How a marketing niche can boost your firm’s growth – the second of our three part series from Sam Turner

by | Dec 12, 2017

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Taking your marketing to the next level – part two

In this three part series, Sam Turner, Head of Digital at ClientsFirst, examines the factors that elevate marketing strategies from functional tick box exercises to plans that make a real difference for advisory firms’ bottom lines.

Narrowing your target audience may sound more like financial suicide than the path to growth. Surely, it makes more sense to spread your net as wide as possible and maximise your opportunities? As many successful financial planning firms are finding out for themselves, focusing on a particular sector of your ideal client base can help you to create clear marketing messages and provide a profitable direction to follow.

One of your business goals may be to gain twelve more clients in the next year. If you then decide to develop a marketing strategy focused on defining and creating a niche market, it will make it easier to see which routes to market to pursue and which specific actions are needed to fulfil that overall business goal.

But first, how do you decide which niche to go for and what really constitutes a niche?

 
 

When is a niche not a niche?

Many advisory firms describe themselves as catering for a niche market in terms of HNW individuals, business owners or people with £X of investible assets. While these may all be accurate, they’re too broad to be of much value in your marketing and will not give you a competitive advantage. After all, a niche isn’t a niche if most other financial firms want to service the same group of people.

Instead, a niche should identify a particular part of your target audience by specific criteria, such as age range, geography or occupation. One method of selection is known as the 3Ps – population, passion and product/service. Don’t just hone in on one of those categories, though, think of it as a Venn diagram and focus on the point of intersection. It could be empty nesters; interested in travel; looking for retirement planning.

Potential niches

Selecting your niche will obviously depend on your particular area of expertise. But also think about your current client base. Who do you like working with? Where do you feel you make the most difference? Do they have a common job? Do they share a typical problem (not just lack of planning)?

 
 

One new and emerging niche is the HENRYs (High Earners, Not Rich Yet). These are typically younger than the average financial planning audience, let’s say in their mid-twenties or thirties. They’re perhaps likely to work in the medical or legal sector and will probably be based within commutable distance of a large city, where they can command a higher salary.

Facebook may or may not be where you think your potential niche ‘hang out’ but Facebook Audience Insights can be very helpful in enabling you to identify a new client base. You can test the size of that audience by location, job title and age and decide if that is a viable medium for any advertising campaign.

Another option is to see which pages of your website are being most regularly visited. Keyword Hero’s free version gives you keyword data for your 25 most frequently visited pages so you can see which issues are of most interest to your prospects. Hubspot Free will also give you data about who your leads are and what they did on your site. Both these tools may help you identify a niche you hadn’t previously considered.

 
 

What does your niche enable you to do?

Armed with a definition of your ‘niche market’, it will suddenly become clear how you should be marketing in order to attract them. Your marketing material can now be directly targeted with specific messaging – leading to a much greater chance of response.

Howard Gossage, an American advertising innovator during the ‘Mad Men era’, famously said, ‘I don’t know how to write for everybody, only to somebody.’ How much easier is it to write effectively if you have a particular person in mind rather than some vague, amorphous group that may just happen to be interested in your service at some point in the future?

A sharper focus will streamline your efforts and ensure you’re not diluting your core message. So if you’ve decided to target doctors then tailor your marketing accordingly and make sure it just talks to doctors. They’ll feel you understand them and the issues that are important to them.

Speak their language

One of the most telling ways that shows how well you understand your audience is how you speak to them.

As an episode of ‘The Apprentice’ earlier in the autumn highlighted, if you’re dealing with the hospitality sector, you need to say ‘guests’ not ‘consumers.’ A HNW individual doesn’t call themselves a ‘HNW individual’, but a doctor does call themselves a doctor. So make sure you’re using the language of your prospect, not ‘industry speak.’ Try and come across as natural and authentic.

It’s a good idea to have a ‘tame’ member of your target audience to test out some of your marketing messages to see if they ring true.

One note of caution: a market notoriously difficult to get right is the teenage one. They will spot an infiltrator a mile off! Neutral, friendly and approachable, in this instance, is usually more successful than attempting to use the ‘in phrase’ and getting it wrong!

What is a marketing persona?

How do you apply your marketing campaigns to your niche? The most important step right at the outset is to draw up a marketing persona – a fictionalised representation of your target audience which helps you to address specific concerns, rather than fall into the trap of broad generalisations.

There are lots of free templates online to get you started. This is where you really get under the skin of your ideal prospect. What do they do? Where do they live? What are their hobbies? But you’ll go into much more detail too. What are their concerns? Their daily frustrations? Their ultimate ambitions? Answering probing questions like these will ensure your personas are the right ones and not just based on your assumptions.

The better you know your ‘niche market’, the better you can communicate with them. And the better you can communicate with them, the more likely they are to engage with you and become a long-term client with all the mutually rewarding benefits which that brings.

Sam’s original article for IFA Magazine, on creating a marketing strategy, can be found HERE   ClientsFirst is a marketing agency that specialises in working with financial services firms.

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