There are a lot of agencies that can build a website, run paid media, write content or manage your social channels. And sometimes, that’s exactly what you need.
But if you’re trying to solve a bigger growth problem, the conversation should probably start somewhere else.
Maybe you’re generating leads, but they’re not turning into opportunities. Maybe marketing and sales disagree about what a qualified lead is. Maybe you’ve invested in HubSpot but aren’t getting much value from it. Or maybe your team is doing a ton of marketing, but no one can confidently say what’s contributing to pipeline.
Simply doing more marketing won’t solve any of those problems. Addressing growth challenges at the root requires a partner that understands your industry and your business well enough to figure out what’s going wrong, then bring the right people, strategy and execution to fix it.
What’s the Difference Between a Marketing Agency and a Growth Partner?
A marketing agency and a growth partner likely offer a similar suite of services: content, paid media, websites, SEO, brand, creative and so on.
The difference is where the conversation starts.
If you ask an agency to run a paid campaign, they’ll probably start thinking about audiences, creative and media strategy.
Your growth partner will first want to know why you’re running it.
What are you trying to accomplish? Where does this campaign fit into the larger growth strategy? What happens to a lead after they convert? Is sales equipped to follow up? What would have to happen for the campaign to be considered successful six months from now?
Sometimes a paid media campaign will still be the answer; sometimes that conversation will uncover a completely different problem. A growth partner is willing to diagnose before it prescribes.
So what should you be looking for as you’re evaluating potential growth partners?
1. They Know Financial Services
There’s a difference between an agency that has some financial services clients and one that understands the industry.
Your partner shouldn’t need three months to learn what separates an RIA from a broker-dealer, how an asset manager goes to market or why selling technology to advisors is different from selling directly to consumers.
They should understand that financial services buying journeys can be long and messy. Multiple stakeholders may be involved, trust carries an enormous amount of weight, and compliance is almost always part of the process. What works in another industry doesn’t always translate neatly into this one.
Industry knowledge saves time, but more importantly, it changes the quality of the strategy.
When you’re evaluating a partner, ask about the people who will work on your business. Have they worked with companies like yours? Do they understand your audience and distribution model? Can they talk intelligently about your competitive landscape?
A financial services logo on a case-study page doesn’t tell you any of that.
2. They Can Think Strategically, and Then Do the Work
Strategy only matters if someone can turn it into action. At the same time, execution without a clear strategy creates its own problems. That’s how teams end up publishing content because the calendar says it’s Tuesday, launching campaigns without a clear audience, or adding technology without knowing what they expect it to improve.
A good growth partner should be comfortable on both sides, able to identify the biggest opportunities, help you decide where not to spend time and money, and build what the strategy calls for.
Just as importantly, execution should feed back into the strategy. If a campaign isn’t working, you want a team that asks why and adjusts, not one that keeps delivering against a plan everyone knows isn’t producing the expected result.
3. They Can See Beyond Their Own Lane
Especially in financial services, growth can get complicated quickly.
A single client journey might touch paid media, content, a website, CRM, email nurture, sales outreach, and reporting before an opportunity ever makes it into the pipeline.
If the people responsible for those pieces aren’t looking at the whole journey, it’s easy to optimize one part while missing a problem in another area.
Say your paid campaigns are producing qualified leads, but very few are turning into opportunities. You could change the targeting, test new creative, or increase the budget.
Or you could look at what happens after someone fills out the form on your website.
How quickly does someone follow up? Is the lead getting routed to the right person? Is there a nurture sequence? Do you know why the prospect converted in the first place? Is the CRM giving anyone enough information to prioritize the lead?
If the handoff process is causing friction, generating more leads is only creating more opportunities to lose them.
Your growth partner doesn’t necessarily need to own every part of the process, but they should understand it well enough to spot the problem.
4. They Make Your Internal Team Stronger
Bringing in an outside partner shouldn’t be an indictment of your internal team.
Quite often, it’s the opposite.
Your internal marketing leaders have context an outside firm can never fully replicate, even with a wealth of industry knowledge. They know the personalities, history, internal dynamics, products, and customers. That’s incredibly valuable.
What they probably don’t have is unlimited time, or specialists in every discipline they need.
A three-person marketing department shouldn’t have to become experts in paid search, HubSpot architecture, AI search optimization, conversion strategy, graphic design, video, PR and web development just because all of those things happen to fall under “marketing.”
A good partner helps fill those gaps.
That might mean becoming an extension of a small marketing team. For a larger organization, it could mean bringing in specialized expertise for a particular initiative. In other cases, the partner may handle execution, allowing an internal CMO to spend more time on strategy and leadership.
The model can change. The goal shouldn’t be that your internal team has more leverage because the partner is there.
5. They Care About the Numbers Your Leadership Team Cares About
Traffic is useful. So are impressions, clicks, email engagement, and conversion rates.
They’re just not the end of the story.
Eventually, somebody is going to ask what all of that activity did for the business.
Depending on the firm, the answer might be qualified pipeline, new clients, AUM, advisor recruitment, revenue, or something else entirely. Your growth partner should know what those numbers are and understand how their work is expected to influence them.
Ask potential partners what they’ll measure and how often they’ll evaluate it. Ask what they would do if the numbers aren’t moving in the right direction.
Reporting on what happened is easy. The more useful conversation is what you’re going to do about it.
6. They’ll Tell You When They Think You’re Wrong
You want to work with people who are responsive, collaborative, and easy to work with.
You also want them to disagree with you sometimes.
If you’re bringing in outside experts, part of what you’re paying for is perspective. They should be willing to tell you when the data doesn’t support your assumption, when they think you’re prioritizing the wrong initiative, or when there’s a better place to spend your budget.
Sometimes the answer really is a new website or another campaign.
Other times, the best recommendation might be to fix the sales handoff first, rethink the positioning, or stop spending money on something that isn’t working.
A partner who challenges you respectfully is doing their job. A partner who says yes to every request may just be taking orders.
Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Financial Services Growth Partner
You can learn a lot about a potential partner by asking questions that go beyond capabilities and pricing:
- How much of your work is in financial services, and with what types of firms?
- Who will be working on our account?
- How do you figure out what’s limiting a client’s growth?
- What happens if you think we’re focused on the wrong problem?
- Which capabilities do you have in-house, and where do you bring in outside expertise?
- How do you typically work with an existing marketing team?
- How do you connect marketing activity to pipeline and revenue?
- What should we realistically expect to accomplish in the first six to 12 months?
- Can you give us an example of something a client asked for that you recommended they not do?
And pay attention to what they ask you.
A partner who’s curious about your sales process, revenue goals, customers, team structure, technology, and previous attempts to solve the problem is probably trying to understand the business.
If most of the conversation is about their services, that’s useful information too.
Finding the Right Financial Services Growth Partner
The right answer won’t be the same for every firm.
A growing RIA hiring its first marketing leader has very different needs from a $20 billion wealth management firm with an established marketing organization. A fintech struggling to generate pipeline needs something different from a company that has plenty of leads but can’t convert them.
Start with the problem you’re trying to solve, then look for the team with the industry experience, strategic perspective, and execution capabilities to help you solve it.
That’s the model we’ve built at Intention.ly. We work exclusively in financial services, bringing together industry veterans and specialists across marketing and growth. Sometimes that means becoming an extension of an internal team. Sometimes we’re brought in to solve a very specific problem. And sometimes our work starts with helping a firm figure out what the problem is.
The definition of a growth partner is a team that first works to identify what will move the business forward, and then acts on it.