We cover the two types of marketing (operational vs. lead generation), realistic timelines for seeing results, and how the most successful RIAs are measuring marketing effectiveness in 2025. If you're evaluating a marketing partner or trying to justify your current marketing budget, this conversation provides a practical framework.
👇 Watch the full discussion below:
Co-Founder Stephen Beach & Strategist Faustin Weber discuss marketing ROI.
Transcript:
Stephen Beach: Welcome to the Craft Impact Marketing Podcast, where we talk about marketing for RIAs, independent financial advisors. The world needed one more podcast, is what we decided. So Faustin and I took that upon ourselves. This is our cross to bear. One more show where you just have two white guys that are kind of riffing on marketing topics, and we need your support to help us grow this into a viral sensation.
My name is Stephen Beach, the co-founder of Craft Impact. I have on the show with me Faustin Weber, who is one of our marketing strategists. Between us, we hear a lot of questions from financial advisors around ROI, marketing tactics, you know, how we support organic growth, and how they should be evaluating different shiny objects. We just want to tackle these common questions and kind of share our unique perspectives.
Faustin Weber: Stephen, it's great to be with you. Let's start with our number one question that I'm asked, you're asked, especially early on, when people first reach out and want to learn a little bit more about our services. They say, "Okay, so let's say I invest on a monthly basis with you, I invest in marketing. What is that return on investment? And what's the timeline that I can expect to see that return on investment?"
Stephen Beach: Love it. I think that for a lot of business owners of financial advisory businesses, many of them have not put a lot of time, effort, and money into the marketing side. Because the model that they've followed is more so, you know, focus on client service, do a really good job with your clients, and then the referrals will come.
So we probably, I think this is probably the most common question we get, and so of course we have a lot of thoughts. I would divide it into two buckets for marketing. Marketing is a big term, right? But you could just look at it as kind of operational marketing as bucket number one, and then lead gen marketing is bucket number two.
When people say What's my ROI, what they're getting at is, if I put a dollar in, you know, how many dollars do you spit back out at me? Simple. That's like the lead gen side. Operational marketing, though, I think the way we look at our role in our partners' businesses is we need to support them with collateral, client communications...
Stephen Beach: We just had a really big one this past week, where the Trump tariffs went into effect and the markets plummeted for two straight days. They're getting a lot of incoming calls. It's like, how do we proactively communicate with our client base so that we're not fielding as many calls, or so that people are a little bit more comfortable and they know where we stand? So that's operational marketing. You're not gonna get ROI out of that that you can measure, but it needs to be done. It's part of the business model, part of your client service model.
Then on the other side, bucket number two, marketing investment. It would be "I put a dollar in, and how much do I get out? $2, $3?" How many new clients do I generate if I invest 10 grand a month in marketing?
For those, we found it can be hard to measure. It used to be easier to measure, frankly. At the highest level, we look at it this way: tell us your goal for net new for the year or the next three years. We have clients trying to add 25 million net new, some looking to add a hundred, some at 300 million, trying to get to a billion in three to five years.
I say, tie us to that number, right? If we're a marketing agency truly invested in your business and want to generate a return for your money, we need to know that because everything we do will be geared towards helping you hit that goal.
Faustin Weber: I would just add too that firms come and partner with us at different levels in terms of building out the marketing infrastructure. Yes, we're connecting our marketing tactics and overall strategy to net new overall as a firm, so that you can measure ROI that way.
But for firms already doing marketing tactics, publishing consistent content across different channels and platforms, we're gonna add almost immediate ROI in being able to improve and enhance all those different things already happening.
If you're a firm that comes in and you haven't built all that infrastructure, like you're still working on messaging or trying to figure out your target audience, need to improve your branding, or build out a new website, we can also work with you. It's just that the ROI timeline is a little bit longer in those cases.
Stephen Beach:] Yeah, nice. I think that's a good distinction. Let's take two extreme examples: a breakaway advisory group and an established RIA that's been in business for 20 years, already producing content consistently for a year or two.
With the breakaway advisor, they don't have their own brand name, logo, messaging dialed in, the website they can control, social media channels, email marketing, video marketing, ability to host a webinar. What's my ROI gonna be? Two ways to look at it. One, we're gonna take all the headache and put a strategy in place that you wouldn't be able to do yourself. The ROI is really the return on your time.
If you're spending 7,500 a month versus 15 grand a month, there's a different timeline on when you can expect to see new revenue. But within the first 90 days, you'll know if we're the right partner going forward. Then within six to nine months, we'll be able to point to things where maybe it's not "Craft brought in this client for me," but rather "a person visited my website, I had a meeting with them, they attended one of our webinars, we sent them seven emails over four months, they downloaded an ebook, and then they became a client."
Faustin Weber: Yeah, going back to the example around time. The 2024 Kitces marketing study shows that the higher-growth practices that spend more on marketing actually have a greater cost in terms of advisor time spent.
That's one of the big returns on investment – we cut down that cost almost immediately. We have a very set structure with our clients where we start a weekly meeting cadence, own all of the agendas, and take a lot of the ideas advisors have been storing up. Most advisors we work with have incredible ideas about marketing – they've just never been able to execute on them.
Almost immediately, we take all those ideas, put a whole structure to it, build a strategy around it connected to the overall practice goals and net new. We take away that time element pretty quickly. That's those first 90 days where people know right off the bat if we're gonna be a good partner for them or not.
Stephen Beach: Right. Even getting started in a simple manner with quick wins. One would be market commentary, either monthly or quarterly. It might take 10 to 12 hours from start to finish. Within the first 30 to 60 days, we could take that over and drop your time from 10-12 hours down to 30 minutes.
Another example would be "I have this old slide deck from 2003, and I'm serving million-dollar clients with it." Who's gonna figure out this slide deck thing? That right there would be some ROI if it helps close a prospect into a client. That's where we try to place ourselves – how can we stay close to revenue?
So that's how we approach it – trying to be a sales enablement partner, especially in the first 30 to 60 days, to show some quick wins so you can start to trust us and see some ROI, even if it's not exactly black and white, dollar in, dollar out.
Faustin Weber: Yeah, I love that. A couple of quick examples of exactly what you're talking about with investment commentary. We just started with a new partner last month who sends out quarterly commentary. It takes the advisor multiple hours to do all the research.
We said, "Why don't we help you take that on?" He said, "I've had this idea about potentially recording a video to enhance the client experience, but I don't even know where to start."
We said, "Let's help you with that. You record a video for us, we'll help with the visual slides, edit the video, and then take the transcript and build out a draft of the investment commentary."
I just remembered the look on this advisor's face when he realized he could just record a five-minute video, and we could create everything else. That's not ROI in the sense of more assets, but we've bettered the client experience and saved that advisor 8-10 hours of work that he can invest in following up with new prospects or client meetings to ask for referrals.
Stephen Beach: Nice. Love it. That's it for us, riffing on ROI for financial advisory firms. We'll get into other top questions in further episodes. Thanks very much.
Shameless plug for Craft on Tap
Understanding and measuring marketing ROI does matter, but as discussed, you need a nuanced approach. This conversation is only a starting point. For ongoing insights and practical strategies tailored to RIA growth, listen to the new Craft on Tap marketing podcast. Available now, wherever you find your podcasts. Ready to chat? Get in Touch
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