You Don't Own Your Social Media Audience

Every social media platform eventually changes the rules. The only question is when.

If this topic sounds familiar, it's because I write some version of this article almost every year. And every year, there's a new example proving the same point.

Let’s start with Facebook. Its business pages used to be a legitimate organic channel. In 2012, an average post reached about 16% of its followers. Today, that number is between 1% and 2%. Facebook didn't announce "we're turning off your free reach." They just slowly turned the dial until paying became the only option.

Next, Twitter became X overnight after an ownership change, and businesses that spent years building an audience watched the platform shift beneath them.

Finally, Google+ shut down entirely in 2019. If you'd invested time there, that audience simply disappeared.

Now it's LinkedIn's turn. LinkedIn was one of the last platforms where organic reach still worked the way social media was originally supposed to. You connected with someone, you posted, they saw it. Not anymore. According to the Algorithm InSights 2025 report, LinkedIn views are down 50% year over year, engagement has dropped 25%, and follower growth has declined 59%. Company pages now reach only about 1.6% of their followers. And if you've noticed LinkedIn suggesting you boost your posts more often, that's not a coincidence. It's the same playbook Facebook ran a decade ago.

This is the life cycle of every social media platform. They launch with a generous organic reach to attract users. Once the audience is there, they reduce visibility to push businesses toward paid advertising. It's not a conspiracy. It's a business model.

The lesson isn't to avoid social media. It still has a role. The lesson is to never let a platform you don't control be the primary way you reach your audience. Get your social media followers onto a list you own: email, SMS, or even a physical address. If the algorithm changes tomorrow, or a platform shuts down, or ownership changes the rules, you still have a direct line to the people who have chosen to hear from you.

The takeaway: Social media platforms will always change the rules. Build your audience there, but don't store it there. When you move your social media followers to your owned lists, you will never be at the mercy of an algorithm update, an ownership change, or a platform that decides your content is no longer worth showing for free.

Kristen Luke

Founder of Kaleido Creative Studio and OnNiche®

Setting Growth Goals Isn't Enough

Firms love setting targets. They rarely provide the support to hit them.

Does this sound familiar? Leadership sets growth expectations for advisors, teams, or offices. "Bring in $X in new revenue this year" or "Generate Y new clients."

Then they step back and wait for results. And when the goals aren't met, they're surprised.

What's missing? Support to actually get there. The goal is clear. The path to get there isn't.

Who should this advisor focus on? How should they reach these people? What activities should they focus on each quarter? Once they commit, are they actually doing what they committed to? Who is helping them stay accountable? Who is helping them reflect and adjust each quarter to meet their goals? Who can they turn to when they hit a roadblock?

Most firms don't have a system in place to answer these questions. They set the expectation and assume advisors will figure it out. Some advisors try generic tactics that don't work. Others do nothing because they don't know where to start. Either way, the firm ends up frustrated that goals aren't being met, and advisors feel set up to fail.

If you want to do things differently, here's what it takes:

First, strategy. Who should this advisor focus on? What are the best channels to reach them? Advisors don't naturally think this way, so they need help developing a clear strategy.

Second, a plan. What tactics should they focus on this quarter? And the quarter after that? A plan turns strategy into actionable steps and prevents advisors from spinning their wheels on low-impact activities.

Third, ongoing support. Who is checking in on progress? Who helps them troubleshoot when things aren't working? Who removes obstacles that prevent them from moving forward? Without this, even good plans stall.

Firms have great intentions to help their teams hit goals, but without a support system in place, team members are unlikely to achieve those goals.

The takeaway: If you're going to set revenue or client expectations for your advisors, you need to invest in the strategy, plan, and support that make achievement possible. Anything less is setting them up to fail.

If your firm is ready to provide this level of strategic support to your advisors, schedule a call to learn how OnNiche® can help.

Kristen Luke

Founder of Kaleido Creative Studio and OnNiche®

Why Tomorrow's Marketing Will Look More Like 2000 Than 2020

The future of advisor marketing isn't more technology. It's more human.

Last week, I published a piece on my Substack about how AI is fundamentally changing the marketing landscape for financial advisors. The core argument: The pandemic forced advisors onto digital channels, and now AI is forcing us to rethink what actually works.

👉 Read the full article here

Most people assume the answer to AI is more technology. More AI tools. More automation. More digital. I think the opposite is true. Tomorrow's most effective financial advisor marketing is going to look a lot more like 2000 than 2020.

Here's why: The digital world is becoming static noise. So much content floods every channel that it all blurs together. But while digital gets noisier and more impersonal, the value of genuine human-to-human interaction is going up. We're in the middle of a loneliness epidemic. People are craving real connection.

Think about what actually builds trust: sitting across from someone at a small dinner, showing up at industry events, hosting quarterly gatherings where people know each other by name. That's an old-school relationship strategy. And it's the future.

Physical touchpoints matter more than ever, too. An automated email gets deleted. A handwritten birthday card stays on someone's desk for a week. In a world where every interaction is increasingly digital and automated, something you can hold in your hands stands out precisely because it's rare.

The takeaway: The pandemic taught us that digital was essential. AI is teaching us that digital alone isn't enough. The advisors who recognize this shift early, investing in human connection and physical presence, won't be scrambling to adapt when the rest of the industry catches up.

Kristen Luke

Founder of Kaleido Creative Studio and OnNiche®

A New Case for Focusing on a Niche: AI Can't Replace What It Can't Access

AI is about to make generic financial advice worthless. But niche expertise? That's still invaluable.

I wrote my book Uncomparable: The Financial Advisor's Guide to Standing Out Through Niche Marketing about why focusing on a niche is so valuable for financial advisors. The core argument: When you specialize, you become the obvious choice for a specific type of client rather than one option among thousands of generalists. You stand out. You build a reputation that generates referrals.

But there's a new reason to focus on a niche that I didn't anticipate when I wrote the book: AI.

AI is getting very good at basic financial planning advice. It can explain fundamental concepts, suggest standard strategies, and walk someone through generic planning scenarios. For basic financial advice, AI will soon be able to advise on much of what generalist advisors do today. And it will do it faster and cheaper.

But here's what AI can't replace: the pattern recognition and contextual expertise that comes from working deeply within a specific niche.

When you've spent years working with business owners preparing to sell their companies, you know the real timeline isn't what the investment bankers promise. You've seen what happens when someone doesn't properly plan for taxes on the sale. You know which wealth management mistakes newly liquid entrepreneurs make in their first year post-exit. You know exactly which attorney, which insurance specialist, which tax preparer to connect a client with for their specific situation. That knowledge isn't documented anywhere AI can access. It's in your head, built from watching the same patterns play out dozens of times.

This is the knowledge that matters most to clients, and it's the knowledge AI can't easily replicate. Why? Because it exists in the minds of people with deep experience in a niche, not in training data.

Generic financial planning advice will become commoditized by AI. But niche expertise built from years of focused experience? That becomes more valuable, not less.

The takeaway: AI will make generalist financial advice a commodity. The advisors who thrive will be the ones with deep niche expertise that can't be easily replicated because it exists in experience, not documentation. If you've been on the fence about specializing, this is your signal.

Kristen Luke

Founder of Kaleido Creative Studio and OnNiche®

The Best Marketing Investment for Your Youngest Advisors

Your 25-year-old advisor might not be ready to bring in clients. But they're perfectly positioned to build the relationships that will.

I see advisory firms struggle with this question: What marketing should our youngest advisors be doing, if anything? They're too early in their careers to have real credibility with prospects. They can contribute to the firm's content marketing, but there is an even better marketing activity these young advisors are uniquely positioned to do: building relationships with future centers of influence (COIs) who can become referral partners.

Think about it. Your 25-year-old advisor can't easily connect with a 55-year-old business owner who needs exit planning. The credibility gap is too wide. But they can absolutely connect with a 26-year-old attorney at a large law firm or a 27-year-old CPA at a local accounting practice. Because they are peers, the relationship is natural and not forced.

Here's what makes this so valuable: These young professionals are building their own careers at the same time. In five or ten years, that attorney might be a partner bringing in estate planning clients who need wealth management. That CPA might have their own book of high-net-worth clients. And when they do, who will they think of first? The advisor who built a real relationship with them early, before everyone else was competing for their attention.

The key is setting the right expectations. You shouldn't set the expectation with your advisors that anything will come from these relationships in the short term. These young COIs aren't established enough yet to be consistent referral sources. Some might work at firms where they can occasionally refer, but that's not the point. The point is building strong relationships now, during a unique window before these professionals already have referral partners locked in.

This is relationship-building without the pressure of immediate results. Your young advisor can focus on building genuine relationships, staying connected, and establishing trust over time. They're not asking for referrals. They're just building a network of peers who will grow their careers together.

The takeaway: You don't need to wait until your youngest advisors have credibility with prospects to start their marketing efforts. Put them to work building relationships with future referral partners now, while they're peers. It's an investment that compounds over years.

Kristen Luke

Founder of Kaleido Creative Studio and OnNiche®

Why Your Marketing Budget Shouldn't Be Divided Equally Across the Year

Consistent spending doesn't guarantee consistent results.

When it comes to a marketing budget, it's easy to fall into the habit of dividing it equally across the year: $10K per month, every month, like clockwork. A little spending in January, a little in February, steady through December. The thinking is that consistent spending means consistent results.

But it doesn't. Steady spending doesn't create steady results. You end up wasting money in months when no one is paying attention to your marketing and not investing enough when they are.

The ebook The Lightning Strike Strategy, by Category Pirates, argues that the most effective marketing isn't evenly distributed across the year. It's concentrated. Instead of spreading resources thin across 12 months, you focus 70% of your budget on two to four major initiatives per year, investing heavily when it matters most.

For financial advisory firms, this might mean going all-in during the months when your niche is most likely to make decisions. Maybe you invest heavily around the start of the year, around the end of tax season, and early fall when prospects are already thinking about their finances, and pull back in November, December, and the summer months when nobody's paying attention.

This doesn't mean everything else stops during the quiet months. Some activities require a consistent budget regardless: your marketing technology like email and website costs, podcast production, or a networking breakfast you attend every month. But the big-money campaigns get concentrated in the windows where they can actually move the needle.

This makes perfect sense when you hear it, but it's rarely how firms operate. Most advisors default to even monthly spending because it's easier to budget. But you'll spend your money more wisely and get better returns when you invest in attracting clients during the windows when they're actually ready to hire you.

The takeaway: Strategic concentration beats equal distribution. When you focus your marketing budget on the right moments and give those initiatives the resources to actually break through, you get results.

Kristen Luke

Founder of Kaleido Creative Studio and OnNiche®

Are Your Next-Gen Advisors Business Development or Service Advisors?

Not every advisor who wants ownership is built for what ownership requires.

A pattern keeps showing up in my work with advisory firms: A talented next-generation advisor who was hired to service existing clients starts asking about ownership. They're good at their job. They care about the firm. They want to build something long-term. But when the ownership conversation happens, it stalls. Why? Because firm owners aren't confident that these advisors can bring in new business.

It's a fair concern. Servicing clients and developing business require different skill sets, different mindsets, and different levels of comfort with uncertainty. An advisor can be exceptional at one and struggle with the other. The challenge is figuring out which type of advisor you have before making ownership decisions that affect the entire firm's future.

Working with advisors through our OnNiche® program has taught me something: The difference between a business development advisor and a service advisor shows up almost immediately—not in what they say they want, but in how they behave when given the opportunity.

Business development advisors engage quickly. They're anxious to build their plan. They ask questions about implementation. They start taking action, even when it feels uncomfortable. They treat business development as a challenge to tackle, not an obligation to avoid.

Service advisors drag their feet. Even with professional support and coaching behind them, they struggle to get anything off the ground. It's not that they don't care or aren't capable—they're often excellent advisors. They're just not wired for the proactive work of putting themselves out there in ways that feel uncomfortable. And that's perfectly fine. Both roles are valuable.

The mistake firms make is waiting too long to figure out which type of advisor they have. They assume that interest in ownership indicates a capacity for business development, or they hope that with enough training, any advisor can become a rainmaker. But aptitude matters. Some advisors will thrive in business development. Others won't, no matter how much support you provide.

The takeaway: Before discussing ownership, give next-gen advisors a real opportunity to demonstrate business development capability—not through hypotheticals, but through action. How they respond will tell you what role they're truly built for in your firm's future.

Want to see if your advisors are built for business development or client service? Schedule a call to learn more about OnNiche®.

Kristen Luke

Founder of Kaleido Creative Studio and OnNiche®

Why Your Marketing Metrics Might Be Lying to You

The things easiest to measure in marketing are usually the things that matter least.

I'm currently reading The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game by C. Thi Nguyen, and one concept keeps showing up in my thinking about financial advisor marketing: The Gap. Nguyen defines it as "the distance between what is being measured and what actually matters." It's a simple idea with big implications for how firms approach their marketing efforts.

Here's how it plays out: Marketing platforms give firms endless metrics: likes, impressions, click-through rates, email open rates, website traffic. These numbers are easy to track, easy to report, and easy to compare month over month. So firms do. They check them constantly. They celebrate when they go up and worry when they go down. They make decisions based on them.

But these metrics mostly measure one thing: attention. And attention isn't the same as trust. It's not the same as credibility. It's definitely not the same as a prospective client thinking, "This is the advisor I want to work with."

The things that actually lead to new client relationships—depth of connection, perceived expertise, whether someone feels understood—are much harder to measure. There's no dashboard for "this person now trusts you enough to have a real conversation." No metric for "your content helped someone realize they need help." No score for "you're now top of mind when they're ready to hire an advisor."

So advisors default to what they can measure. They optimize for engagement instead of trust-building. They chase virality instead of relevance. They produce more content to increase impressions rather than better content that deepens relationships. The scoring system focuses them on the wrong outcomes simply because those outcomes are quantifiable.

The gap between what firms measure and what actually matters widens, and they wonder why all that activity isn't translating into new clients.

The takeaway: The best marketing metrics are often the ones you can't easily track. Don't let the ease of measurement pull your focus away from the harder work of building real relationships and demonstrating genuine expertise. Those are what convert attention into clients.

Kristen Luke

Founder of Kaleido Creative Studio and OnNiche®

Why Marketing Planning Feels So Frustrating

Marketing feels complicated when you focus on the tools instead of the purpose.

If your marketing plan starts with brainstorming, that’s the problem.

Earlier this week, I published a piece on Kitces.com titled Creating an Annual Marketing Strategy to Fit Your Firm (and Stop Guessing What to Do Next) about why advisory firm marketing often feels ineffective and expensive, and why that usually has less to do with the tactics themselves and more to do with how firms choose them in the first place. If marketing planning has ever felt frustrating to you, this will sound familiar.

👉 Read the full article here:
https://www.kitces.com/blog/marketing-strategy-ria-advisor-firm-long-term-budget-investment-prospecting-roi/

For many advisory firms, annual marketing planning feels like throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something sticks. Instead of a clear strategy, the process turns into a guessing game.

It often starts with brainstorming. Podcasts. Social media. Webinars. Some new tech solution. Why those ideas? Usually because they were mentioned at a conference, recommended by another advisor, or feel like something the firm should be doing.

At larger firms, this gets even harder. Each advisor brings their own ideas, and the list quickly becomes overwhelming. To keep everyone happy, marketing teams end up doing a little bit of everything or choosing ideas by consensus. The result is a collection of disconnected tactics that don’t reinforce each other and may not actually attract new clients.

When results don’t show up quickly, confidence in the process disappears. Activities get dropped before they’ve had time to work, new ideas replace them, and the cycle repeats. Over time, marketing starts to feel expensive and pointless, even though the real issue isn’t whether a specific tactic works.

The problem is choosing marketing ideas in a vacuum, without a clear framework for how they work together or what they’re meant to accomplish.

The takeaway: Marketing planning isn’t a brainstorming exercise. It’s a strategic decision-making process. When you change how you choose marketing activities, you give them a real chance to work.

Kristen Luke

Founder of Kaleido Creative Studio and OnNiche®

When Marketing Feels Confusing, Come Back to This

Marketing feels complicated when you focus on the tools instead of the purpose.

You’re not alone if you feel frustrated or overwhelmed by how often marketing seems to change. New technology appears. Algorithms shift. Tactics fall in and out of favor. It can start to feel like you’re always behind or doing the wrong thing.

When that happens, I find it helps to zoom out.

In the independent financial advisory space, marketing has always been about two things: relationships and education. That hasn’t changed, even as the tools have.

Every effective marketing tactic, whether it’s social media, a podcast, networking, or a referral campaign, is simply a way to build trust or help someone understand how to solve a problem they care about. The format may change, but the purpose does not.

If you use relationships and education as your true north, decisions get easier. You can ask simple questions: Does this help me build real connections? Does this help my audience better understand their situation and options? If the answer is yes, you’re probably on the right track.

You don’t need to chase every new trend or platform. You just need to show up consistently in ways that deepen relationships and educate the people you want to serve.

The takeaway: Marketing will keep changing, but the foundation won’t. Anchor your strategy in relationships and education, and you’ll always know what to do next.

Kristen Luke

Founder of Kaleido Creative Studio and OnNiche®