You’re Asking Too Much of Your Content

Content marketing is valuable. But in 2026, it can’t be your entire marketing strategy.

I talk to a lot of advisors who feel like they’re doing marketing because they’re putting out content: blog posts, videos, podcasts, newsletters, and social media. They’re consistent, they’re showing up, and they’re wondering why it’s not translating into new clients.

Content is not the client-acquisition strategy it used to be 10 years ago. Publishing a blog post doesn’t mean the right person will find it, read it, trust you, and schedule a call. That’s a lot of weight to put on a 700-word article.

What content actually does well is support everything else. It demonstrates credibility when a prospect looks you up after a referral. It nurtures relationships by keeping you top of mind. It gives your centers of influence something to share. And increasingly, it helps you show up in AI-powered search results.

All of those are valuable. But none of them is the same as proactively generating new business.

The trap is that creating content feels productive. You can point to the work and say you marketed this week. But if that’s all you did, you spent your time on the passive side of marketing and skipped the active side. If you want to be proactive, do the things that require interaction with actual humans first. Have a coffee with a CPA. Email prospects you haven’t heard from in the last six months. Show up where your niche gathers. These are the activities that generate relationships, referrals, and new business. Content supports them. It doesn’t replace them.

The takeaway: Content has a role in your marketing. But if it’s the only thing you’re doing, you’re asking it to carry more than it can. Do the human work first. Then let your content reinforce it.

Kristen Luke

Founder of Kaleido Creative Studio and OnNiche®

AI Won’t Fix Disorganized Marketing

If your marketing doesn’t have a system behind it, AI just makes the mess faster.

A recent Harvard Business Review article argued that the biggest obstacle to using AI in marketing isn’t the technology. It’s that most organizations haven’t changed how they operate their marketing to include AI.

Most firms still approach marketing the way they always have. Someone has an idea, it gets handed to whoever has time, that person creates it however they see fit, and it goes out. There’s no shared playbook. No centralized strategy that everyone works from. No documented rules for what the brand sounds like or what’s off-limits.

When you add AI to that process, you don’t get better marketing. You get more of the same inconsistency, just faster.

The HBR article introduces a concept called a “brand code,” which is essentially a centralized place where your strategy, messaging, audience definition, tone, and rules all live in a format that both people and AI tools can work from. When it exists, everything produced for your firm draws from the same foundation. When it doesn’t, every person and every tool is making it up as they go.

For advisory firms, this doesn’t need to be complicated. It means documenting who you serve, what you say, how you say it, and what the rules are, and putting it somewhere your team can actually find it. If you’ve already done this work through a documented strategy and brand and messaging guidelines, you’re ahead of most firms. If you haven’t, AI will only magnify the gap.

The firms that take the time to document it and organize it will be the ones that get the most out of AI, their team, and any outside partners they bring in.

The takeaway: AI is only as good as the system it’s working from. Before you invest in tools, invest in the foundation: your strategy, messaging, rules, and voice. Organize it once, and everything that follows, whether it’s produced by a person or a machine, will be more consistent, more efficient, and more on-brand.

This is what we help firms build at OnNiche® by Kaleido. We document your strategy, messaging, audience, and guidelines so your team, your tools, and your partners are all working from the same foundation. Schedule a call if you’d like to talk through what that looks like for your firm.

Kristen Luke

Founder of Kaleido Creative Studio and OnNiche®

How to Support the Teams You’ve Acquired

Acquiring a firm or recruiting an advisor is only the beginning. Here’s how to set them up to grow beyond the clients they brought with them.

Whether you’ve purchased a firm or recruited an advisor with an existing book of business, you already know how much work goes into the transition itself. But once the accounts are moved and the clients are settled, there’s a question most firms don’t have a great answer for: How is this team going to continue to grow from here? After all, you made a big investment. Wouldn’t you like to see it grow organically beyond just the new clients that came with them?

Most firms handle the operational side of a transition well. But the growth side often gets overlooked entirely. The assumption is that the advisor will figure it out or that what worked before will keep working. Or the new environment means new resources and opportunities that they could be taking advantage of if they just knew how.

So how can you help? Give advisors a clear strategy for their first year with you. Not a vague “go grow your book” but an actual strategy: what channels make sense for them, what messages they should be communicating, who they should be building relationships with, and what marketing assets they need to support those efforts.

Then, break it down for them. Give them 90-day plans with specific activities, realistic goals, and a clear sense of what’s being prioritized this quarter versus next. Translate those quarterly plans into weekly action items so the advisor knows exactly what to focus on each week, rather than going by gut.

And finally, provide support. Give the advisor someone they can reach out to when they’re stuck and a path to execution help. When you set up an advisor with this kind of structure, you can expect them to continue growing after the close.

The takeaway: When you acquire a firm or recruit an advisor, the growth plan matters as much as the transition plan. Build a strategy, break it into manageable steps, and give them the support to actually follow through.

This is exactly the kind of work we do at OnNiche® by Kaleido. We help firms give their advisors a focused strategy, a quarterly plan, and the ongoing support to execute it. If you’re bringing on new advisors and want to set them up to grow, schedule a call and we’ll walk you through how it works.

Kristen Luke

Founder of Kaleido Creative Studio and OnNiche®

The Power of Multiple Touchpoints

One mailer doesn’t make an impression. A consistent series of them does.

I recently filed for probate on a friend’s estate I’m managing. Within days, the direct mail started showing up. Company after company, all selling similar estate-related services.

Most of them sent one piece. I glanced at it and tossed it. I couldn’t tell you a single name.

But a few companies sent multiple pieces, week after week. And they were consistent. Same look, same colors, same tone. After the third or fourth one, something shifted. I didn’t just notice them. I remembered them. If I had actually needed the service they were selling, those would have been the ones I called (assuming I didn’t already have a strong referral to another professional, which would be better).

That’s the power of multiple touchpoints.

Here’s another example. For over 10 years, a real estate company sent me a mailer every couple of months with listings in my building. Each mailing, I would glance at it and then toss it. But when it came time to sell, that company was the first one I thought of. I’ve now listed two properties with them, my own and the estate’s, and referred someone else in the building to them. Ten years of consistency turned into three transactions.

One impression almost never leads to action. It doesn’t matter how good your piece is, how clever your subject line is, or how well-designed your ad is. A single touchpoint is easy to ignore and easier to forget.

But when someone sees your name, your message, and your brand consistently across multiple touchpoints, something changes. You stop being a stranger and start being familiar. And people hire people they feel like they already know.

The companies that stood out in my mailbox weren’t doing anything more creative than the ones I forgot. They were just doing it more often, with enough consistency for their name to stick.

The takeaway: One touchpoint is forgettable. Multiple consistent touchpoints build familiarity, and familiarity builds trust. Whatever marketing you’re doing, the question isn’t just whether you’re doing it. It’s whether you’re doing it often enough and consistently enough to be remembered.

Kristen Luke

Founder of Kaleido Creative Studio and OnNiche®

Marketing Doesn’t Have to Be Public

Some of the highest-return marketing activities are ones nobody else ever sees.

If you scroll LinkedIn for five minutes, it can feel like every advisor is doing something. Posting content, hosting webinars, launching podcasts, sharing behind-the-scenes videos. It creates the impression that marketing means being visible and public all the time.

But some of the most effective marketing you can do is something nobody else will ever see.

A coffee meeting with a CPA who is rapidly growing their business. A handwritten note to a client who just closed on a house. A small dinner with six people who all work in the same industry. A phone call to a center of influence you haven’t talked to in three months. A personal email to someone you met at an event.

None of these shows up on a feed. None of them gets likes or impressions. But they build the kind of trust and relationship depth that a LinkedIn post never will.

This doesn’t mean public marketing is wrong. Content, social media, and visibility all have a role. But if you’ve been avoiding marketing because you don’t want to post online or don’t feel comfortable being public, you’re not out of options. You might actually be better suited for the kind of marketing that produces the highest return.

The advisors I’ve worked with who have the strongest referral networks didn’t build them by posting. They built them by showing up personally and consistently for the people who matter most to their business.

The takeaway: Marketing isn’t just what people can see. Some of the most valuable activities happen in private, one relationship at a time. If public marketing doesn’t feel like you, lean into the private work. It’s not a backup plan. It’s often the better plan.

Kristen Luke

Founder of Kaleido Creative Studio and OnNiche®

Follow the Gold, Not the Fool’s Gold

Most advisors chase “popular” marketing tactics when a more lucrative opportunity is already within reach.

When I ask advisors what they want to do for marketing, the answer is almost always the same: social media, maybe some ads, automated AI outreach. It always surprises me because these are fool’s gold. They look promising, they take real effort to chase, but they rarely pay off the way you expect. Meanwhile, there’s usually a gold mine within reach that’s being ignored.

Here are two examples.

Imagine a firm focused on divorcees that shares a floor with a divorce attorney practice. The attorneys know what the advisors do, they like them, and they are not only happy to refer them business but willing to make introductions to other attorneys in the area and help them get access to speaking at CLE events. That’s pure gold.

Or imagine a wealth management firm affiliated with a CPA practice that’s growing rapidly through acquisition. Every time the CPA firm acquires a new practice, there’s a new pool of clients who need financial planning. The advisors don’t need to run ads. They need a system for getting introduced to the clients already coming through the door. That’s pure gold.

In both scenarios, why would you spend any time chasing fool’s gold when you literally own a gold mine?

The takeaway: Before you invest in a marketing tactic you have to build from scratch, look at what’s already in front of you. The highest-return opportunity is the one that’s specific to your situation, your relationships, and your niche.

Kristen Luke

Founder of Kaleido Creative Studio and OnNiche®

A Marketing Plan Is Not a Marketing System

A plan tells you what to do. A system keeps you doing it.

A marketing plan is a document. It outlines your target audience, lists some tactics, and sets a few goals for the year. It’s an excellent starting point. But a plan by itself is static. It doesn’t adapt, it doesn’t remind you what to do on Tuesday, and it doesn’t help you when you’re stuck.

A marketing system is the infrastructure around the plan that keeps it alive. Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Annual Strategy

A system starts with an annual strategy that defines your direction: who you’re marketing to, what channels you’ll focus on, what topics you’ll talk about, and what assets you need to build. This isn’t a list of tactics. It’s the framework that every decision for the year connects back to.

Quarterly Plans

A system translates that strategy into quarterly plans. Every 90 days, specific activities get scoped based on the time and budget you actually have. You set measurable goals. You identify the people and organizations to build relationships with for that quarter. Then at the end of the quarter, you reflect on what worked, adjust, and build the next one. The plan evolves instead of going stale.

Weekly Action Items

A system breaks quarterly plans into weekly action items. Quarterly goals are too far away to drive daily behavior. Weekly action items tell you exactly what to focus on this week. Creating a reminder at the start of each week keeps it visible so it doesn’t get buried under client work.

Support When You Need It

A system includes support. When you hit a wall, whether it’s filling a room for a small event or writing a blog post you’ve been putting off, you have someone you can talk to or message who understands your strategy and can point you in the right direction.

Resources and Execution

A system gives you a centralized place to store and access your marketing assets, from one-pagers and presentations to educational guides and brochures, so everything you’ve built is easy to find and use. And when you’d rather hand something off entirely, a system connects you with a team that can execute on your behalf.

A plan is what you intend to do. A system is what makes sure it actually happens.

The takeaway: If your marketing feels disorganized or inconsistent, you probably don’t need more ideas. You need a system: annual strategy, quarterly planning, weekly action items, accountability, resources, and support.

Ready to set up a marketing system for your firm? Schedule a call to learn how OnNiche® by Kaleido can help.

Kristen Luke

Founder of Kaleido Creative Studio and OnNiche®

AI Can Help You Become Uncomparable

The best use of AI isn’t replacing what you do. It’s deepening what makes you different.

Yes, I talked about AI last week. And yes, I said we’re all tired of hearing about it. I’m sorry. Here we go again.

There is still a lot of uncertainty about how AI will impact financial advisors. But while people debate that question, I’m starting to see how advisors are already using it to better serve their clients.

In different advisor communities and conversations I’m part of, I’m seeing advisors build entirely new tools for their clients using Claude’s artifact feature. An artifact is an interactive tool, such as a calculator, decision-making app, or comparison chart, that the AI builds for you right inside the conversation. You don’t need to know how to code. You describe what you want, and it creates it. You can then share it with clients via a link.

One of my clients, who works with physicians, used this feature to build a calculator that helps doctors in a medical group evaluate their benefits options. It’s specific to their situation, specific to their decisions, and far more useful than a generic online tool.

And that’s the key: When you have a niche, you can build tools that no one else would think to build because you understand the nuances of what makes your clients different. A generalist advisor wouldn’t know the specific benefits a doctor in a medical group is weighing. A niche advisor does.

I talk about this concept in “Chapter 8: Business Model” of my book, Uncomparable: The Financial Advisor's Guide to Standing Out Through Niche Marketing. Advisors who fully commit to their niche design their entire business around their ideal client, including the tools, processes, and experiences they offer. AI just makes that faster and more accessible. You don’t need a developer or a budget for custom software. You need an understanding of your niche and a clear idea of what would help them. That’s how AI helps you become uncomparable.

A note: Be thoughtful about what information any tool you build collects or displays. Do not build anything that requests information that could create compliance issues for your firm.

The takeaway: AI is most powerful when paired with niche expertise. The advisors who know their clients deeply enough to build something specifically for them will always have an advantage over both generalists and algorithms.

Kristen Luke

Founder of Kaleido Creative Studio and OnNiche®

AI Tips That Are Practical, Not Hype

Here’s how to use AI to standardize your firm’s marketing and communication.

I know. You’re tired of hearing about AI. I am too. But I found a really useful tool that I think can help streamline your marketing and communications.

In mid-January, my team switched to Claude after testing it for a single day. The output was just that much better than what we were getting from ChatGPT. But one of the things I am liking the most is not the original reason we switched: Skills. (I’ve heard ChatGPT now has something similar, but I haven’t tested it.)

A skill is a set of instructions that you write once and that the AI follows every time. Think of it like a standard operating procedures manual that your AI actually reads. You define the rules, the structure, the tone, and the guardrails, and the AI applies them automatically to every piece of content it produces. You don’t have to re-explain your preferences every time you start a new conversation. And because skills can be deployed across your entire organization, everyone on your team is working from the same playbook instead of each person producing things their own way.

Here’s how we use them, and how you could do the same.

SEC Compliance. Everything written for marketing purposes needs to comply with SEC marketing guidelines. We built a skill that ensures the AI won’t produce content with testimonial language, performance claims, superlatives, or other common violations. If you upload a first draft, it will rewrite the language to be compliant. It doesn’t replace a compliance review, but it means the draft that reaches your compliance team is already clean.

Writing Style. We follow Associated Press style with a few modifications, so we created a skill that enforces those rules in everything the AI produces. If your firm has a style guide or even just a set of preferences, you can teach the AI to follow them. Maybe you don’t want your firm to use Oxford commas or em dashes. Or you spell out numbers at different thresholds. Instead of remembering every rule, the skill handles it.

Writing Voice. If you’ve built up a library of original writing, podcast transcripts, or video transcripts, you can create a skill that teaches the AI how you sound. Sentence structure, word choice, tone, how you open an article, how you close one. The output isn’t perfect, but it’s a much better starting point than generic AI copy.

Content Structures. Over time, most firms develop specific ways of doing things. A newsletter follows a certain format. Blog posts have a preferred structure. Social media posts hit certain beats. Client welcome emails, meeting follow-ups, and annual review summaries all have a way they should read. You can build a skill for each type so the AI produces first drafts in your structure rather than inventing its own.

The best part: If you’re on a team plan, skills deploy at the organization level. Your team doesn’t need to know these skills exist for them to work. If a new advisor sits down to write an article with the assistance of AI, the AI will automatically write it in your firm’s style, in the voice you’ve defined, in your standard article structure, and it will flag anything that might raise a compliance issue. The advisor didn’t have to know any of those rules existed.

Don’t know how to create a skill? Just ask Claude to help you build one.

The takeaway: AI gets more useful when you teach it how your firm actually works. If you’re using AI for marketing and communication, take the time to define your style, voice, compliance rules, and content structures.

Kristen Luke

Founder of Kaleido Creative Studio and OnNiche®

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®