You pay premium rates
for unqualified intent.

Paid search works for advisory firms in narrow circumstances and wastes money in most. The firms that succeed are not spending more — they are buying a much smaller thing.

The honest answer first

Paid search works for advisory firms in narrow circumstances and wastes money in most. The firms that succeed with it are not spending more — they are buying a much smaller thing.

Why broad advertising fails here

Terms like "financial advisor near me" are expensive, competitive, and attract people at the very beginning of a search that will take months. You pay premium rates for a click from someone who will speak to six firms and remember none of them.

Worse, the intent is unqualified. You cannot tell from the query whether they have four hundred thousand or four million, and you pay the same either way.

Where it does work

A narrow situation with urgency. Someone searching for how a particular employer's equity plan is taxed after an acquisition has a problem, a deadline, and a small pool of firms who understand it. That click is cheap and it converts.

Your own name. Inexpensive, and it stops competitors appearing above you when a referral looks you up. This is defensive spending and it is usually worth it.

Retargeting readers, not strangers. Someone who read three articles is a different proposition from someone who has never heard of you. This only works once you have content worth reading.

What to have in place first

A page that matches the search. Sending paid traffic to a homepage is the single most common way firms waste an advertising budget — the visitor arrived with a specific question and landed on a general answer.

And a way to know what happened. Without tracking that connects a click to a booked call, you are buying traffic and guessing.

The comparison worth doing before you spend anything

Work out what a client is worth to you over their lifetime and what your current cost per new relationship is through referral. Most firms discover that referrals cost them almost nothing and that the same money spent on making referrals easier would outperform any advertising.

Advertising is a reasonable answer when you have exhausted the cheaper channels. Very few firms have.

The compliance layer

Ad copy is advertising in the regulatory sense as well as the ordinary one. Landing pages, headlines, and any claim in them require the same review and record-keeping as anything else you publish, and paid placement makes exaggeration considerably more visible.

The channels that cost nothing →