for some firms. Her concern is the ceiling. Referrals are hard to control, lumpy in their timing, and eventually depend on a network that runs thin. As firms grow, referrals alone typically cannot hit the growth goals she is working toward with her clients.
Both sides agree that the word "referrals" often gets used as a strategy when what firms are actually doing is hoping. A real referral strategy means tracking sources in the CRM, identifying which clients are your top evangelists, equipping advisors with scripted language for the ask, and measuring outcomes quarter over quarter. Done that way, referrals are a legitimate and often powerful growth lever. Done passively, they are unpredictable and hard to build on.
Kendra closes with a challenge worth sitting with: write down every marketing activity your firm is currently doing and ask which 50% you would cut. Whatever survives that exercise is probably where your energy belongs.
RIA marketing is constantly evolving... or at least, it should be. RIAs that can keep up will see growth; those that don't will fall behind. This episode is a starting point, not a finish line. For ongoing insights and practical marketing strategies for RIA growth, listen to Craft on Tap. Available now, wherever you find your podcasts.
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