Part 2: The next generation of wealth has never heard of you. Time to introduce yourself.
Geoff Director, executive vice president of strategy, Manifest
There is not a more interesting place to be a marketer right now than in the wealth management sector — and I don’t just mean within financial services. These firms will need to undergo a metamorphosis from B2B organizations with unknown brands and no marketing muscles into household names in mass-affluent America with new business models. And fast.
It’s an intoxicating strategic puzzle to work on.
There are only so many rich people
The universe of high-net-worth individuals, for whom the entire apparatus of independent wealth management and RIAs has been geared, is, shall we say, expiring. There are too many advisors to serve the dwindling nugget of super-wealthy folks, so advisory businesses have been looking to scale, congealing into larger and larger networks and groupings.
This explains why M&A activity in this sector has been scalding hot. According to MarshBerry, in Q1 of 2025 alone, we saw 88 transactions in this sector — the third-highest quarter in any year, ever.
Now they’re all starting to recognize the marketing transformation staring them in the face. The next generation of wealthy investors, and the inheritors of massive Boomer wealth, do not relate to the current model of financial advice. According to BlackRock, 70% of heirs are likely to leave their family’s advisor after getting their inheritance. They simply don’t relate to the current model of wealth management, having been conditioned for low-fee, passive management.
Suddenly, large wealth management firms are going to need to market themselves directly to mass-affluent America, with new products and new business models. These are consumers who never had the asset levels worthy of most advisors’ time. People who have never been marketed to by this industry. People who have never heard of most of these brands.
Understanding your future demand
The assumption most wealth management companies are making is that any direct-to-consumer offering for younger, mass-market investors should be positioned as tech-centric and self-directed. Kids today — they just love their technology, right?
In reality, today’s youngest investors (Gen Z) are more interested in paying for financial advice than the other generations are, according to Cerulli. Contrary to cliches about young people, they fully grasp the severe economic challenges they’re likely to face, are responsibly trying to get ahead of them, and want some traditional human advice along the way.
Our own search and social listening analysis shows that Millennial and Gen Z consumers are interested in finance and investing as a subject matter. They consume videos on “FinTok” and YouTube, not only for edification, but for…welp…fun.
It’s understandable for wealth management firms to leverage robo technology to preserve margin when serving larger numbers of consumers with fewer assets, but the brands that figure out just the right way to integrate old-fashioned relationship building, high-touch advice, and good service, in the way today’s consumers like to communicate, are going to have a massive advantage. Technology is the table stakes — humanity is the real differentiator.
Build. A. Brand.
Before you run out and give a bunch of money to a creative agency or production company to make a consumer campaign, you need a brand strategy worthy of the consumer stage.
You’re entering a different game than winning a book of business from a breakaway advisor, where you could get away with little more than a coherent website, an email list, and a brochure about how much you revere advisors’ independence. According to Radius Insights, only 3%‑8% of relationships in financial services are “in play” each year because consumers don’t feel there is a meaningfully different alternative.
According to Cerulli, 87% of next-gen wealth holders say “shared values” are important when choosing a financial advisor. They’re not “value investors,” they’re values investors – they want to know what they’re buying into when they sign up with your firm more than they care about the particulars of your products, your service model, or your AUM. These consumers will not look up from their phone for your version of “our advisors take the time to learn about you and your family” or “our robo advisor tool is super easy to use!”
If you don’t codify a differentiated value proposition, a unique brand personality, and an ownable POV to drive all your messaging, it’s likely that your marketing will blend into the void despite best intentions.
Making the case internally
It will likely be challenging to sell your board on brand strategy work, as they tend to see this kind of thing as expensive and frivolous. So it’s imperative that you don’t frame brand building as a cost at all, but rather as an intangible financial asset that accrues value over time, like any other investment.
First, show that having a strong brand identity means having a “durable competitive advantage,” as Warren Buffett likes to say. Your advisors may be the same. Your tech may be the same. But if you have established a reputation in the minds of consumers, and they think there’s something special about you, that is an advantage you can quantify.
Second, as a result of establishing a reputation with consumers, your brand has measurable value as intellectual property. For instance, the Coca-Cola brand alone, independent of its actual business (i.e., sales, revenue, etc.), is worth tens of billions of dollars simply for being famous. If your organization is sold, the value of your brand identity would be a line item on the balance sheet.
Build an audience
You understand the next-gen investor that you’ll have to win with. You built an ownable brand strategy and managed to get your board to buy in. Now what do you do with that fancy new brand of yours?
Traditionally, wealth firms would think in terms of campaigns. Launch a website, run a brand campaign, maybe sponsor an event, then harvest the leads and repeat. But the players who win with consumers in this category will have a markedly different approach – they’ll think like media brands and content companies, with engaged followerships.
If you had a new product to announce or insight to share tomorrow, how many people do you think you could reach? The new marketing metrics of success should be subscriber growth, community size, listeners, and viewers. Because the audience’s default assumption is not that wealth managers are the true experts – content is now currency.
As frustrating as it may be to realize that you’re competing for thought leadership status with content creators working alone in their basements, focus on the bright side: This is a meritocracy. If you can figure out compelling content, you can compete for attention with the biggest names in the sector and business media giants alike.
Think about which executives at your firm could have a bigger presence on social media and become influencers. Remember, young investors don’t want rockstars – they want substance over flash, with a dose of humanity. Harness the most insightful frameworks or talking points that your advisors are coming up with and turn them into unique thought leadership pieces for the masses. Turn what used to be boring newsletters and PDFs into evermore visual, native social content.
Audience building will help you address the vast middle part of your funnel that’s often overlooked in this space, where firms try to go from awareness to handshake in one swift motion. Turn your brand strategy into a content engine that could only come from your firm. Answer the fundamental question of content and you’ll be on your way: what could only your firm create that would also be genuinely interesting to the audience?
We’d love to help
As I mentioned in the introduction to this series on financial services marketing, Manifest thrives in the complexity and haziness of things like content strategy. In fact, we built a content strategy model just for situations like this, where there are so many variables to try to tackle at once. We’d love to show it to you. Or reach out to hear about our approach to brand strategy in the financial services space.
If you’d like to get a copy of our Top 10 List of Marketing Moves for Financial Services, email us at hello@manifest.com.
Explore the series
Underpriced: The unexploited marketing opportunity in finance
Part 1
Finance built empires without marketing. The next chapter won't be that generous
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Part 2
The next generation of wealth has never heard of you. Time to introduce yourself.
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Part 3
10,000 fintechs. One underpriced asset: trust.
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Part 4
Banks don't have a relevance problem. They have a relationship problem.
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