Nine Steps to Launch a New Niche

The 52: How to Expand Your Niche

How to Expand Your Niche

When I talk to advisors about niching, the conversation is usually about narrowing the niche to become more specialized. However, there may be times when it makes sense to expand your niche. For example, you may have dominated your market and need to expand just to continue growing your business.

When you are ready to expand your niche, start by looking at markets that share a similar problem to your existing niche. For example, if you work with widows, you could expand into divorcees since both groups share the problem of being solely responsible for their household finances for the first time. Or if you work with tech employees, you could expand into biotech and pharma employees who share the problem of managing their equity compensation.

When it’s time to expand, the key is to find a new market that shares the same problem as your existing niche.

The 52: Market Solutions, Not Services

Market Solutions, Not Services

Many financial advisor websites highlight the services they offer—financial planning, investment management, estate planning, tax planning, retirement planning, education planning, etc. But most prospects don’t know what service they need. They just understand the problem they have.

Instead of marketing your services, market the solution to the problem your prospect is facing. Here are some examples:

• Education planning: “Put your kid through college.”

• Tax planning: “Keep more of the money you earned.”

• Estate planning: “Protect your family even after you are gone.”

Where Is Your Marketing Failing?

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.  

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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 52: Agitate the Pain

Agitate the Pain So Your Prospect Acts

Two indicators that predict whether a prospect will hire an advisor are how much pain they feel because of their financial situation and their sense of urgency around solving that problem. Some client types, like widows, inherently have a high sense of pain and urgency, while others do not (e.g., people who are sitting on so much cash that they don’t know what to do with it).

When you face a situation where a prospect doesn’t feel significant pain, you need to agitate any pain that does exist to get them to take action. You don’t have to market on fear, but you need to bring to light the pain they may not be aware of. For example, if someone has piles of cash, you could explain, “Each day you are sitting on cash, your money is worth less than the day before because of inflation. The longer you wait, the less valuable your cash becomes.”

If your prospect doesn’t feel pain and urgency, you must create this for them to get them to act.

The 52: Marketing Surges: More Momentum, Less Effort

Marketing Surges: More Momentum, Less Effort

Stephanie Bogan’s meeting surge has become a popular client service approach for many RIAs. But the concept can be applied to marketing as well. While there are some activities that should be consistently implemented (e.g., newsletters), others could actually be more effective if done in surges. For example:

• Schedule all your one-on-one meetings with CPAs in January right before tax season gets busy.

• When launching a niche, flood your social media channels with as much niche-focused content as possible during the first three months to start establishing your reputation as an expert.

• Schedule your speaking engagements in January, February, March, April, May, September, and October when people are most likely to take action on their finances.

Through marketing surges, you will create more momentum with less effort.

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.  

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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 52: The Most Popular Niche We See Is …

The Most Popular Niche We See Is …

I talk to a lot of financial advisors about which niches they are pursuing or considering. For a long time, the niches I heard most frequently were business owners and women in transition. But these days, the most popular niche of the advisors I speak to is employees with equity compensation.

Does this mean equity compensation is too saturated to pursue? No, it just means you must niche down and become more specialized so that you can clearly differentiate from other advisors in the equity comp space. That could mean focusing on one industry or even one company. Or it could mean specializing in one subset of the niche, like C-suite executives or IPOs.

When there is too much competition in a niche, it’s time to niche down.

How Choosing A Niche Can Help Financial Advisors Conquer The 3 B’s Of Marketing Differentiation