SIFMA panel says advisers can build an audience without becoming finfluencers

UBS employs an executive director in adviser marketing named Mitch Slater, whose title, chief visibility officer, is a fair summary of where the business has landed; he moderated a panel this week at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association's Social Media and Digital Marketing Seminar in New York. "Being really good at what you do is no longer always enough," Slater said. "People have to know you exist. But visibility without credibility is just noise."

The panelists — financial advisers and wealth management executives from Merrill Lynch, RBC Wealth Management, Oppenheimer & Co. and Edward Jones — began with credibility as the foundation and kept going. Morgan Newman, Oppenheimer's director of investments, said advisers need both credibility and popularity, with credibility first, and supplied the line that belongs above every content calendar: "Credibility and credentials don't make someone stop scrolling." Sean Howe, a senior vice president at RBC Wealth Management, flagged the opposite failure, the pressure to produce something solely because it might spread, saying, "What matters is if you can speak from a place of authority and expertise."

The tactics they described were cheaper and more personal than most marketing budgets assume. Newman worked with a brand strategist to build a style that carried both her expertise and her personality — being human, as she put it, without getting overly personal — and Howe's content series gained traction once he began working his interests in fitness and nutrition into it, producing a popular Wellness Wednesday feature on LinkedIn. The aim was not influence for its own sake but a point of connection over something an audience already cares about.

Several panelists said the industry's default register, heavy with jargon and pitched at colleagues rather than clients, is much of why good advisers go unseen. The discussion kept returning to engagement that does not sacrifice trust, compliance standards or professional expertise, and credibility in this business does carry regulatory weight. Visibility of that kind is earned by personality rather than template, and it is already being priced. Merrill's plan to sell asset managers a map of its advisers' books — packages our reporting has put at $125,000 to $860,000 — treats adviser-level attention as a product.

An adviser who builds that audience under her own name is accumulating something her firm has already learned to sell, which is one argument for starting and another for establishing early who owns it if she leaves.