Your Marketing Team Probably Knows Too Much About Your Firm
You’re writing the draft for your home page, and you pass it around the table in your team meeting. Everyone says it sounds right, so it’s time to publish… right?
Your entire marketing team knows what the firm means by “planning for business owners.” Advisors are already picturing the client behind the phrase and the conversations they’re about to have. Leadership knows which services, situations, and years of experience are packed into those words. Perfect.
But the prospect you want to reach reads that sentence with none of that history attached.
That’s where an otherwise beautiful piece of marketing can just muddy the waters. The people who are responsible for creating and approving it can automatically fill in those details that never made it to the page, so the broad language doesn’t feel like it needs to be more specific.
Before you publish your next article or newsletter, ask: How much of this copy only works because we already know what we mean?
Your Prospects Don’t Know What You Meant
When you say “planning for business owners” inside your firm, your team can hear that and immediately think about preparing for a business sale, coordinating taxes, planning for life after the sale, deciding how much liquidity to keep afterward, etc.
When you say “planning for business owners” on your home page, a prospect sees “planning for business owners”.
If they’re already in the process, maybe they’re starting to think about what that could look like, but they’re not seeing you talk about what they’re currently looking for support with.
If they’re 3 years out from sale, they’re probably looking for someone who’s worked through those exact decisions before. Broad language doesn’t give them the evidence that your firm has. Another advisor whose website talks directly about preparing for an exit is much easier to recognize as relevant to where your prospect is right now.
When you keep the language vague to try and encompass as much as possible under a single term, the right prospect can land on your site, see that you have some experience in wealth management, and then leave without evidence that your team regularly handles the situation they’re living right now.
You have the expertise. Let your audience see it.
You Can Make the Same Mistake in Search
The same blind spot that you have in your messaging is in your SEO, too. You could build content around the language it uses internally because that language feels precise to the people inside the business. The problem is that prospects may never type those words into Google or Claude.
Say you’re talking about “tax-efficient retirement income planning.” You know what that means. I know what that means. Is my grandmother typing that into Google when she’s looking for you?
Prospects are probably looking for things like “how much tax will I pay when I retire?” or “should I take Social Security before I start withdrawing from my IRA?”
Both are referring to the same planning problem, but only one sounds like the internal monologue that’s getting put in the search bar and that your audience wants to identify with.
That’s where being too close to your business can be so expensive, because you can spend months building content around concepts that you talk about in meetings while missing the people you’re targeting completely.
For me, keyword research is partly a translation exercise. We’re literally figuring out how the firm’s expertise shows up in the language people use before they ever know what to call the problem.
Where Are You Filling In the Blanks?
The easiest way to find the disconnect is anywhere you’re assuming readers already know the backstory.
Service pages
If a page says “retirement planning,” does it show the kinds of decisions clients actually bring to the firm, or leave the reader to guess?
Advisor bios
Does the bio tell me what this advisor is especially good at helping with, or mostly tell me where they worked and how long they’ve been in the industry?
Content and SEO
Are you using the language prospects use when they’re trying to figure something out, or the language your team uses once the problem already has a name?
Read what you’re about to post through the eyes of a stranger using only what’s actually there. Would it make sense? Would it reflect the way they’d think about the problem?
Your Advisors Are Probably Saying It Better Out Loud
Your service page probably says that you help executives prepare for retirement. Talk to the advisor who does that work every week, and you’ll probably get much more useful context for the service.
They’ll probably explain how retirement dates get all tangled up with vesting schedules, concentrated stock, or deferred compensation. Suddenly there’s more shape to “retirement planning for executives” that was probably missing before.
That’s what I’d want to pull into the marketing. It shows what the firm actually spends its time helping with, and it gives the right prospect a much easier way to find their situation in your content.
For established RIAs, the hardest part is usually getting more of that day-to-day expertise onto the page before it gets compressed into the safest possible service description.
Final Thoughts
The people approving your marketing have years of context behind every sentence. Your prospect has the sentence.
If that sentence makes them work too hard to figure out whether you understand their situation, they have plenty of other tabs open. And if your content uses language they would never think to search, they may never find you in the first place.
That’s the risk of knowing your own firm too well: you can read specificity into language that a prospect experiences as incredibly generic.
I work with RIAs to turn the expertise that already exists inside the firm into website and content people can actually recognize themselves in. If that’s the kind of help your marketing team needs, book a call to talk about working together.
