Should Advisors Have More Than One Niche?

The 52: Leverage the Networks of Others

Leverage the Networks of Others

When you start working with a niche, it is unlikely that you will have a large personal or professional network of people who fit your niche. Sure, you could spend time trying to build your network through social media or traditional networking tactics, but that is a long process. To get traction with your niche immediately, leverage the networks of people and organizations that already have built the potential client bases you want to reach.

Here's what that might look like: You can ask existing niche clients to have you speak in front of a group of people they know. You can submit guest articles to websites or publications your niche reads. You can ask existing clients to share your content on online forums they belong to that you can’t join. Or you can be a guest on a niche-focused podcast.

By focusing on leveraging the networks of others, you will both get in front of your niche and build your own network faster.

The 52: Quality or Quantity? Which Is Better for a Blog Post?

Quality or Quantity? Which Is Better for a Blog Post?

If you have limited time and resources, should you focus on quantity or quality when it comes to blogging? The answer depends on your goal.

Exposure

If you are trying to get name recognition as quickly as possible in a niche, blog as much as possible (1+ times/week) and then share the blog through as many channels as you can (e.g., social media, email, other websites). This focus means writing shorter content (600-750 words) to keep up with the frequency. In this case, quantity is more important than quality.   

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Research shows that the companies blogging more frequently generate greater website traffic than those posting less frequently[1] (assuming similar blog quality). That being said, Google gives preference to higher-quality content over lower-quality content, which generally means longer posts (approximately 2,000+ words). Our experience has been that long-form content on our clients’ websites generates significantly more traffic year after year than short-form content. So if SEO is your goal, focus on quality first and quantity second.

1. https://neilpatel.com/blog/blog-post-quality-vs-quantity

The 52: Can You Have More Than One Niche?

Can You 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. The more niches you have, the more champions you need and the more plans you must implement.

With that in mind, here is my general rule of thumb for whether you can have multiple niches:

• RIAs with a solo advisor: You must focus on one niche—end of story!

• RIAs with a few advisors: You would be best served by having one niche for the entire firm. However, if not all advisors are equally suited for the same niche, you may decide to have multiple niches. This is not an ideal scenario, so you should have as few niches as possible, with each advisor focusing on only one niche.

• Large ensemble RIAs: Unless you started with a niche, it’s unrealistic to assume you will ever transition to just one focus. Instead, you can have multiple niche specialty areas. The key to success is having advisors dedicated to just one niche.

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.

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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 12-Week Advisor Marketing Plan

The 52: Qualify Your Prospects Using Your Scheduling Software

Qualify Your Prospects Using Your Scheduling Software

If you get a fair number of leads from your website, you’ve faced the rude awakening that most web leads don’t meet the minimum requirements to become a client. So how do you quickly identify the people who are not a fit and refer them to another advisor before you spend your valuable time on a call or in a meeting?

The answer! Use your calendaring software to ask basic qualifying questions. Many systems allow you to add custom questions to gather this kind of information.

To learn the questions to use on your scheduling software to screen your prospects, read our latest blog.

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.

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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.

Use Your Calendaring System to Qualify Prospects

The 52: The 12-Week Marketing Plan

The 12-Week Marketing Plan

If a financial advisory firm creates a marketing plan, it’s usually done on an annual basis. The problem with an annual plan is that it tends to be objective-based (e.g., implement a client referral program) instead of action-based (e.g., ask 10 clients for a referral). It’s also easy to procrastinate with an annual plan because you have months to complete your objectives. The result is that you rarely accomplish what you aimed for.

Instead of developing an annual marketing plan, consider a quarterly plan as described by Brian Moran in the book The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months.

By developing a quarterly marketing plan, you are more likely to complete the action items you commit to, you can more easily adapt your strategy as opportunities arise, and you are more likely to hit your goals.