3 Financial Advisor Tips for Generating Leads with LinkedIn

As a former financial advisor for Merrill Lynch, I understand how hard it can be to grow your pipeline on a limited marketing & sales budget. It’s a bit shocking in 2025 to hear people say their #1 marketing activity is cold-calling.

There are affordable, more modern, and less abrasive ways to grow your book of business in todays economy. As a financial advisor, you should be focusing on personal brand building and lead generating activities.

This reminds me of one of the campaigns I ran many years ago. I took my top 200 local lead targets, and I wrote a handwritten, personalized card with info about our high interest rate CD opportunity and my business card. Very simple, and it cost me about $150 total with postage.

After 2 weeks, it had generated 10 appointments and 5 new clients who each invested $25k to $50k in CD’s, and this led to initial conversations about moving their investment accounts to me. This was a much better result than cold-calling 150 people per day, hoping to land 1-2 meetings. As a financial advisor, you could basically copy and paste your best offer currently with the same direct mail approach and get better results than cold-calling.

In todays market, LinkedIn is a great way to make initial connections with affluent investors (even in smaller cities and more rural areas). There are free features you can use on LinkedIn to begin making introductions and gain initial 1:1 meetings with ideal investors.

Here are a 3 tips on how to utilize LinkedIn for customer acquisition as a financial advisor:

1. Utilize the Job Title and City Filters, and Max Out Weekly Connection Limits.

Let’s say your ideal audience is local small business owners or nurses at the hospital. On LinkedIn, you can enter the job title “small business owner” or “nurse” and click enter. Then select “people” (rather than company), so you can get a full list of people with that related job title. Then on the filters, enter the “city” you’re focusing on.

This will help narrow the prospect list. Now you can click “connect” on each relevant profile. You don’t need to add a intro message. This typically gets 20% to 40% acceptance without one. LinkedIn will allow you to search up to 1,000 profile results per month (with a free account), and send 150 connection invites per week. Keep it at a max of 50 per day.

This should gain you roughly 30 new connections per week. You can later check back in your “network” area to see who has accepted, and then send an initial intro message. I have a standard format for this, if you’re curious, reach out to me and I can share it with you. Just remember that a focused target connection list (ideal client / financial advisor match) and a personalized intro message (focused on providing value) will gain the most traction with new cold connections.

2. Create a LinkedIn Newsletter [Content Marketing].

As a financial advisor, most firms already have tons of “approved” marketing content that you can use. Some companies even allow you to personalize some of this content. LinkedIn has a feature where you can create a newsletter on the LinkedIn platform. Most people post monthly, but that’s up to you.

Two lead generating aspects of this are that you can provide outside links to a landing page or your calendar. Once you launch your newsletter - it lands in all of your current and future connections notifications section (automatically) for them to read and follow.

If you already have say 500+ connections, you’ll likely have a few hundred readers within your first week of launching your newsletter. Plus, if you keep focusing your connection invites on ideal prospects in your market - this will help your personal brand building efforts locally as well.

3. Quality Over Quantity. A Personal Touch vs. Automated Outreach Gets the Best Results.

Focus on quality, not quantity with LinkedIn outreach. You don’t need to post everyday. Post when you have something valuable to share with your audience. Also, make sure you personalize your content so that you stand out amongst other financial advisors in your market.

Trust me, I’ve used a few automated tools for LinkedIn and they can be a bit expensive while yielding minimal results (if that). Focus on identifying your target audience, and once they accept your invite, send a personalized message about why you noticed them, who you are, how you’re helping clients like them, and your valuable call to action.

I have sent thousands of automated connection emails and yielded zero meetings. I’ve also run outreach campaigns where I made 10 targeted connections, got 5 to accept, and landed 1 meeting and closed the deal. Quality beats quantity on LinkedIn, and a focused and personal approach wins new clients.

If you’d like to learn more about how to use LinkedIn outreach to grow your financial advisor book of business OR are looking for other new ways to find customers - you can schedule a free initial coaching session here (click below).