Danielle Onesto of Abacus Wealth Partners and Kirsten Ly of Modera Wealth Management did not arrive at their roles through the traditional door. Onesto was an artist and an educator. Ly spent decades marketing architecture and engineering firms before finding her way to the advisory world.
On the latest episode of Marketing Matchup, both share what their unconventional origins reveal about the gap between how most advisory firms have grown and how they will need to grow going forward.
Neither started with a formal mandate. Abacus asked Onesta on the spot if she wanted to run their marketing efforts. Ly joined Modera as a marketing director and walked into a two-person team triaging requests as fast as they came in. Within months she had added staff, redefined the team’s scope, and earned a promotion to CMO.
What both found at their firms was the same familiar challenge: growth had been built on relationships and referrals, and building something more strategic required cultural persuasion and planning.
Shifting from Reactive to Strategic
Danielle Onesto recently completed a five-year marketing strategy for Abacus, and one of its defining priorities is a shift from advisor-driven marketing and toward marketing-driven advisor efforts. Rather than fielding last-minute requests for prospect materials, her team now meets with each advisor individually to build a customized Advisor Marketing Plan, or AMP.
Every plan reflects the advisor’s strengths, communication style, and business development goals. Some advisors are natural on camera. Others prefer writing or hosting events. The marketing plan is built around what actually fits. The effect has been broader than Onesto expected. “You can’t just outsource growth to the marketing department,” she said. “It has to be across all departments and really embedded in the culture.”
Kirsten Ly built a parallel program at Modera called Momentum. At the end of 2024, Ly asked every advisor to complete a growth planning exercise that looked at their strengths and opportunities, and how marketing might support their individual goals. The result is a set of mini marketing plans, one for each office, that coordinates regional priorities with firm-wide strategy. Some offices have advisors who love doing client events. Others prefer media placements or LinkedIn visibility. Momentum makes room for both, and holds the whole effort together under a single brand that gives the initiative internal credibility and staying power.
Showing Up Where Prospects Are Already Looking
AI search was a topic both guests had been thinking about long before the conversation turned to it. Prospects are increasingly using tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity to research and validate advisors before ever reaching out, and both Onesto and Ly have been working to ensure their firms show up in those results.
Abacus came into this moment with a head start. Years earlier, Onesto led an SEO initiative with a consultant who pushed the team to structure content around questions, not just keywords, and to train internal staff rather than simply hand the work off. That foundation translated well when AI platforms began surfacing answers from well-organized content.
“We actually had a prospect send us their prompt,” Onesto said, “and we put it into AI to reverse engineer why we were recommended.” What started as good SEO hygiene turned out to be effective groundwork for the AI era.
Ly is approaching the same challenge from several angles at once: expanding advisor LinkedIn presence, improving website architecture, cleaning up SEO, and building toward a review program that can generate the kind of third-party social proof large language models tend to favor.
"We have somewhere around 80 advisors, and for a long time, they had some restrictions in place around what they could do with social media,” Ly said. “To my mind, that's 80 unused marketing channels that we can turn on."
Prospects who arrive through AI tools are not the same as traditional inbound leads. They tend to be further along, more like a warm referral than a cold search click, already holding a shortlist and ready to have a real conversation. That changes what firms need to be ready to deliver in the first meeting.
Watch below for the full conversation, or find the complete episode of Marketing Matchup on your podcast platform of choice.
