The 52: An Advisor Directory Focused on Niches

An Advisor Directory Focused on Niches

Advisor directories like NAPFA’s Find an Advisor, FeeOnlyNetwork, and FPA’s PlannerSearch can be a cheap, passive way to get unsolicited leads. The problem is these listings are generally zip code based, so they aren't great for people focused on a niche they serve nationally. For advisors who fall into this group, there is an advisor directory site for you: Wealthtender.com! Now prospects can choose an advisor who specializes in working with clients just like them rather than just picking a generalist close to their home.

P.S. We don’t have any financial incentive to promote Wealthtender, but they did give us a discount code to share with you. Use the code KALEIDO for 50% off your first two months of any subscription plan.

Year 3 Niche Marketing Plan for Financial Advisors

In a previous blog, I discussed the fact that it can take three years of a focused niche marketing strategy before an advisor will reach the level of exponential growth.

In year one, you talk to everyone you know in your niche and establish credibility through content marketing. In year two, you increase your content marketing, establish lead capture mechanisms, and use online strategies to drive leads.

Year three is typically when your efforts finally gain traction. Here is what to focus on in your year-three marketing plan:

1. Host Live or Virtual Events

Hosting your own events, whether in person or online, requires a large mailing list to get people to attend. By year three, you should have been building your list long enough to have enough people that you can host an event.

If your niche is primarily made up of local people, host live events. If your niche is nationwide, then do webinars or other virtual events.

The key to these events is to make them specific to your niche and their interests. Avoid generic topics that would appeal to any audience.

2. Write a Book

Writing a book is a huge undertaking, but it can be the piece that finally propels you to the status of expert. By year three, you should have two years of experience working with your niche and enough content to write a book. If writing is not your thing, you can hire ghostwriters or a service like Scribe Media to write it for you.

Once you have your book, give it away for free to everyone in your niche. You’ll never sell enough books to make up for the time and money you invested, but it takes only a handful of new clients resulting from the book to get the ROI you are looking for.   

3. Sponsor Events

If there are events such as conferences or trade shows that attract your niche, this is the time to sponsor them or reserve a booth.

This step is by no means a requirement. In fact, if you are getting speaking engagements, you probably can skip this step altogether. But event sponsorships can be a good way to show your niche you are committed, engaged, and invested in their community.

4. Niche Down

After two years of working with your niche, you may find a subset within the niche that is an even better fit for you.

For example, if you work with divorcing women, you may prefer divorcing women who still have kids in the house and want to keep the home until they are off to college. Or maybe you work with business owners, but you really add value to business owners in professional services.

This is where you niche down and become more specific. This added specificity will help you stand out even more. Once you niche down, refine your website, marketing materials, and content to reflect this new subset of clients.

Final Thoughts

The first year lays the foundation for a successful niche marketing strategy, and the second year builds the framing. In year three, you begin to reap the rewards of your efforts and propel your business forward while making refinements along the way.

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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: Recycle Your Content

Recycle Your Content

It’s difficult to create original content—blogs, videos, email newsletters, etc.—week after week. To save time, repurpose popular content you’ve already created. Review your marketing analytics and see which content has the most traffic, clicks, or views, and reuse or re-create that same content. One easy way is to reverse the tone—turn positive into negative. For example, take a “Top 10 Retirement Planning Tips for Business Owners” blog and turn it into “Top 10 Retirement Planning Mistakes Business Owners Make” by adapting the same content as a negative.

The 52: Use the Book-Writing Process as Marketing

Use the Book-Writing Process as Marketing

I picked up this week’s marketing tip from Dr. Travis Parry, author of Achieving Balance.

Writing your own book can be an incredibly powerful marketing tool once published. But there is marketing value even before you even write your first word.

Use the book-writing process to interview people in your niche. Asking people to be interviewed for a book is an easy ask when “cold calling.” Once you interview someone in your niche, you can ask for introductions to other people you should be interviewing. You can continue to stay in touch by having them review what you wrote for accuracy. And you can send them a book when it is published.

This interview method will get you in front of dozens of potential clients long before your book becomes its own marketing tool.

The 52: Are You a Cover Band or an Artist?

Are You a Cover Band or an Artist?

In their book Become Known for a Niche You Own, the Category Pirates use a great metaphor to describe the value of those who niche:

“There are a total of zero cover bands in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Anyone who has made it into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame became known for a niche they owned. Notice how differently the world values musicians who write their own music versus musicians who play covers.”[1]

I bring this quote to your attention because I find a lot of financial advisors fear focusing on a niche because they are afraid it will lessen the value of their business. In reality, by niching, you’ll be seen as more special and as a result more valuable to your audience.

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1. Category Pirates, Become Known for a Niche You Own: Why Legendary Writers Use Languaging to Design New & Different Categories, 2021, Kindle Edition.

The 52: Being Better Isn’t Better. Being Different Is Better

Being Better Isn’t Better. Being Different Is Better

When I ask firms, “How are you different?” I get similar answers:

• We have better customer service.

• We offer better financial planning.

• We have a better investment strategy.

But there is a problem with differentiating yourself as being “better”: It is easy for someone else to swoop in and be better than you.

This approach means a constant race to be the best. When you differentiate on being better, another firm can easily dethrone you by offering slightly better customer service or adding one more financial planning discipline.

When competing for clients, being better isn’t a sustainable strategy. Instead, be different in some defendable way (e.g., have a niche specialization) because it is hard for the competition to also be different in that same way.

The Year-One Niche Marketing Plan for Advisors

Year 2 Niche Marketing Plan for Financial Advisors

In my last blog, I discussed the fact that it can take three years of a focused niche marketing strategy before an advisor will reach the level of exponential growth. In year one, you talk to everyone you know in your niche and establish credibility through content marketing. In year two, you continue those efforts and layer on additional ones:

1. Develop an Ebook or Other Lead Capture Resource 

After you consistently blog for a year, you’ll find you are generating more traffic to your website. Since not all those visitors will be ready to do business with you, you’ll want a way to capture their names and email addresses so you can nurture that relationship until they are ready.

The simplest way to do this is through a PDF resource like an ebook or checklist. You can also consider an on-demand webinar. The important thing is that the resource is something that your niche will value and that you offer it in exchange for their email address.

2. Expand Your Content

Once you are in the habit of consistently creating blogs, you want to expand your content. If you like to write, you can continue writing blogs but add longer, more in-depth content. If that is not an option, increase the number of blogs you write each month (say from two to four).

This is also the time to consider developing videos to enhance your blogs or as a standalone. You can also consider hosting a podcast and inviting people associated with your niche community to be guests. Or you can start designing interesting infographics for your niche.

Only expand your content if you can consistently execute it. If blogging is already enough for you, stick to that one thing.

3. Guest Everywhere

In both years one and two, it is important to get in front of your niche as much as possible. This means looking for opportunities to be a guest speaker at live or virtual events, be a guest on podcasts, and contribute guest articles to websites or publications.

When you have an opportunity to leverage someone else’s network, you take it, no matter how insignificant. These opportunities not only build your credibility but also lead to additional opportunities.

4. Optimize Content for Search Engines

If you consistently write blogs in year one, your website will probably start to rank for some keywords your niche is searching for. In year two, you can make a more deliberate effort to optimize your content and overall website to drive more search traffic.

Search engine optimization is a pretty technical concept, so I would recommend you hire a company like Advisor Rankings to help you with your SEO efforts.

5. Utilize Ads

Year two is when you may want to use ads to expand the reach of your content. For example, you might promote your lead capture resource or the content you are already posting on social media to a wider audience using paid advertisements, usually called “promoted” or “boosted” posts.

You may want to advertise in highly targeted niche publications and websites. And if enough people are searching for your service on Google (e.g., financial advisor for dentists), you might consider using Google search ads.

Ads can complement your SEO efforts. The key to success is that your ads must be highly targeted to your market with a message that resonates with your niche.

6. Build Your Center of Influence (COI) Network

In your first year, you talk to anyone you can think of associated with your niche. In year two, it’s time to implement a deliberate and systemized effort to meet new centers of influence and nurture those relationships for referrals. It can take years of relationship-building to gain the trust required for COIs to provide a referral. Starting these efforts in year two will pay dividends in future years.     

Final Thoughts

If the first year lays the foundation for a successful niche marketing strategy, the second year builds the framing. In year two, your efforts get more sophisticated as you expand your reach through a lead capture resource, new content formats, guest opportunities, search engine optimization, ads, and COI networking.

Your diligence may already be paying off as you gain traction with your niche market, which increasingly looks to you for guidance on their financial problems.

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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: Don’t Obsess About Vanity Metrics

Don’t Obsess About Vanity Metrics

I often see advisors obsess over marketing metrics such as website visitors and social media followers—or what we call “vanity metrics.” These numbers make you feel good, but they aren’t leading indicators of your business’s future success. Nor do they provide information to inform your strategy.

Here are examples of vanity metrics:

• Website visitors

• Social media followers

• Number of attendees at your client event

Instead, you want to focus your analysis on metrics that truly help inform your strategy:

• Number of people who scheduled appointments

• Number of new people added to your marketing database

• Lead source (e.g., website, referral) of new prospects

• Conversion rate

Year 1 Niche Marketing Plan for Financial Advisors

In his 2014 article “Building a Niche Advisory Business: It Takes 3 Years for People to Know, Like, and Trust,” Michael Kitces presents the idea that it “takes about 3 years for the exponential growth of a niche to really start to take off.” That has been my experience when working with financial advisors as well.

Why does it take so long to build a niche advisory business? Kitces says that it takes “time to be known, liked, and trusted in the first place, especially as a financial advisor in our low-trust industry of financial services.” But once you gain this trust and become the go-to person in a niche, the business takes off, and marketing becomes much easier. 

How fast you will grow depends on your current engagement with a niche. Kitces states that businesses that already have some connection to or presence with a niche can grow faster, while firms brand new to a niche will grow slower.

If you are committed to mastering a niche, how should you spend your marketing efforts over those three years? In this first part of a three-part series, we’ll look at what to do in year one.   

The first year of building a niche business should be spent creating a marketing foundation. In his article, Kitces says this is the year you should focus on becoming known and do business with anyone in your niche you can.

So what does marketing in that first year look like? It means solidifying your message, establishing your expertise, and talking to everyone you can in your niche. Specifically, here are the steps you should take in your first year:

1. Define Your Niche

This step may seem obvious, but it is critical to get clear on who you serve. The more you “niche down” and become specific, the better. For example, “executives” is too broad. Niching down to “director-level and higher in the STEM field with equity compensation issues” will serve you better in the long run.

2. Craft Your Message

Next, you need to develop a clear and specific message that resonates with your niche. Your message should directly address their greatest financial concern or highest financial aspiration. This message needs to be simple and consistently communicated on your website and in your elevator pitch, marketing materials, and online profiles.

3. Build a Landing Page

Once you have your message, you need to develop a webpage dedicated to your niche on your existing website. If you are ready to go all-in from the start, then focus your entire site on the niche. This will serve as the hub for your future marketing efforts. It will also house all content that positions you as an expert. Finally, it provides a way for people to schedule appointments with you.

4. Blog

You’ll want to position yourself as an expert as quickly as possible. I find the best way to do this is through a blog. Not only does writing force you to learn what you need to know to be an expert in a niche, but it’s also the best way to showcase the expertise you are learning.  

Having this content on your website gives you credibility with anyone researching you online. You can also submit blogs to other publications or websites as guest posts to help get you in front of more people. Finally, if optimized for search engines, blogs can drive significant traffic to your website.

5. Build your Network

Networking in the early days of your niche strategy will accelerate the timeline for results. Tell everyone you know in or associated with your niche what you are doing. Ask them to make introductions to other people in the niche—not for referral purposes, but just to expand your network. And then add all those people to your email marketing list.

The goal is to meet as many people as possible as quickly as you can. You will learn so much and start to get opportunities you can’t even imagine exist. And hopefully, your efforts will help you get your first few niche clients.

6. Nurture your Network

Staying top of mind with your niche community will yield enormous benefits in future years. To stay top of mind, create an email newsletter featuring content specific to your niche (usually your blog). Continuously build a list of every contact, prospect, and client who fits into your niche community, and send the newsletter at least once a month (more often is better).

7. Present to Groups

Try to find as many groups as you can to present to during your first year in a niche. Presenting to groups early on will open up more speaking opportunities in the future.

Develop one presentation that addresses your niche’s primary financial concern or highest aspiration, and give them the steps to solving their problem or achieving their goal. Use this same presentation for the entire year, making tweaks along the way.

The groups you speak to don’t have to be formal. You can start by presenting to a handful of clients you already work with. Or maybe you just present to friends who fit your niche. Smaller groups are better in the beginning because they allow you time to work through and perfect your material. 

Final Thoughts

The first year of a niche focus will probably be the slowest and most frustrating, but stick with it. By staying on top of your year-one marketing plan, you lay a solid foundation for your niche advisory business. With your dedication and a solid niche, your efforts will be rewarded in year three and beyond, when your marketing becomes effortless because your ideal clients seek you out.

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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.