An increasing number of financial advisors are turning to options to achieve their clients’ income and risk management goals, according to a new survey.

Of 600 advisors surveyed this year, 61 percent said they were using options, up from 48 percent in 2011, according to a report by the Options Industry Council (OIC).

The usage increase cut across every advisor type—from 87 percent of regional broker-dealer reps to 44 percent of RIAs—and, overall, use of options was most prevalent among larger, more successful books of business, according to the survey.

The survey, however, found that the largest increases in usage were among practices with less than $100 million in assets under management. Among firms with $500 million or more in AUM, the survey found options use has actually dipped in the past three years, going from 94 percent to 80 percent of advisors.

The covered call was the options strategy advisors used the most; the top two goals of the options use cited by advisors were income generation and risk management.

Options use is expected to continue to trend upward, with nearly half of survey respondents saying they expect to increase their use of options, according to the survey.

One options veteran said he sees the trend among advisors and clients at Raymond James, who along with everyone else, have been prompted by dismal bond yields to look for alternative sources of income.

“It’s kind of client-driven in a lot of ways,” said Gary Franklin, Raymond James’ vice president and manager of options trading and strategies.

It’s becoming more common to see advisors add a covered call to supplement income from an equity dividends retirement strategy at the behest of clients, he said.

Advisors also have had more incentive to adopt options strategies as more of their competitors make it a part of their core strategies, he added.

“Also, the industry itself is becoming more mainstream,” Franklin said. “Just in the last 10 years, the technology from the exchanges has gotten up to snuff, with a what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach.”

Both advisors and their firms have shown more interest in options in general, with firms making more of an effort to educate their representatives about the products, said Eric Cott, the OIC's director of advisor education.

"The theme is, there are tools in the toolbox that might have sort of fallen to the bottom," he said. "Here is an opportunity to not only differentiate yourself, but introduce something new to clients that makes you a lot more valuable."

Beyond covered calls, advisors are also showing more interest in more complicated strategies, such as cash-secured puts, which are put options secured with cash set aside to pay for the stock purchases, and protective puts, which act as insurance against losses in unrealized gains on long stocks.

In regard to protective puts, Cott said, "A lot of successful advisors did that in '08 and it allowed them to have better conversations with clients."

The survey indicated a possible boost to practice development as a result of options use. It found, for example, that options users were twice as likely to have books of business of $500 million or more than non-users.

Moreover, 46 percent of advisors said that options clients tend to provide more referrals.

“Advisors say clients for whom they use options are more knowledgeable about investing, more open to receiving advice, and more likely to provide referrals than clients without options in their portfolio,” wrote the authors of the survey, which was conducted by Bellomy Research and commissioned by OIC.