All In On Local

Let me start with the ask: This week we’d love your feedback. Whether you’re a client, community member, or colleague, your thoughtful input would be valuable on this topic. So leave a comment or send us an email if you have my email address. We’d love to hear from you!

We’re having an interesting discussion internally as a team about how we want to grow. Specifically, how we want to market. If you’re a regular reader, you know that recently we’ve talked about the team’s bandwidth, how the firm is growing, and so on. We intend, next year, to hire a marketing specialist. In fact, we actually intended to hire this marketing specialist all the way back in 2025, but that was before we learned that we needed to start saving heavily for future real estate acquisition costs.

However, as we start getting into the nitty-gritty of thinking about what we want that marketing specialist to actually do for us, it’s bringing up a classic marketing problem: Market to everyone, and you market to no one. Compounding the issue? No singular marketing person we work with can do it all. There are no marketing unicorns, much as we’d like to find one!

But it’s a curious challenge, because when you think about a marketing specialist, what comes to mind? Nicely designed graphics to be shared on social media? Content creation for channels like YouTube or TikTok? A friendly face at a booth at the Unity in the Community celebration? Any and all of these are valid marketing channels, but not all marketing channels are made equal. So, this week, we’re talking about what we know from marketing studies in the financial planning world, what our unique positioning here in Longmont suggests for us, and then repeating the ask: how would you want to see your financial planning firm show up in the world?

What We Know About Financial Planner Marketing

The classic maxim of marketing wisdom is this: pick a client avatar (a middle-aged couple including a cardiologist) and then market like crazy to that specific avatar. Brand your business around that client profile, name your services after things familiar to that avatar, and make it clear to the world that you do business with that avatar and only that avatar.

MY Wealth Planners has a small problem with the avatar exercise. Our avatar is Longmont’s accomplished professional. But other than a city and a sociographic descriptor, that doesn’t get much more specific. Are they a Micron employee with stock options? Leadership in the St. Vrain Valley School District? A small business owner on Main Street with a great side business in commercial real estate? There are plenty of accomplished professionals in Longmont, but other than geographic familiarity and a love of Longmont, it’s hard to market to that group. That said, there are a few things we can keep in mind that do make MY Wealth Planners unique in this market:

• We are Longmont’s first Fee-Only CFP® Professional Fiduciary-at-all-times financial planning firm.
• We are Longmont’s first (and as of writing, only) Certified B Corp.
• We are Longmont’s first NAPFA Registered Adviser and XYPN Member firm.

Those are all valuable signals in a local marketplace, but more importantly, they are distinct. We’re never going to win a national marketing campaign against mega-firms that splash the phrase “Financial Planning” across all of their marketing (even if they, by their own regulatory disclosures, don’t offer financial planning [Cite: 1 2]). Even the term “Fiduciary” gets abused by firms in their marketing, stating that thousands of their representatives are serving their clients in a fiduciary capacity while simultaneously disclaiming all fiduciary responsibility and liability in their disclosures, and collectively donating a million dollars annually to PACs that actively lobby against fiduciary standards and donate millions more annually to non-profit organizations that sue the government every time an enhanced standard of conduct is proposed in rulemaking or legislation.

But, setting aside the fraught messaging environment for financial planning firms, what can we make of the various strategies for marketing? The most recent studies show that even with well-targeted messaging and content, the cost of client and revenue acquisition can be remarkable. Here are some interesting data points from the most recent Kitces marketing study (citation to prior study edition; the 2026 version we’re citing here is in pre-release and will be updated upon public release):

• The average cost of per-client acquisition for a firm our size is $4,896 per new client household.
• The average cost to obtain $1 of new revenue for a firm our size is $0.71.
• The cost of advisor time (e.g., “the labor/wage cost of Dan or someone like Dan spending time marketing”) makes up 63% of marketing costs.
• Cost of client acquisition by channel averages:
  • Client Referrals: $3,198
  • Professional Referrals: $7,371
  • Online listings: $1,366 (Example)
  • 3^rd Party Review Sites: $1,402 (Example; if you’re a client, leave us a review while you’re there!)
  • Webinars: $12,917
  • Seminars: $15,447
  • Client Appreciation Events: $44,191
  • Networking: $10,931
  • Social Media; $48,836
  • Blogging: $10,857
  • Podcasts: $4,793
  • Videos: $37,170
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO): $3,020
  • Answer Engine Optimization (AI): $23,378

In other words, some channels like client referrals still involve costs that equate to 53.3% of annualized fee minimum revenue, while other channels like the annual client party would take 7.36 years of ongoing annualized fee minimum revenue to break even! Notably, then, in the world of non-networking marketing (e.g., more traditional “content marketing”), blogs and podcasts are far more cost-effective than things like Facebook ads or educational workshops. Yet, the most cost-efficient methods also require 3^rd party involvement, such as client and professional referrals. Even then, I think many clients would reasonably say they’d get exhausted and annoyed if we ended every meeting by saying: “Know anyone who needs a great financial planner?” (Correct us if we’re wrong about that!)

Standing Out in Longmont

So in an environment where the use of appropriately qualifying signaling words like “financial planning” and “fiduciary” are effectively stolen by bad actors, and mass marketing strategies are generally ineffective, what can we do to stand out?

One thing that the megafirms of the world have no hope of competing with us on is our ability to have a local impact. Sponsoring local non-profit organizations and fundraisers, volunteering for community events, serving as trusted counsel to non-profit boards, and supporting community impact projects are all meaningful parts of how we gain visibility and credibility in Longmont. Yet, those activities are perhaps more in the sub-domain of marketing called “public relations” than they are traditional marketing activities. In other words, when we hire a marketing person, it seems like the least useful thing we could do is send them out to do what we already do today. But, as noted above, having them run Facebook ads or sending them out to run a booth at the fair doesn’t seem like their best use otherwise.

We have the unique privilege and advantage of being Longmont’s first real financial planning firm. However, having a “monopoly” on what we do is simultaneously a strength and also a threat in SWOT analysis parlance. Any other financial planner of sound competence and ethical mind can break that monopoly any time by opening up shop here. And while we’d welcome the company in adding more highly qualified and ethical service providers to the Longmont community, that doesn’t solve our own marketing problem. Further, today we have to acknowledge that a lot of our brand and success in growth has rested on the personal reputation of Dr. Daniel Yerger. We’d be the first to acknowledge that’s about the worst possible means of growing a firm, because while it’s good to have a good reputation in the community, Dr. Dan simply doesn’t “scale” as much as we’d like (darn need for sleep!)

That said, we’ll admit we’ve seen more success through channels like search engine optimization and client referrals. For example, our search engine optimization drives about 44% of our potential client traffic today and costs us only about $5,000 annually to accomplish. Meanwhile, we’ve spent as much as $30,000 sponsoring local community events and non-profits in a given year, and the ROI on that has been 0%. In total fairness, we perhaps naively had a “build it, and they will come” mentality around such sponsorship activities, so we can’t really blame the community for that one.

So what would you do?

We’re genuinely curious. If you’re our regular reader, whether you’re a client or community member, we’d love to know. What would you find meaningful if you were looking to find a financial planner today? Is it engagement in the local community? More regular or higher quality educational content? Just being top of mind by seeing the brand regularly?

For that matter, do you think we’re referable? If yes, we’d love to know why. If not, we’d love to know why even more! What could we do to make that easier or more readily “doable” for you if you’re of the mind to?

Ultimately, as we look at adding someone whose full-time responsibility will be looking at our marketing strategy and implementing a fresh version of it, we’d love to get your take.