Can Financial Advisors Have More Than One Niche?

One of the most common questions I get about niche marketing is, “Can I have more than one niche?” The answer comes down to your available resources.

Each niche requires its own marketing plan and its own champion to spearhead the effort. For example, let’s say your niche is employees with equity compensation plans. You will need to have a website (or at least a webpage) for that niche. You will have to create content, such as blogs or videos, to demonstrate your expertise on topics directly relevant to your niche’s financial pain points (no generic content!). You will have to optimize your website for search engines and implement strategies to drive people to your website. You will have to participate in online and offline communities where members of your niche gather. You will need to develop niche-specific campaigns (e.g., download the ebook, register for a webinar, attend an event). And you will need to have at least one staff member who takes full ownership of the niche to ensure this plan gets executed consistently.

Now imagine repeating this process for a completely different niche. Or multiple niches. Do you have the employee bandwidth to accomplish this? Do you have the financial resources to execute an entire marketing plan for each niche?

Unless you have both the staff and the financial resources to pull off multiple niches, you’ll implement two or more niche marketing plans poorly instead of implementing just one niche marketing plan well.  

With that in mind, here are rules of thumb for whether you should have multiple niches depending on your firm situation and size:

Individual Advisors

Whether you are a solo practitioner or an employee tasked with business development responsibilities on your own, you absolutely should focus on only one niche.

You have limited resources to dedicate to marketing, so you want to make sure you get the most impact for your dollars and effort. You will get much better results putting all your time, focus, energy, and money into one niche than if you spread yourself thin across multiple niches.

Boutique RIAs

RIAs with just a couple of advisors often want to work with multiple niches, mostly because they have a diverse client base to start with. Because time and money are limited, it is recommended that the firm as a whole focuses on one niche. You will get better marketing results with less effort than if you attempt multiple niches.

There are times when not all advisors are equally suited for the same niche. For example, one advisor may lack the empathy required to work with widows. Or a generational divide can make one advisor unlikely to attract a certain niche.

While not ideal, these scenarios may require having multiple niches. The key to success is having as few niches as possible, with each advisor focusing on only one.

Enterprise RIAs

Unless your firm started with a niche focus, it’s unrealistic to assume you will ever transition to one niche for the entire firm. Instead, you should have multiple specialty areas to focus on different niches—for example, business owners, women in transition, executives, and socially responsible investors.

Large firms with plenty of talent and deep pockets can easily pull this off. They can easily assign one financial advisor to spearhead each niche. And they have the support staff and the financial resources to consistently implement multiple marketing plans at once. 

Final Thoughts

Having multiple niches can be tempting, but it can also dissipate your focus. Remember, the more niches you have, the more champions you need and the more marketing plans you must implement.

Before you attempt two or more niches, review the above rules of thumb and ask yourself if you have the staff, time, and money to go all-in on multiple fronts. If you don’t, concentrate your efforts on one niche. You can always pull the other niches off the back burner after you’ve succeeded with your current niche.

---

About Kristen Luke

Kristen Luke is the President of Kaleido Creative Studio, a marketing agency that helps transform Registered Investment Advisors and their employees into experts in a niche, making it easier for them to stand out from the competition and attract ideal clients. Over the past 16 years, Kristen has consulted with hundreds of financial advisory firms and shared her marketing expertise via industry conferences and publications nationwide.

The 12-Week Financial Advisor Marketing Plan

I have been developing marketing plans for financial advisors for more than 15 years. A marketing plan serves an important function of giving a firm direction on what needs to be accomplished. The problem is that, like a financial plan, the marketing plan becomes outdated quickly because the business environment is constantly changing. For example, most marketing plans developed in January 2020 needed an overhaul by April 2020. While a drastic shift in strategy like we saw in 2020 is rare, adapting marketing tactics based on new opportunities and threats is not rare.

Besides becoming irrelevant quickly, annual marketing plans face other issues:

1. The 12-month timeline is so long that it is easy to procrastinate and put off tasks for another day, month, or quarter.

2. The goals tend to be objective-based (e.g., implement a client referral program) instead of action-based (e.g., ask 10 clients for a referral), making it difficult to know when the objective has been achieved.

3. An annual plan can’t foresee all the things you will learn as you implement various tactics. Your experience and results may significantly change your strategy and tactics.

4. It doesn’t anticipate the opportunities that will arise as you succeed in implementing your plan (e.g., speaking engagements pop up, you get invited to be a podcast guest).

5. It is not designed to adapt, so when tactics become outdated, the entire marketing plan gets disregarded.

In the book The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months, author Brian Moran proposes a different way to create a plan—by shortening your planning period from one year to 12 weeks.

The argument is that if you develop a 12-week plan, every task in your plan will be actionable. With only 12 weeks to implement the plan, you have a built-in sense of urgency that doesn’t allow for procrastination. A 12-week plan also means you are more likely to complete the action items you commit to, making it more feasible to hit your goals.

You can easily apply the framework of The 12 Week Year to a marketing plan. Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Establish Overall Objectives for Your Marketing

What would you like to accomplish? Do you want to increase the leads you get from Google searches? Do you want to increase referrals from your clients? Do you want to overhaul your brand and website?

Write down your firm’s priorities that are top of mind. Do not include “parking lot ideas” because you won’t have time to implement them.

Step 2: Break Down Tasks

Using a spreadsheet, use one column to record all the tasks needed to maintain your existing marketing—for example, send monthly newsletter, attend Chamber of Commerce lunch, record podcast episode. In the same column, write down all the tasks required to implement the objectives you identified in Step 1 above.

You will quickly find that the number of tasks required to implement all your objectives is not feasible in 12 weeks. Adjust by picking just one or two objectives to focus on.

Here are examples of tasks:

• Write blog on [topic]

• Promote blog on social media

• Contact [center of influence name] to schedule lunch

• Attend lunch with [center of influence name]

• Ask [client name] for referral

• Send monthly newsletter

• Send invitation for webinar

• Research search engine optimization companies

• Choose website developer from companies interviewed

Step 3: Assign Each Task to a Week

In a second column, assign a week (1-12) to each of the tasks in the first column. I recommend you include the date of the first day of the week to make visualization easier—for example, “Week 1: April 4.”

You will need to put tasks in the order of weeks required to accomplish them. For example, if you want to launch a new website, the tasks might be:

• Research website companies (Week 1)

• Schedule appointments with website companies (Week 2)

• Meet with ABC website company (Week 3)

• Meet with DEF website company (Week 3)

• Meet with XYZ website company (Week 4)

• Decide on which company to hire (Week 6)

You may not have the information you need during your planning session to include all the required tasks, but you can add new tasks later. In the example above, you will add your tasks to meet with specific website companies to the correct week once you schedule the appointments. You will add the tasks for website development once you know the process and timeline for the company you hire.

If you find that you have too many tasks after assigning them to specific weeks, you may have to make cuts. The 12-week marketing plan is designed to keep you accountable and stop procrastination. If you know you won’t be able to accomplish all the tasks, create a more realistic plan.

Step 4: Execute and Track

With your 12-week plan in place, all you have to do now is follow the plan and execute the tasks assigned to each week. If something new comes up that needs to be integrated into your plan (e.g., speak at ABC accounting firm), add the task to the correct week. This is not an invitation to add new “shiny object” distractions to your plan but instead consider new opportunities resulting from your efforts.  

At the end of each week, mark each task as “complete” or “not complete.” If a task is partially complete, record it as “not complete” because you did not accomplish it by the date you set for yourself. You can then copy and paste the task into another row and assign it to the week you plan on completing it.

Count all the tasks you completed and divide that by the total number of tasks for the week. In The 12 Week Year, Brian Moran calls this the execution score. It is the percentage of the tasks set for the week that you completed. For example, if you meet eight out of 10 tasks, your execution score is 80%.

Moran considers a weekly execution score of over 85% as “success.” Your execution score will be more meaningful if you break out the tasks into many pieces. If you have only one task that encompasses many parts and don’t fully execute it, your execution score will be 0%, which will decrease your motivation.

For example, “podcast” has many components: reaching out to a guest, booking a guest, recording the podcast, posting it on the website, promoting it on social media, and sending it out via email. There are six separate tasks here. If you just put “Podcast” as your task and don’t send out the email, your execution score will be 0%. If you break it out into six tasks, your execution score will be 83% (five tasks completed/six tasks total).

Even if you miss one task, such as emailing the podcast, it doesn’t mean that the rest of the efforts had no value. This score is to keep you accountable for executing your tasks and provide insight into where you can make improvements.

Step 5: Use Week 13 to Analyze and Plan

Use the last week of the quarter (the 13th week) to review the results from your previous 12 weeks and plan for the next 12.

Assess your overall execution score for the period. If it is low, did you take on too much, and do you need to adjust expectations next quarter? Do you need to free up time or hire additional help to implement? If the execution score is high, can you take on more next quarter and make even faster progress toward your marketing objectives? And no matter your score, where is there room for improvement next quarter?

Once you have analyzed your completed 12-week marketing plan, repeat Steps 1-5 for the next 12-week period.

Final Thoughts

You might find that you quickly abandon a year-long marketing plan. New opportunities and threats can make your strategies irrelevant, and the long timeline invites procrastination.

If 12 months is too long, 12 weeks is just right. Build a 12-week marketing plan using the steps outlined here to create a framework that supports you rather than weighs you down.

With a shorter time frame, you can adapt your strategies as needed and accomplish more. The end result? A better marketing system for you and your firm.

---

About Kristen Luke

Kristen Luke is the President of Kaleido Creative Studio, a marketing agency that helps transform Registered Investment Advisors and their employees into experts in a niche, making it easier for them to stand out from the competition and attract ideal clients. Over the past 16 years, Kristen has consulted with hundreds of financial advisory firms and shared her marketing expertise via industry conferences and publications nationwide.

9 Steps to Launching a New Niche Specialization Within Your Firm

Most financial advisory firms grow their businesses through referrals and word of mouth. As a result, they often have a wide range of client types. Often though, once a firm reaches a certain size (for example, $1 billion in AUM), one of two things usually happens:

1. They realize they want to make a more focused effort marketing to a segment of their client base where they see additional opportunity, such as business owners, executives, or women in transition.

2. The firm hires younger advisors they would like to groom into business development roles and wants to use a niche to help them succeed (e.g., young tech professionals).

When a firm is ready to launch into a new niche specialization, the next question is how do they go about doing it? Up until this point, marketing has centered on generating referrals, but a niche focus requires a different approach. Here are the nine steps you need to take when entering a new niche market.    

Step 1: Define Your Audience

The first step is to define the general niche specialization you want to focus on, for example, business owners, women, executives, or health care workers. From there, you want to further narrow this niche by identifying the one problem that you will solve for them.

Ideally, this problem is painful to your niche and is urgent for them to solve. For example, if your category is tech employees, the one problem you solve may be helping them minimize the taxes associated with their equity compensation.

While you actually solve many problems for this niche, defining the one problem they all share helps you get clear on exactly who your niche audience is.

Step 2: Assign a Leader

Once you have defined your new practice area, the next step is to assign an advisor within the firm to spearhead the effort. This person needs to have some sort of connection to or experience with this new niche. This person needs to be dedicated to this marketing effort and should be given the time and resources they need to make it succeed.

While other people in the firm can help with the niche, the leader is ultimately responsible for making it succeed. If no one is in charge, the niche is doomed to hobble along and never gain traction.

Step 3: Develop Your Message

The third step is developing a compelling message that specifically attracts your niche. Clients hire you to solve a problem for them. Therefore, you need to establish a clear, simple message that articulates the problem the prospective client faces and how you solve this problem.

The message needs to be specific to the niche’s pain points and aspirations and use their language, not yours. This message then needs to be translated to other marketing materials, like a landing page on your website or a brochure.

Step 4: Create a Landing Page

To seriously market to a new niche, you need to highlight the niche offering on your website.

You do not need to change your entire website. All you need to do is add one page to your website that communicates your message to your niche and include that page in your main navigation menu. The landing page should also offer a way for your niche to schedule an appointment with you.

Step 5: Develop a Lead Capture Mechanism

In step five, you need to begin building a list of names of people in your niche you can market to for years to come.

One way to do this is to offer a resource on your website that prospects are willing to enter their contact information in exchange for the resource. These lead capture devices can be ebooks, recorded webinars, online courses, reports, white papers, or even physical books.

Step 6: Create Nurturing Campaigns

As you integrate into a niche community, you want a way to stay top of mind with everyone you meet for years and years. Your goal is to be the first financial advisor your niche prospects reach out to when they are ready to hire a professional.

One of the best long-term ways to nurture these contacts is through an email newsletter that you send weekly, semimonthly, or monthly.

You also need a short-term nurturing campaign for those people who give you their contact information on your lead capture resource. This is usually an automated email series that immediately follows the download of your resource.

The goal with this nurturing campaign is to capture any prospects who are ready to act right away.

Step 7: Determine Content to Create

Content marketing is the most effective way to demonstrate your expertise with a niche, even when you are just beginning.

Pick one communication medium—written, video, audio, or visual—that you want to use to showcase your expertise. Then pick a format within that medium, such as presentations, blogs, video blogs, podcasts, or infographics, that you will use.

Use the content to highlight your expertise in the various channels you use (see the next step).

Step 8: Determine the Channels to Access Your Niche

Ask the people you know in the niche where you can find other people like them. What events do they attend? What organizations do they join? What media or publications do they consume? Where do they congregate online? Who are the key influencers who can get you access to this niche?

Once you understand where they are, figure out how you can integrate yourself into those channels. Can you contribute a guest article to a popular website or publication? Can you speak in front of a group? Can you interview influencers on your podcast so they promote it to their audience? Try to leverage the people, organizations, and publications that already have access to the niche you want to reach.

Step 9: Develop a Conversion Process

After you’ve put in all this effort into marketing to a prospect, you want to make sure you convert a high percentage of those people into clients. To do this, you need a process that seamlessly transitions a prospect into a client. This includes having an appointment calendaring system on your website, a pitchbook and proposal that convey your value proposition, and a follow-up process to prevent anyone from falling through the cracks.

Final Thoughts

A niche market can help firms focus their marketing on an area of opportunity and groom the next generation of financial advisors into business development roles. Regardless of your intention, entering a new niche market will make it easier for you to stand out from the competition and attract clients. Follow these nine steps as a roadmap to establish yourself in your desired niche market.  

---

About Kristen Luke

Kristen Luke is the President of Kaleido Creative Studio, a marketing agency that helps transform Registered Investment Advisors and their employees into experts in a niche, making it easier for them to stand out from the competition and attract ideal clients. Over the past 16 years, Kristen has consulted with hundreds of financial advisory firms and shared her marketing expertise via industry conferences and publications nationwide.

Where Is Your Marketing Failing?

A lot of financial advisors complain that their marketing is not working. They’ll list out all the things they are doing that they’ve been told to do but just aren’t seeing the results they hoped for.

It can be frustrating when you think you are following all the marketing best practices, but they don’t work. Do you need to scrap your work and try something else? Most likely not. Instead, analyze your marketing to see where there may be a point or points of failure. 

Think of your marketing system as an arch. An arch is a structure that supports a building—in this case, your business. Each stone of the arch reinforces the other to create one sound structure. If any part is weak or fails, the entire system is compromised. 

Your marketing system acts in the same way. The individual “stones” that make up your arch are your audience, message, channel, content, call to action, lead capture, nurturing, and conversion. They rely on one another’s strength to make the overall marketing system structurally sound.

Since all these pieces are interconnected, you need to analyze which stone is exhibiting weakness to see why your overall system is not structurally sound. Let’s take a look at each piece.

Stone 1: Audience

Do you have a narrowly defined audience you are trying to reach with your marketing? Your audience will dictate which message to communicate, which marketing channels to use, and which content to create. An overly broad audience (e.g., pre-retirees with investable assets of $500,000 in the greater Los Angeles area) will water down the effectiveness of your message, channels, and content.

Signs of Weakness:

• Not defining your audience

• Marketing to too large of an audience

Stone 2: Message

Do you have a clear, simple message that resonates with your audience? Do you consistently communicate that message? If you have a broad audience, your message is probably generic and doesn’t appeal to anyone.

If your message is generic (e.g., we help you achieve peace of mind), complex (e.g., addressing all the services you offer), or not repeated enough, you won’t break through the noise in the various marketing channels you use. You also won’t get your audience to accept your call to action to do business with you.

Signs of Failure:

• Having a generic message

• Not addressing your audience’s primary financial pain point

• Having too many messages you are trying to communicate

• Having a complex message

• Not repeating one simple message often enough

Stone 3: Channel

Are you using marketing channels that reach your audience? Do you attend the events your audience attends? Have you published in the media that your audience consumes?

If you use the wrong channels, you will fail to have your audience hear your message or consume your content. 

Signs of Failure:

• Blindly using social media

• Attending broadly targeted events (e.g., chamber of commerce)

• Placing ads in non-targeted publications or websites

Stone 4: Content

Are you using the right content for your channel? For example, you can fail in using written content on a visual channel, such as promoting blogs on Instagram.

Are you communicating the right message in your content? If you are using the wrong content, your channel won’t generate interest in your business and won’t entice people to accept your call to action. 

Signs of Failure:

• Content that does not address your audience’s primary financial concerns or aspirations

• Content mediums that are not conducive to the channels you chose

• Content that does not represent the way you solve problems for your clients

Stone 5: Call to Action

Do you have a clear and specific action you want your audience to take in every marketing campaign? You should actually have two calls to action to choose from depending on the campaign you run:

• Transition call to action: Use this when you want a lead to enter their contact information so you can market to them in the future (e.g., “download the ebook”).

• Direct call to action: Use this when you want a prospect to make an appointment (e.g., “schedule a 30-minute introductory call”).

Signs of Failure:

• Not using transition calls to action on most marketing campaigns or on the website

• Using a direct call to action too soon in the marketing funnel (e.g., Facebook ads promoting “schedule an appointment”)

• Not including a direct call to action on every nurturing campaign once you have the prospect’s email address

• Having too soft of a direct call to action (e.g., “contact us to learn more”)

Stone 6: Lead Capture

Do you have a way to capture the names and contact information of your audience you would like to market to in the future? This lead capture is usually an ebook, webinar, course, report, or another tool that directly addresses the audience’s primary pain point and is promoted through your transition call to action.

Signs of Failure:

• Not having a lead capture that directly relates to your audience’s primary pain point

• Not having a lead capture that is part of the sales process

Stone 7: Nurturing

Do you have a system for nurturing the leads from your lead capture? You will want two types of nurturing campaigns:

• Short term: A campaign that looks to capture people ready to take action and schedule an appointment now! This is usually a series of drip emails specific to the lead capture resource sent over several weeks. The series agitates the problem, overcomes the prospects’ objectives, and convinces them that you’re the right advisor for them.

• Long term: A campaign that you regularly send month after month, year after year, such as a newsletter. The goal is to stay top of mind with your entire prospect database until they decide to take action and schedule an appointment.

Signs of Failure:

• Not having both a short-term and long-term nurturing campaign

• Not having the direct call to action on every campaign

Stone 8: Conversion

Do you have a process that makes it easy for your audience to go from lead to prospect to client? Do you have a follow-up process so that prospects don’t fall through the cracks?

If you don’t have a good system to turn your marketing leads into appointments on your calendar and then clients for your business, you waste all the time, money, and effort spent on the other stones of your marketing arch.   

Signs of Failure:

• Making it difficult for prospects to sign up to work with you

• Not having a way for prospects to schedule an initial appointment with you on your website

• Not having a qualifying questionnaire so that you meet with only ideal prospects

• Not having a way for prospects to easily sign agreements on their computer or device when they are ready to move forward

• Not having a standardized follow-up process to keep prospects engaged until they are ready to work with you

All the stones of your marketing need to support each other to generate consistent results. Evaluating the individual stones in your arch will indicate whether you have an incredibly strong marketing structure or if your whole system is compromised.

If you do identify a weak stone, you now know where you should spend your time, effort, and money improving your marketing instead of randomly implementing new tactics, hoping for better results.  

---

About Kristen Luke

Kristen Luke is the President of Kaleido Creative Studio, a marketing agency that helps transform Registered Investment Advisors and their employees into experts in a niche, making it easier for them to stand out from the competition and attract ideal clients. Over the past 16 years, Kristen has consulted with hundreds of financial advisory firms and shared her marketing expertise via industry conferences and publications nationwide.

How to Know If You Picked a Good Niche

You can anticipate many benefits when you focus your practice on a niche. With a successful niche, you enjoy reduced competition, higher marketing ROI, and overall efficiencies in your business.

But when you are just starting out, how do you know if you will succeed with your chosen niche? While there is no guarantee, you can filter your niche through the following criteria to see how likely you will succeed.

Pain

Is your niche feeling significant mental or emotional pain regarding their problem?

The more pain a prospect feels about their specific financial problem, the more likely they will act to solve it.

For example, someone who receives a sudden windfall, such as the sale of property or the exercise of stock, faces the very real pain of taxes. Someone who is suddenly single and managing their personal finances for the first time faces the pain of not knowing if they can survive on the money they have. Someone who has more than enough money and just wants to get their finances organized is not feeling that much pain.

Purchasing Power

Is your niche willing and able to pay your fees?

If your niche doesn’t have the means to pay your fees, you don’t have a business. An ability to pay does not mean they have the assets for your minimum AUM fees. You may have to find a creative pricing structure that matches your niche’s financial situation (e.g., subscription, flat fee, or hourly).

Regardless, you deserve to get paid what your expertise is worth, and if your niche can’t pay you, it’s not a good choice.  

Easy to Target

Is your niche easy to find for marketing purposes?

Some niches will be easy to market to, and others will not. For example, finding a list of employees working for one business (e.g., Pfizer) is easy because you can search LinkedIn. Finding a list of people interested in family legacy planning would be harder.  

Can you easily find or purchase a marketing list of people in your niche (e.g., LinkedIn or a direct mailing list)? Can you easily identify where members of your niche gather together (e.g., conferences or associations)? Answering yes to either of those questions is a good sign that you’ll easily reach your niche.

If you can’t buy a list of prospects or determine where they gather, it doesn’t mean that your niche is a bad choice. But it does mean you should be prepared that marketing will be harder for this niche.

Growing

Is your niche market growing?

While you don’t have to pick a niche in a fast-growing market to succeed (e.g., advising clients on NFTs), you don’t want to invest your time and money in a slowly dying market either.

For example, I have seen two instances where an RIA specialized in utility company pension plans that eventually phased out. While some employees got grandfathered in, new employees did not.

It was clear this niche was no longer a long-term feasible client base. In both cases, the firms shifted their businesses away from the niche.

Urgency

Is it urgent for your niche to have their problem solved?

The more urgent it is for your niche to solve their problem, the easier it is for you to attract them.

For example, dealing with the immediate aftermath of a spouse’s death is an urgent need. Someone who has money scattered across different employers and investment accounts and just wants to get their finances organized doesn’t feel an urgency to solve their problem.

If there is no urgency, don’t automatically eliminate the niche—but be prepared for a longer, more difficult sales and marketing process.

Dominance

Is it possible for you to dominate this space due to a lack of competition?

How much other competition is there in your niche? If there is a lot, it may mean you need to niche down further.

For example, there is a lot of competition for financial advisors serving business owners. If you choose business owners as your niche, you will probably want to be even more specialized so that you can dominate the space.

You may work with individual partners within a business who want to sell their stake. Sure, your competition may deal with clients like these, but you can become the dominant expert if that’s all you do.

Complexity

Is the niche’s primary financial problem complex enough that most other financial advisors can’t address it adequately or profitably?

Complexity is one of the key factors that will help protect your dominance in a niche.

If your niche has an issue that takes a lot of time and research, most advisors will not adequately serve these clients. But once you have worked with several of these clients and developed the expertise and a process, you can profitably serve these clients in a way the competition can’t.

Experience

Do you have personal or professional experience with this niche?

It’s important to choose a niche you have experience with, either professionally or personally. You may already have a handful of clients in the niche. Or you may be in the niche yourself.

For example, if your niche is families with special needs children, it’s OK if you don’t have any clients in this niche if you have a child with special needs. You have experience with this niche because you are part of this niche.

Credibility

Do you have credibility working with clients in this niche?

If you have no experience working with your chosen niche, it will be hard to convince the first few clients to work with you.

For example, I once spoke with an advisor who thought airline pilots would be a good niche. But he had never worked in the airlines and didn’t have any airline clients. He had no established credibility, which would make that niche very difficult for him. 

Access

Can you access the niche through an existing network and opportunities?

How much access you have to your niche will make all the difference in your ability to market. Say you want to work with physicians at Kaiser—this is not an easy group to get in front of. But if your spouse is a Kaiser physician, they can help you gain access to that network.

The best-case scenario is if you are a member of the niche (e.g., your niche is special needs planning and you have a child with special needs). But if you aren’t a member, you will want to make sure you have other ways to access the group.

Expertise

Do you have the skills and knowledge to serve this niche?

Finally, do you have the expertise to serve the niche? Now, when you are just starting with a niche, you won’t have a lot of expertise, but you should have some basic skills to serve this group.

For example, when I started my business 13 years ago, I had worked for an RIA in marketing for three years. While I definitely was not an expert with my niche like I am today, I had the basic skills and knowledge to help my first few clients.

What’s Your Formula for Success?

There is no exact calculation to tell you whether a niche will succeed. But go back and look at your answers to the above questions. If you had only a few yeses, you might want to reconsider your niche. Your likelihood of success increases with the more affirmative responses you have.

---

About Kristen Luke

Kristen Luke is the President of Kaleido Creative Studio, a marketing agency that helps transform Registered Investment Advisors and their employees into experts in a niche, making it easier for them to stand out from the competition and attract ideal clients. Over the past 16 years, Kristen has consulted with hundreds of financial advisory firms and shared her marketing expertise via industry conferences and publications nationwide.

Are You Ready for Marketing to Get Harder?

For most financial advisors, marketing is hard. It’s either not in your skill set or not something that interests you. As a result, you may ignore active marketing tactics and rely on referrals to passively roll in. That marketing strategy can work if you charge your fees based on a percentage of assets under management and the stock market continues to grow by double digits each year.

But are you ready for when marketing gets harder?

Recently, I’m seeing more complacency from financial advisors when it comes to marketing. One reason is that revenue is skyrocketing based on stock market performance alone. Financial advisors lack a sense of urgency to actively seek out new clients when revenue continues to grow on its own. A second reason is that some firms face staffing shortages and don’t have the time to dedicate to marketing.

During good financial times like these, I tell firms they should invest in their marketing to prepare for the next economic downturn. A downturn creates a lot of opportunity to pick up new clients because it is one of the rare times when the entire population faces a “money in motion” event at once.

It is also a time when advisor revenue suddenly shrinks due to lower AUM fees, and firms become anxious about replacing that revenue with new clients as quickly as possible. To be prepared for, and take advantage of, downtimes, you need to execute a marketing strategy consistently—and that means before the market drops.

While you should invest in your marketing in preparation for a downturn, you should also do it for another reason. Marketing will only get harder, and those who don’t take marketing seriously now will feel the effects the most. Let’s look at three reasons why marketing will get harder.

1. The Next Generation of Investors Is Relying Less on Financial Advisors

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, “About 70% of households with a net worth of $500,000 or more headed by a person under 45 had an investing style that was either strongly or mostly self-directed in 2019, up from 57% in 2010.”

Anecdotally, I have seen this trend play out with some of the firms I work with that market to this demographic. Younger investors are interested in paying for one-time advice but want to manage their investments on their own and balk at paying AUM fees. 

There is still a huge market of baby boomers who value delegating their finances to a financial advisor and are willing to pay AUM fees. But will this continue 10 or 20 years from now? Or will Gen Xers and millennials look to pay their financial advisors like they do their attorneys and accountants—on an hourly or project basis?

If this happens, advisors will have to attract a larger volume of clients each year than they currently do to maintain revenue. If it doesn’t happen, it is still possible there will be a smaller pool of investors willing to pay AUM fees that all firms will compete for. In either scenario, financial advisors will have to be better marketers than they are today.

2. Marketing Tactics Are Getting More Complex

Not worried about the longevity of the AUM model? There are other ways marketing is getting harder. Namely, marketing tactics are becoming more complex. When I started my marketing career in this industry 16 years ago, the RIA I worked for had a weekly radio show, hosted two weekly public workshops at a local restaurant, and did the occasional client appreciation event. It was a simple system that produced dozens of prospects weekly.

Not only are those tried-and-true methods saturated, but you now have so many other channels to master as well. To market your business today, you need to be an expert in search engine optimization, Google ads, social media, video marketing, webinars, podcasts, and marketing automation systems, just to name a few. And the bad news is, these channels are quickly getting saturated as well, so it is hard to stand out. The complexity of marketing will only speed up as artificial intelligence plays a bigger role in our everyday lives.

It’s hard for career marketers to keep up with all the trends and changes in their field. How are you supposed to compete when it’s your job to service clients, not be a marketing expert?

3. It’s Harder to Differentiate

Finally, it’s getting harder for firms to differentiate themselves from the competition. For a while, fee-only RIAs stood out to prospects because they were “independent” or “fiduciary.” Today, so many firms fall into these categories that they’re not differentiators in most geographic areas. Offering “comprehensive financial planning” used to be a differentiator too, but most financial advisors now claim to provide this service even if they don’t. To a prospect, most financial advisors look and sound the same, so to stand out, you have to be the better marketer.

What Can Be Done?

You might feel overwhelmed by the fact that marketing is going to get harder than it already is. But what can you do about it?

My first recommendation is to make your marketing a priority. Financial advisors have many different marketing approaches they can use, but the key is to implement your marketing consistently. Don’t let it slip when you get busy. When you execute your marketing in fits and starts, you may not be able to restart it quickly when you need clients again. You will be well-served to hire a consultant who can help you with the big-picture strategy before you start trying ad hoc tactics and technology.

My second recommendation is to carve out a niche for yourself. By specializing in solving the financial problems of a narrow set of clients, your marketing becomes more focused and effective. You have fewer competitors, you connect better with ideal clients, and you clearly stand out from other advisors. In other words, in a world where marketing is getting harder, your marketing gets easier.

---

About Kristen Luke

Kristen Luke is the President of Kaleido Creative Studio, a marketing agency specializing in helping RIAs promote their businesses to a niche through an expertise approach. Over the past 15 years, Kristen has consulted with hundreds of financial advisory firms and shared her marketing expertise via industry conferences and publications nationwide.

How to Compete for Clients on Your Terms: 4 Key Realities Advisors Face

Do you struggle to attract new clients other than from referrals? There may be a reason for that struggle—it is hard for prospects to choose you. That may sound insulting, but I don’t mean it to be. Let’s take a look at some basic realities prospects face.

Reality #1: Most Financial Advisors Make the Same Claims

All financial advisors claim they are good at the most important services a prospective client is looking for, including comprehensive financial planning and investment management. Even if your competition isn’t effective at these services, they also need to keep their businesses running, so they will say what it takes to get clients. The truth is, you can’t stop financial advisors from saying they do what you do, even if they don’t.

Reality #2: Prospects Aren’t Qualified to Evaluate Financial Advisors

Most prospects aren’t qualified to evaluate whether a financial advisor is good or not. Have they worked with dozens of financial advisors in the past to know the difference? You hope not because that kind of track record means they will probably be a terrible client. Unless the prospect is in a field that requires them to interact with a lot of financial advisors—for example, CPAs—this is probably the first or second time they’ve had to evaluate and hire a financial advisor, meaning they don’t have the skills to do so.

Reality #3: Prospects Have Too Many Similar Choices

To a prospect, most independent financial advisors look the same. They all offer the same basic services (financial planning, investment management, retirement planning, etc.), work with the same typical client (high net worth, probably nearing retirement), for the same similar price (1% of AUM +/-).

They have so many similar options and don’t know how to make the right choice. They become so overwhelmed, they don’t make any decision in fear of making the wrong one, or they choose an advisor based on some factor other than being the most qualified (see reality #4). 

Reality #4: When Prospects Can’t Evaluate Qualification, They Use Other Factors

When a prospect can’t evaluate you based on qualification (because how do they know if you are more qualified than the dozens or even hundreds of other advisors in their area?), they will resort to other factors. These factors include (1) the lowest price; (2) whether they like you more than the other advisors they meet with; (3) someone they know recommends you (this person is probably also not qualified to evaluate financial advisors); (4) they like your marketing the best; or (5) they choose an established (probably national) brand they think is a safe choice.

Again, It’s Hard for Prospects to Choose You

If you wonder why it is hard to get new clients, it is because it is hard for them to choose you. You must compete on factors that have nothing to do with how qualified you are or the services you provide.

Do you want to offer the lowest price? Probably not. Are you more likable than all the other advisors your prospect interviews? Who knows? Do you have the largest network in town of people who can refer business to you? Unlikely. Are you the best marketer in your area? My guess is definitely not! And do you have a well-known brand name with decades of history behind you? Not if you are a small, independent RIA.    

Sure, you can try to compete on being independent, fee-only, or a fiduciary if those are still differentiating factors in your community (most places, they are not). Today, most advisors claim they put their clients’ interests first, which goes back to reality #1. And from most prospects’ point of view, those factors equate to minuscule differences anyway.

Compete on Qualification Instead

So how do you compete? You can lower your price, work on being more likable, expand your network, or spend more money to have the best marketing. Or you can change the playing field completely and compete for clients based on qualification. After all, most prospects would prefer to choose the advisor they knew is most qualified instead of just going off gut instinct.

How do you compete on qualification? The easiest answer is to specialize in a niche, a narrow segment of clients you serve exclusively.

When you work exclusively with a niche, such as business owners selling their business or employees with pension plans at the local utility company, it’s easier to make the claim you are the most qualified among a prospect’s choices.

When all you do every day is work with a niche, it’s logical for a prospect to assume you are more qualified to handle their niche-specific problems than a generalist firm would be. How could you not be?

The services a niche needs may not even be that different from what most people of similar wealth and income levels need. But when you point out their differences and how they need a specialist, they will evaluate all other advisors based on their level of experience in working with people like them.

The key is to narrow in on a niche where few companies can make the same claim as you. For example, many firms claim they work with business owners, so you can say you work with business owners who own agricultural businesses. You position yourself as an expert in the specific issues that ranch and farm owners face.  

Marketing Doesn’t Have to Be Hard

Marketing is hard when you have a business in an industry where prospects can’t tell the difference between you and the competition. The solution is not to differentiate your firm in some minor way that prospects won’t even notice. The answer is to design your firm so that prospects can’t even compare you to other firms. There just aren’t other firms like you that exist. That’s when you have no competition!

---

About Kristen Luke

Kristen Luke is the President of Kaleido Creative Studio, a marketing agency specializing in helping RIAs promote their businesses to a niche through an expertise approach. Over the past 15 years, Kristen has consulted with hundreds of financial advisory firms and shared her marketing expertise via industry conferences and publications nationwide.

---

Further Reading:

If You Want to Get Rich, Build a Power Niche by Bruce M. Stachenfeld
Differentiate or Die: Survival in the Era of Killer Competition by Jack Trout

Social Media Doesn’t Work All That Well for Financial Advisors. Try These Channels Instead

Whenever an RIA reaches out to my firm, we always ask what they hope to accomplish. One of the most common responses we get is, “We want to improve our social media presence.” What they are really saying is, “If we improve our social media, we’ll get more leads.” In my experience, and the experience of many marketers I talk to, this is just not the case.

Social media generally does not build leads for most financial advisory firms. Of course, rare exceptions exist, but those companies devote more time and effort than 99.9% of advisors ever will creating content, building an audience, and consistently engaging on social media.

The best use of social media is for nurturing existing relationships, but that also requires active engagement. If all you do is post content, then your posts just become one more thing that people scroll past on their cellphones.  

If you want to get more exposure with your target market and, as a result, more leads, there are better channels than social media. Let’s look at two of them: influencers and search.  

Influencers

Building an audience, whether that is through social media, blogs, YouTube channels, podcasts, or email lists, takes time. While building an audience is valuable and worth pursuing, you should start connecting with that audience by leveraging influencers.

Influencers are the people, publications, and organizations that already have the audience you want to reach. They already have built-in trust with your audience and are likely to have engaged followers.

So how can you leverage influencers? Here are some ideas:

• Contribute guest blog posts to popular websites your target market visits.

• Contribute articles to publications your target market reads.

• Be a guest on a podcast your target market listens to.

• Be a guest speaker at a conference, workshop, or event your target market attends.

• Engage with influencers your target market follows on social media who may be willing to share your content.

• Contribute expertise to a newsletter or educational event of a traditional center of influence (e.g., CPA, attorney) your target market is connected to.

If you don’t have a large network or following of your target market, leveraging the relationships of others will be the fastest way to get in front of your desired audience.

Search

When people have questions, the first place they look to for an answer is the internet, whether that is on Google or YouTube. These are people who clearly have a pain point they want to resolve, and you can help! These people are actively engaged in solving their problem, and a portion of them may be in the mindset of hiring a financial advisor.

The key to using search to your benefit is to identify the most pressing questions prospects who would be interested in your services may search for. You then develop content that provides them with an answer.

This content creation is the first step. The second step is to optimize your content so that your prospect is likely to find it on Google or another search engine, or YouTube if you produce videos. 

While the search strategy will not get you in front of your target market as quickly as the influencer method, investing in a search engine optimization strategy can provide compounded rewards over the long run in the form of new prospects.

Summary

If you are frustrated with your social media efforts, don’t double down on a tactic that isn’t working. Instead, focus on leveraging influencers and search engine optimization. You’ll connect with your target audience and have a better opportunity to generate the leads you seek.

---

About Kristen Luke

Kristen Luke is the President of Kaleido Creative Studio, a marketing agency specializing in helping RIAs promote their businesses to a niche through an expertise approach. Over the past 15 years, Kristen has consulted with hundreds of financial advisory firms and shared her marketing expertise via industry conferences and publications nationwide.

Seven Ways to Differentiate Your Financial Advisory Business

One of the most common frustrations I hear from financial advisors is “How do I get prospects to understand that we are different from the other firms out there?” Usually, those “other firms” I hear about claim to offer comprehensive financial planning but don’t deliver on their promise. Yet time and time again, the prospect is choosing the company with the best marketing, not necessarily the one with the best financial advice.

When I ask an advisor how they think their firm is different, I hear terms like “fee-only,” “fiduciary,” and “independent,” or statements like “We actually do comprehensive financial planning.” These are all good qualities worth highlighting. But unless a prospect is highly informed, those “differentiators” don’t help them understand how you are different from other companies they interview—especially if they say the same thing as you.

Instead of asking the question “How do I differentiate my firm from the competition?” you should ask yourself, “How do I become incomparable?” If you want to sound different, you have to be different in a way that is obvious to your prospects.

So how can you position yourself to be incomparable from your competition? Let’s look at seven ways:  

1. Focus on a Niche

When you focus on a narrow set of clients—for example, business owners who are selling their company—it is obvious that you specialize in the needs of one type of client. For people in your niche, this will be in sharp contrast to the firms they interview that are all things to all people.

2. Be an Expert Where Others Aren’t

You can position yourself as an expert in an area most other advisors don’t have knowledge. This focus may overlap with a niche, or it can be a stand-alone solution covering a wide variety of client types. For example, you may have expertise working with people highly invested in real estate who need an investment strategy that diversifies their concentrated position in real estate but doesn’t force them to sell property.

3. Develop a Proprietary Process

By developing a unique, proprietary process, you make comparing your firm to others akin to comparing apples to oranges. This approach means throwing out the standard seven-step financial planning process that most firms use. Your unique process should help prospective clients see a clear path from where they are today to where they can expect to be after working with you.

4. Have a Unique Distribution Method

Offering a way to deliver advice other than by meeting in the office or over Zoom can help you stand out from the crowd. For example, let’s say your office is an Airstream you bring to the client’s home. You offer the ultimate in convenience because all your client has to do is step out their front door, and there you are.

5. Offer Best-in-Class Customer Service

You can propel your business by having customer service so good that people can’t help but talk about you. Just consider the reputation of the Ritz-Carlton and Nordstrom. However, this approach is challenging for most advisory firms to pull off because the only way it works is through widespread word-of-mouth from your existing clients. That means you need enough clients who talk about you regularly to build your reputation in the community.

6. Outspend the Competition on Marketing

One way to stand out from the competition is to be louder than them. That means having a bold brand and being everywhere—workshops, radio shows, podcasts, billboards, sponsorships, advertisements, etc. If your brand is ubiquitous, your prospects will feel like they already know you, and it will be hard for them to compare you with other firms. The downside is that you have to be prepared to spend a lot of money. If you’re not fully committed, you’ll just waste your money.    

7. Stand for Something

When you share the same values and beliefs as your prospects, they automatically recognize you as different from other advisors. But this means you need to be bold in your messaging, perhaps even controversial or divisive. For example, you state, “We are a faith-based firm that weaves in conservative, Christian values into everything we do.” Then you build your culture and client experience to match those values. As with No. 6 above, you have to commit to this approach. If you dabble in standing for something, you won’t have the impact you are looking for.      

Go All In

Choosing just one of these methods can help you stand out from your competition. If you layer in multiple options, you’ll find even more ways to prove your uniqueness. Whether you adopt one approach or multiple ones, the key to success is to go all in. Putting your toe in the water won’t get you any results, and you’ll continue to look and sound like every other advisor. Remember, if you want prospects to think you are different, you actually have to be different.

---

About Kristen Luke

Kristen Luke is the President of Kaleido Creative Studio, a marketing agency specializing in helping RIAs promote their businesses to a niche through an expertise approach. Over the past 15 years, Kristen has consulted with hundreds of financial advisory firms and shared her marketing expertise via industry conferences and publications nationwide.

How to Choose a Niche Market for Financial Advisors: Step 2—Discover the Intersection of Passion, Aptitude, and Profit

Advisors often ask me which niche they should choose. There is no easy answer. If there were, everyone would be doing it, and there would be no competitive advantage.

The best niche for your firm will be revealed by determining what makes you unique. Randomly picking a niche market out of a hat is not a successful strategy.

So the question is, how do you find that perfect niche? You will find your successful niche at the intersection of passion, aptitude, and profit.

Passion

Start with passion because you want your work to be something that interests you and that you’re excited about. Passion is contagious, and prospective clients will pick up on this energy, making them want to work with you.

To brainstorm what you are most passionate about, ask yourself:

• What are my interests and passions?

• Who am I passionate about working with?

• What types of people do I naturally network with or spend time with?

• What would I be doing if I weren’t a financial advisor?

• Which types of clients are enjoyable and easy to serve?

Answer these questions both professionally and personally to produce the most options to consider. 

Aptitude

Next, look at your aptitude. Your aptitude is your natural ability or general suitability for a specific type of work.

To uncover your aptitude, you should analyze your experience, skills, and talents that not every advisor can claim they have. Your aptitude comes from your natural talents, current and past professional experience, and life experience.

To discover your aptitude, ask yourself:

• What services do my clients find most valuable?

• What specializations do I have or special services do I offer?

• What unique educational background do I have?

• What previous career or professional background do I have?

• What is unique about my life experience?

• What types of clients are most engaged in our work together?

• What hole in the industry do I naturally fill?

• What natural talents and strengths do I have?

Profit

Finally, you want to look at profit because making money is the only way you can stay in business. Ask yourself these questions:

• What types of clients are most profitable?

• What types of clients are naturally attracted to the firm without much effort?

• What types of clients are willing and able to pay for my services?

I recommend you spend 45 minutes brainstorming everything that comes to mind. The first 15 to 30 minutes of this exercise will reveal the obvious answers. It’s when you brainstorm for more than 30 minutes that more innovative ideas come to light.

After you have spent 45 minutes brainstorming, spend an additional 15 minutes making connections between the different ideas you wrote down in each of the circles. 

As you answer these questions, you will find that the overlap between your passion and your aptitude is what makes you unique. The overlap between your aptitude and your profit is where you create value. And the overlap between your passion and your profit is what motivates you to do the work you do.

As an example, let’s say you decide that your passion is in helping young people who are building wealth. You determine that your aptitude is in the tech industry since you worked in it before you became a financial advisor. And you realize that you have found profit as a financial advisory firm by helping tech professionals whose companies had an IPO.

By making the connections between your passion, aptitude, and profit, you see that a potential niche for you is tech employees who expect to receive a windfall due to an IPO.

Once you find the intersection for your passion, aptitude, and profit, that is the niche for you.

---

About Kristen Luke

Kristen Luke is the President of Kaleido Creative Studio, a marketing agency specializing in helping RIAs promote their businesses to a niche through an expertise approach. Over the past 15 years, Kristen has consulted with hundreds of financial advisory firms and shared her marketing expertise via industry conferences and publications nationwide.