In this episode of Craft on Tap, Stephen Beach and Faustin Weber walk through the six marketing metrics they are monitoring across their RIA clients right now, and why each one was chosen.
👇 Watch the full discussion below:
Co-Founder Stephen Beach & Strategist Faustin Weber discuss the 6 key marketing metrics.
Craft on Tap Ep 28 Podcast Takeaways & Summary
Key Takeaways:
-
AUM Growth Is the Only North Star: Every marketing tactic, every channel, every piece of content should be evaluated against one overarching question: Is the firm growing? Trying to attribute individual posts or campaigns to new clients will drive you crazy. Focus on the direction instead.
-
Qualified Discovery Calls > Volume: Booking 30 calls that go nowhere is worse than booking five good ones. Tracking the quality of discovery calls, not just the quantity, gives a much clearer picture of whether marketing is generating the right kind of interest.
-
Your Referral Evangelists Are Hiding in Your CRM: Most firms benefit from referrals regularly, but do not track who is doing the referring. Identifying your top referral sources and understanding what content they engage with can reshape your entire marketing strategy.
-
Branded Search is the Easy Brand Awareness Metric: Homepage visits and branded search queries tell you whether people who have encountered your firm across various channels are actually looking you up. It is one of the most underused data points in RIA marketing.
-
Surface Level Analytics Can Mislead You: like meaningful comments, direct messages, profile visits, saves, and watch time show whether content is resonating.
-
Deserves Attention, Not Obsession: For firms going after clients with $1M or more in investable assets, AI search rankings are not yet a primary lead source. That said, your online reviews and localized bottom-of-funnel search visibility are worth tracking as AI tools continue to evolve.
Podcast Summary: 6 Marketing Metrics for Financial Advisors
Metric 1: AUM Growth as Your Marketing North Star
AUM growth is where every marketing conversation should start and end. Quarterly and monthly AUM growth tells you whether all the activity across referrals, digital marketing, events, and content is moving the firm in the right direction (or not).
One of the most common frustrations Stephen and Faustin hear from firm CEOs is the desire to draw a direct line between a specific tactic and a new client. That kind of attribution is difficult in 2026. A referral that came in this quarter might have been quietly influenced by a LinkedIn video someone watched months ago, or by a newsletter a client forwarded to a colleague. Multiple touchpoints contribute to every new relationship, and trying to assign credit to any single one of them will likely lead you in the wrong direction.
The more useful question: Are you adding more net new AUM than you were before you invested in marketing? If you added $50M in net new AUM the year before engaging a marketing partner and you are now on pace for $70M or $80M, that upward trajectory is your signal. It is not a perfect science, but it is a far more honest lens than trying to tie a specific Instagram post to a signed client agreement.
Metric 2: Qualified Discovery Calls
Discovery calls are where marketing hands off to your sales process, and they represent the most direct measure of whether your efforts are generating real interest. The keyword is qualified. Volume without quality is not a win.
Stephen and Faustin have seen firms use a one-to-five rating system to score prospects, either before the call, based on intake information or after, based on what came up in conversation. Someone who presents well on paper and then shows up to the call with high debt and a low income is not a qualified prospect.
One cautionary story from the episode: a client was convinced by an outside ad agency that paid digital campaigns would flood the pipeline with discovery calls. The calls came in, but almost none of them resulted in a next step. The prospects were unqualified; many did not show up at all, and the experiment was abandoned after two months. Generating a lot of discovery calls through tactics that attract the wrong audience is not a marketing win. It is a time drain.
Tracking where qualified calls come from, and comparing that to where unqualified calls originate, gives you the data you need to double down on what is working and stop funding what is not.
Metric 3: Referral Sources and Your Top Evangelists
Most advisory firms rely heavily on referrals, but very few systematically track who is doing the referring. This is a significant missed opportunity.
Referrals are not just a passive outcome of good client service. Marketing accelerates them. When clients regularly see content that resonates, they are more likely to share it and more likely to mention the firm to friends, colleagues, and family members. The connection between engaged clients and referral activity is real, but you can only see it if you're tracking it.
The Pareto principle tends to apply here. Roughly 20% of your clients are responsible for the majority of your qualified referrals. Identifying that group, understanding what content they engage with, and looking at what they have in common can tell you a great deal about where to focus your marketing energy.
Once you know who your top evangelists are, you can go further. This is where the concept of unreasonable hospitality comes into play, drawn from the book by Will Guidara about 11 Madison Park, and how some advisory firms have started applying it to their best clients.
Hosting exclusive events, sending thoughtful gifts, and going above and beyond for the people who refer you most consistently is not just good client service. It is a smart growth strategy. Closing the referral loop, reaching back out to the person who made the introduction once their referral becomes a client, is a small gesture that tends to generate more referrals over time.
Metric 4: Homepage Visits and Branded Search Queries for Financial Advisory Firms
This metric is one of the simplest and most underused ways to measure brand awareness in a digital world. Homepage visits from branded search queries, meaning people who typed your firm name or an individual advisor's name directly into Google, tell you whether your marketing activity across all channels is translating into people actively seeking you out. Different from blog traffic or organic search traffic from educational content, branded search is a strong indicator that someone has already heard of you and wants to learn more.
Social platforms are built to keep people scrolling. Getting someone to click a link from a LinkedIn post or an Instagram bio and land on your website is hard. When someone sees your content, gets a referral, or hears your name mentioned at an event, the next thing they often do is Google you. That search volume is trackable, and it grows when your marketing is working.
Google Search Console is the tool to use here. It is free, takes about 10 minutes to connect to your website, and shows you exactly what people are typing to find you. Set a baseline early, and then monitor the trend quarter over quarter. Steady growth in branded search queries across a year is a reliable signal that brand awareness is building, even when individual social posts or campaigns are hard to attribute to specific outcomes.
Metric 5: Deep Engagement Signals Worth Tracking
Surface-level analytics are easy to report and easy to misread. Views and likes feel good, but they do not always tell you whether your content is connecting with the right audience.
Craft Impact groups the more meaningful signals under the label of deep engagement, and they include:
- Meaningful comments where someone shares a personal experience or professional insight in response to your content
- Direct messages that come in after a post, where someone reaches out because something you said connected with them
- Profile visits that result from a specific post, showing that someone was curious enough to learn more about the firm or advisor behind the content
- Saves and shares, which indicate that someone found the content valuable enough to reference later or pass along
- Watch time on video content, particularly the percentage of viewers who stay past the first 30 seconds
Two stories from the episode illustrate why you should go beyond initial observations. One client had YouTube videos generating views where 73% of the audience was coming from Indonesia and Pakistan, not the US-based prospects the firm was trying to reach. Another advisor had email open rates of 75 to 80%, which looked exceptional until further investigation revealed a MailChimp bot was repeatedly clicking the address in the email footer, inflating the numbers significantly.
Metrics require context. Are the people watching your videos in your target geography? Are the people liking your posts actual prospects, or vendors trying to get your attention? Going a level deeper into the analytics takes more time, but it gives you a much more accurate read on what is working.
Metric 6: AI Visibility and Reputation for Financial Advisors
AI visibility is the metric everyone is asking about, so monitor it without letting it consume your focus.
Tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are increasingly being used to research and compare financial advisory firms. The catch is that AI visibility does not behave like traditional SEO. The same prompt typed into ChatGPT 50 times across different users will return different results, in a different order, every time. There is no #1 position to chase.
The key is tracking is your visibility in bottom-of-funnel localized searches. A prompt like "best financial advisor for tech professionals in San Carlos, California" is far more relevant to your firm than a broad national query. Tools like the GeoRank Tracker from Geoptie (linked in the episode notes) can help you monitor these localized prompts without paying the $100 per month or more that some AI visibility platforms charge.
The more important framing, though, comes from understanding how high-net-worth clients are using these tools today. Clients with $1M, $2M, or $5M in investable assets are not starting their advisor search with a Gemini conversation. They are getting referrals from friends, family, CPAs, and estate attorneys. Then they are using LLMs to check you out, compare you to a couple of other names they received, and validate the decision they are already leaning toward.
That is the scenario to optimize for. Strong Google reviews, a polished website, consistent content, and a clear value proposition are what influence the comparison stage. Obsessing over your LLM rankings before those fundamentals are in place is working in the wrong order.
Shameless Plug for Craft on Tap
To reach your AUM goals, you need to know which numbers can tell you something useful, and check them consistently. This conversation is only a starting point. For ongoing insights and practical marketing strategies for RIA growth, listen to Craft on Tap. Available now, wherever you find your podcasts.
Ready to chat? Get in Touch
Listen to Craft on Tap, Growth Marketing for RIAs:
