Columbus, Ohio has quietly become one of the Midwest's most competitive markets for independent financial planners. With Ohio State University feeding a steady stream of young professionals into the local economy, a booming tech corridor along High Street, and a suburban sprawl stretching from Dublin to Gahanna filled with dual-income households actively looking for wealth management guidance, the demand for financial planning services has never been higher. The problem: so has the competition. The Columbus metro now hosts hundreds of registered investment advisors, independent CFPs, and hybrid planning practices, many of them backed by national brands with marketing budgets that dwarf what a solo or small-group practice can spend.
The timing dynamics in this market make the situation harder. Columbus professionals tend to research financial planning services in the evenings — after the kids are in bed, after dinner, often between 8 p.m. and midnight — when your office is dark and your phone goes to voicemail. A prospect who finds your website at 10:15 on a Tuesday isn't going to leave a message. They're going to click the back button and find someone who responds. For financial planners operating in neighborhoods like Upper Arlington, Worthington, and New Albany, where client lifetime value can run into the tens of thousands of dollars, losing even one prospect a week to slow response times is a serious revenue leak.
That's exactly the problem that drove Marcus Tillman, a Columbus-based CFP and founder of Tillman Wealth Partners on Olentangy River Road, to install an AI chatbot on his practice's website in early 2025. What he found over the following months reshaped how his entire office handles new business.
Turning Late-Night Website Visitors Into Booked Discovery Calls
Tillman's first priority was simple: stop losing leads to the time gap between when prospects showed up online and when someone on his team could respond. His website was getting respectable traffic — roughly 800 unique visitors per month — but his contact form was converting at under two percent. "People were showing up, looking around, and disappearing," Tillman said. "We had no idea who they were or what they needed."
After deploying the AI chatbot, his team configured it to open a conversation with any visitor who spent more than thirty seconds on the services page, ask two qualifying questions about financial goals and timeline, and offer to book a complimentary 20-minute discovery call directly into his calendar. Within the first 90 days, the chatbot had initiated conversations with 214 visitors who otherwise would have left without any contact. Of those, 61 booked a call — a 28.5 percent conversion rate on what had previously been zero contact. At Tillman's average client onboarding value of $4,200 in first-year fees, those 61 conversations represented a potential revenue pipeline of over $256,000. He closed 19 of them. "The chatbot doesn't close deals," Tillman said. "But it gets people into my calendar who never would have called."
Handling the January Surge Without Adding Headcount
January is the single busiest month for financial planners in Columbus. New Year financial resolutions, Q4 bonus distributions from local employers like Nationwide, L Brands, and Huntington Bancshares, and the looming tax season combine to spike inbound inquiry volume by 40 to 60 percent above the annual average. For a two-advisor practice like Tillman Wealth Partners, that surge used to mean a backlog of unreturned calls, delayed follow-ups, and prospects who cooled off before a conversation ever happened.
In January 2026, Tillman's chatbot handled 347 incoming conversations over the course of the month — about 11 per day — without a single one waiting more than a few seconds for an initial response. The bot fielded the most common intake questions (minimum account sizes, services offered, fee structures, whether he works with clients managing RSU vest schedules), pre-qualified leads by asset level, and flagged the warmest prospects for same-day human follow-up. His team's callback list shrank from 25-plus names in January 2025 to a prioritized queue of 12 to 15 high-intent leads per week. "We used to dread January," he said. "Last year was the first time it actually felt manageable. The bot absorbed the noise and handed us the signal."
The measurable result: his January 2026 new-client conversion rate was 22 percent, compared to 14 percent the prior January — a difference that translated to four additional new client relationships and roughly $68,000 in additional first-year revenue.
Building Trust With Prospects Who Aren't Ready to Book Yet
Not every person who lands on a financial planning website in Columbus is ready to book a call. Many are early in the research process — comparing fee structures, trying to understand the difference between a fiduciary and a broker, or simply trying to figure out whether they need a financial planner at all. These visitors traditionally bounce without leaving any contact information, representing a silent, invisible dropout that never shows up in analytics as a problem.
Tillman configured a secondary chatbot flow specifically for this segment: visitors who browsed the FAQ page or the "how we work" section got a different opening message — not a booking prompt, but an offer to answer questions. The bot was loaded with plain-language explanations of fiduciary duty, fee-only planning, and what a first meeting actually looks like. It could explain the difference between an IRA and a Roth IRA, walk through what "assets under management" means in plain terms, and help a confused prospect understand whether their situation qualified for comprehensive planning or a one-time financial review.
The results were harder to quantify but visible in downstream behavior. Visitors who engaged with the education flow spent an average of four additional minutes on the site and were three times more likely to return within 14 days. "Columbus clients do their homework," Tillman noted. "They want to trust you before they talk to you. The chatbot lets them do that research with us instead of going somewhere else to find the answers." Of the leads who initially came through the education flow, 34 eventually booked a discovery call — many of them two to six weeks after their first visit. Without the chatbot, that group would have been invisible.
The Columbus financial planning market isn't getting less competitive. As more national planning platforms expand their digital presence and more independent advisors pour money into Google Ads targeting the same high-income ZIP codes — 43221, 43235, 43085 — the practices that convert the most website traffic will pull ahead. An AI chatbot doesn't replace the relationship-driven nature of financial planning. It makes sure the relationship gets a chance to start.
If you're a financial planner in Columbus looking to capture more of the leads your website is already generating, Anchor Co AI builds and manages AI chatbots built for service businesses like yours. See how it works for financial planners at anchorcoai.com/for/financial-planners — starting at $29/mo.