Guide
Financial advisor video marketing statistics: every number carries its source
This page collects the advisor marketing numbers worth repeating, each with its study and year printed beside it, so you can check any figure before you put it in a deck. It also names the famous statistics we traced to their origin and refused to reprint. Last verified: August 2026.
- Of US advisory assets sit with advisors planning to retire within ten years (Cerulli, 2024)
- 41%
- Growth in video posts by financial firms over four years (Hearsay Systems, 2024)
- 287%
- Average referral-to-client conversion, vs 3.6 months for marketing leads (Broadridge, 2024)
- 1.7 mo
- One finished 30 second video on Cutroom, batch plus export
- ~110 CR
How advisors actually market, in numbers
The most complete public dataset on advisor marketing is Broadridge's annual survey. The 2024 edition covered 403 US advisors managing $100 million or more, fielded in late 2023. Its picture is of a profession that markets in the gaps between client work.
- Advisors spend an average of $15,908 a year on marketing; the median is $6,250 and has not moved in four years (Broadridge, 2024).
- The average advisor puts 2.1 hours a week into marketing, and three in ten spend less than one hour (Broadridge, 2024).
- 85% of advisors say finding time for marketing is a challenge (Broadridge, 2024).
- 80% of advisors handle their own marketing, with no agency and no in-house marketer (Broadridge, 2024).
- Only 23% of advisors have a defined marketing strategy (Broadridge, 2020).
- Advisors with a defined strategy onboarded 21 new clients in a year; advisors without one onboarded 14 (Broadridge, 2024).
- The average advisor gained 15 clients in a year at $609 in marketing cost per client; growth-focused advisors paid $997 (Broadridge, 2024).
- An earlier Broadridge survey of 400+ advisors put the average cost of acquiring a client at $929 (Broadridge, 2019).
- 62% of advisors call their own website ineffective at generating leads; the average advisor site produces about two and a half leads a month (Broadridge, 2024).
Referrals and trust, measured
Advisory is a referral business, and the referral numbers are unusually well documented. What the same studies show, less comfortably, is how fragile the relationship behind the referral has become.
One sentence of practice: a weekly talking-head video is the cheapest way an advisor stays visible to the person a client just referred, because that person looks you up before they call.
- Referrals from existing clients and centers of influence produced 67% of new clients and new client assets at RIA firms in 2023 (Charles Schwab RIA Benchmarking Study, 2024).
- A referred prospect converts in 1.7 months on average; a prospect from other marketing takes 3.6 months (Broadridge, 2024).
- 75% of advised investors said they switched advisors or considered switching in 2023; YCharts ran the survey twice because the figure looked too high (YCharts Advisor-Client Communication Survey, 2024).
- Nearly 80% of advised investors want to hear from their advisor at least once every three months (YCharts, 2024).
- 89% of clients say more frequent, personalized communication would make them more likely to refer their advisor to family and friends (YCharts, 2024).
- 88% say that same communication would influence whether they keep the advisor at all (YCharts, 2024).
- Only 26% of advisors meet their clients' expectations for contact frequency (Broadridge, 2024).
- When investors fire an advisor, 32% cite quality of advice, 21% quality of the relationship, 17% cost, 11% returns, and 9% name communication quality outright (Morningstar, 2023).
Why investors fire their advisor
Share of stated reasons for terminating an advisor relationship (Morningstar, 2023).
- Quality of advice and services32%
- Quality of the relationship21%
- Cost of services17%
- Investment returns11%
- Communication quality9%
This is the whole editor
Highlight a phrase and a clip lands on those exact words. No timeline, no keyframes, no layers.
Advisor social media adoption: the ten-year record
Putnam Investments surveyed advisor social media use almost every year from 2013, which makes it the closest thing to a longitudinal record the industry has. The arc it drew: fast adoption, a pandemic peak, then a regulatory comedown.
- In 2013, 49% of advisors using social media reported gaining new clients from it; by 2016 the figure had reached 80% (Putnam Social Advisor Survey, 2013 and 2016).
- 51% of advisors said social media brought in new business in 2023, down from 89% in 2020, with Putnam pointing at fallout from the SEC marketing rule (Putnam Social Advisor Survey, 2023).
- 74% of advisors using social media for business initiated new relationships or onboarded clients during the pandemic year (Putnam, 2020).
- Four in ten advisors have obtained a client through social media (Broadridge, 2024).
- 68% of advisors invest marketing effort in LinkedIn and 50% in Facebook, and those two platforms convert best (Broadridge, 2024).
- Only 8% of advisors use AI anywhere in their marketing; 35% plan to (Broadridge, 2024).
- Video watch time on LinkedIn, the advisor platform of record, rose 36% year over year (LinkedIn, 2025).
Video in financial services
The financial services video numbers split into two kinds: what firms publish, and who is watching. Both point the same direction, and the most honest figure in the set is the caution attached to the biggest one.
The generational data explains the urgency. The advisors leaving the industry sell to people who found them through referrals; the clients arriving found their first financial voice on YouTube.
- Financial services firms increased published video content 287% over four years, measured across 13 million posts from 260,000 advisors and agents at over 100 firms (Hearsay Systems, 2024).
- The same study found text-only posts still drew the highest engagement per post, a caution the vendors quoting the 287% tend to leave out (Hearsay Systems, 2024).
- 93% of wealth management professionals called video an effective way to engage clients and prospects, in a survey of 600+ financial services professionals run by a video vendor (Socialive, 2022).
- 83% of wealth respondents saw increased client demand to communicate by video within the prior year (Socialive, 2022).
- 59% said actually recording, editing and publishing video was an operational struggle (Socialive, 2022).
- 48% of US Gen Z investors learn about investing primarily through social media, and their top single resource is YouTube at 60% (FINRA Foundation and CFA Institute, 2023).
- 37% of US Gen Z investors cite social media influencers as a major factor in their decision to start investing (FINRA Foundation and CFA Institute, 2023).
- 73% of B2B decision-makers say an organization's thought leadership is a more trustworthy basis for judging it than its marketing materials (Edelman-LinkedIn, 2024).
- 105,887 advisors, 37% of US headcount managing 41% of assets, plan to retire within ten years, while total advisor headcount grew 0.2% in a decade to 283,137 (Cerulli, 2024).
The famous statistics we refuse to publish
Three numbers dominate advisor video marketing articles, and none of them survives a trip to its source. They are described here so you know why they are absent, and so you can stop repeating them too.
"Viewers retain 95% of a message on video versus 10% in text." The trail leads to Insivia, a marketing agency, which has said the figure came from a small survey of roughly 200 B2B buyers in the late 2000s, not from any neuroscience. The percentages also echo a fabricated version of Edgar Dale's Cone of Experience, a 1940s teaching diagram that never contained percentages at all. There is no primary study. We do not print it.
"Pages with video are 53 times more likely to rank on the first page of Google." This is real research: Forrester analyst Nate Elliott, January 2009, measuring Google's early universal search. Elliott himself added an update in 2012 warning the finding was years old and almost certainly no longer accurate. It is now being quoted seventeen years after measurement, against a search engine that no longer works that way. We do not print it as current.
"92% of advisors using social media gained assets from it." This one is genuine too: it comes from the 2019 edition of Putnam's Social Advisor Survey. It keeps being quoted without its date, while Putnam's own 2023 edition put the advisors gaining business at 51%, and the survey pages themselves now redirect to Franklin Templeton after the acquisition. A true number quoted without its year became a false one. We print the 2023 figure instead, above, with its year.
Sources
Primary sources for this page, in plain text. Where a figure comes from a vendor's own platform data or survey, that is said in the bullet that uses it.
- Broadridge Financial Advisor Marketing Trends Report, 2024 edition (403 US advisors, $100M+ AUM, fielded October-November 2023), plus the 2019 and 2020 editions.
- Charles Schwab RIA Benchmarking Study, 2024.
- YCharts Advisor-Client Communication Survey, 2024 (about 800 advised investors).
- Morningstar behavioral research, Why Do Investors Fire Their Financial Advisor?, 2023.
- Putnam Investments Social Advisor Survey, editions 2013 through 2023.
- Hearsay Systems Financial Services Social Selling Content Study, 2024 (13 million posts across 100+ firms).
- Socialive financial services video report, 2022 (a video vendor's survey of 600+ professionals).
- FINRA Investor Education Foundation and CFA Institute, Gen Z and Investing, 2023.
- Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, 2024 (about 3,500 management-level respondents in seven countries).
- Cerulli Associates, US advisor metrics research, 2024.
- LinkedIn platform data, 2025.
What the numbers cost to act on
The statistics above reduce to one working conclusion: contact frequency drives retention and referrals, the next generation of clients looks for a face before a firm, and the binding constraint is the 2.1 hours a week an advisor actually has. The unit that fits inside that constraint is one short talking video a week.
Cutroom is built for that unit. Record one take on your phone, up to 3 minutes. It transcribes every word, writes the hook, places b-roll on the exact words that need showing, burns in captions, and returns a finished 9:16 MP4 in about a minute. You direct on the transcript, never on a timeline, and the transcript doubles as the reviewable script a compliance desk wants to see before anything posts.
The arithmetic: a batch is 100 credits and export adds 20 credits per finished minute, so a 30 second video is about 110 credits. The first 3 finished videos are free in your first 7 days, with 600 credits and no card, and carry a Cutroom mark. Lite is $19.99 a month for 1,250 credits, about 11 of those videos, takes the mark off, and cancels in one click under Settings.
The limits, stated flat: source takes cap at 3 minutes, exports are 9:16 MP4 only, and nothing on this page is a promise about your results. The benchmarks are the industry's; the weekly habit is yours.
Questions people ask
- What percentage of financial advisors use video marketing?
- No clean adoption percentage exists, which is why this page does not invent one. The closest measured figures: financial firms grew published video 287% over four years (Hearsay Systems, 2024), and 93% of wealth professionals called video effective in a 600-person vendor survey (Socialive, 2022). Neither is an adoption rate, and any page quoting one without a source is guessing.
- Do financial advisors actually get clients from social media?
- Yes, measurably: four in ten advisors have obtained a client through social media (Broadridge, 2024), and 51% of advisors said social activity brought in new business in 2023, down from 89% in 2020 after the SEC marketing rule (Putnam, 2023). LinkedIn and Facebook convert best (Broadridge, 2024).
- Are these statistics current?
- Each figure carries its source and year inline, and the page states its verification date: August 2026. Where a number is old, the year says so; where a famous number failed the trace back to its source, it is in the debunk section instead of the page.
- Why is the 95% video retention statistic not on this page?
- Because it has no primary study behind it. The trail ends at a marketing agency's small late-2000s survey and a percentage-free 1940s teaching diagram that later versions decorated with invented numbers. A stats page that reprints it forfeits the right to be checked.
- What does a weekly advisor video cost with Cutroom?
- About 110 credits per finished 30 second video: a 100 credit batch plus export at 20 credits per finished minute. Lite is $19.99 a month for 1,250 credits, about 11 of those videos, and cancelling is one click under Settings. Exports are 9:16 MP4, built for Reels, Shorts and the LinkedIn feed.
Every number above can be checked against its named source, which is the standard your own marketing claims will be held to. One sourced page beats fifty recycled infographics.