Marketing Lessons: How to Get to Efficiency and Ease
By Sarah Falcon. Updated 2026-10-26.
Short answer: We make marketing more efficient by aligning it with the people responsible for closing new clients. For independent, fee-only RIAs, that means defining ideal clients, understanding why they choose and stay with the firm, and documenting qualified leads. Strategy should guide tactics, with lead quality taking priority over quantity.
The hardest lesson I learned in marketing was that without a very tight connection to whoever is watching the pipeline and closing, new marketing absolutely does not matter. Worse than that, it becomes extremely expensive. Marketing keeps doing marketing “stuff” - social media, advertising, sending emails. In some cases, marketing does big, expensive (either pure cost or the time it takes) stuff: webinars, conferences, launching a podcast, signing up for an expensive lead funnel.
When Marketing is Inefficient
Marketing stays very busy. Marketing may even report on all of the effort they are making. I had a client once show me a very comprehensive report they created every month to track their marketing. But they had no leads from marketing. This is a very expensive way to do marketing.
It didn’t feel expensive, because it only cost time. They didn’t have an excessive ad budget; they were careful about how they were spending on tools and platforms. But their time was pointed in the wrong direction.
It’s natural; it happens when you don’t know the right direction to point to.
Defining Your Ideal Customer Profile
It’s pretty simple: marketing doesn’t look to marketing for marketing ideas. Marketing looks at the business, and the people who are talking to prospective clients and closing prospective clients and asks the following:
- Who are our best clients now?
- How did they come to us and why?
- Why do they stay?
- Who would you be excited to speak to?
- Who wouldn’t you be excited to speak to?
In marketing terms, that’s your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
What Strategic Marketing Can Look Like
If you’re a small, growing business, being clear about those last two bullet points is very important. Marketing needs to grow your business at the lowest resource cost to people (especially people outside of marketing).
That doesn’t mean marketing is going to be entirely successful, what it does mean is marketing decisions need to be strategic first, tactical second. Some good, strategy-based marketing decisions:
- Our client base is geographically-specific, so let's try running limited, local digital advertising
- We get referrals from our business partners, so let’s create a programmatic outreach and communications strategy to those partners
- Some of our best clients came to us while they were going through [divorce, getting a promotion, planning to retire] here’s the information and perspective they would have found useful and we can create and distribute it on our website, social media, and emails
Eyes on your own paper. Think about your clients and your unique business. All of that stuff you see online (on Facebook, on YouTube, on your competitors’ sites), those are tactics.
The Role of the Marketer
If you’re in marketing, make sure you are very tightly aligned with the people responsible for closing new clients. Start with that alignment first: what do good leads from marketing look like? Before you agree to anything, do your research first, so you can answer these questions:
- Is this doable (is the target billionaires under 30?)
- Is this achievable with the given budget?
- Does the organization have a track record for winning with these types of clients, or is this new for the organization? The latter will take a lot more effort.
Document what good leads look like; document when* that changes. *Maybe “if” that changes, but most likely “when.”
The Role of Leadership
If you’re responsible for your business and/orclosing new clients, be clear about what it is that you want and need from marketing in terms of prospective clients. A hint: if it’s an unqualified number (20 new leads), you’re likely to set up a system where marketing is solving for quantity, not quality. If it’s a (lower) qualified number, where you’re clear what good leads look like, you can get marketing working to grow the kind of business you want.
The sub-goal: energy conservation* so that marketing is focused on being strategic and proactive. The big goal: marketing that’s producing leads that grow your business with clarity and efficiency.
Questions
Why can busy marketing fail to produce leads? Marketing can stay busy with social media, emails, and events without connecting those activities to what the business needs. We start by aligning with the people who speak to prospective clients and close new business.
How do we define an ideal client profile? We ask who our best clients are, how they found us, why they chose us, and why they stay. We also clarify which prospective clients the firm would and would not be excited to speak with.
What makes a marketing decision strategic rather than tactical? We make strategic decisions by starting with the firm's clients and business rather than copying tactics seen online. Examples include local advertising for a geographically focused client base, outreach to referral partners, and content addressing relevant life transitions.
How should marketing and the people closing clients agree on lead quality? We document what good leads look like and update that definition when it changes. An unqualified lead target encourages quantity, while a qualified target makes clear which prospective clients the business wants.
Tell us where you want growth to come from.
A 30-minute call with Sarah Falcon. We talk through where your clients come from today and where you want growth to come from.