The Balanced Advisor Podcast: Finding Your Niche with Kristen Luke

Are You Selling Life Rafts or Sailboats?

Are You Selling Life Rafts or Sailboats?

If you have read any of my articles over the last few years, you know that I strongly advocate that financial advisors focus their practice on a niche market. The reason is that it is much easier to reach a small group of people with similar needs and mindsets and persuade them to work with you than it is to do the same for a broader audience with diverse needs.

That being said, most advisors still cater to everyone who will meet their minimum fee. One of the marketing challenges these advisors face is finding one marketing message that connects with people facing different life experiences.

Let’s say you are a generalist Registered Investment Advisor working with widows, retirees, and people experiencing sudden windfalls. What message would you use that applies to all three of these groups?

Messaging is difficult because some of these clients come from a place of survival, while others come from a place of abundance. To reach all three of these groups, you have to use a generic message like “Helping you achieve your financial goals.” But this message doesn’t deeply resonate with any of these clients, which means you lose out on your chance to connect with your prospect through your marketing.

Instead, let’s consider the messages you could use if you worked with just one of these client types:

Widows: Helping You Regain Your Footing After Your Loss

Retirees: Helping You Understand If You Will Be OK in Retirement

Sudden Money: Helping You Thrive Using Your Newfound Wealth

In financial services marketing, a lot of emphasis gets placed on aspirational marketing messages—for example, “Live the Retirement You’ve Been Dreaming Of.” There is no question that everyone wants to live happily ever after. But some people are so far from that outcome, they can’t even imagine it. They aren’t in the headspace to consider aspirational goals. A recent widow doesn’t want to re-envision a life she loves. She just wants to know if she will end up as a bag lady or have to live with her kids.

If you aren’t willing to niche, at least decide whether you are trying to help your clients thrive or survive. Then build a message around one of those themes. Are you selling them life rafts (survive) or sailboats (thrive)?

Below is a list of scenarios where someone may be looking for a life raft versus a sailboat.

Life Raft

• Loss of a spouse

• Eldercare

• Divorce

• High debt

• Retirement with limited savings

Sailboat

• HENRY status

• Sudden windfalls

• Legacy planning

• Retirement with significant savings

These are generalities that would need adjusting for your clients. For example, retirement may be an exercise in surviving for some, while it is an exercise in thriving for others. For most, the death of a spouse requires a life raft. However, there may be cases where a 22-year-old is in a marriage of convenience with an 80-year-old. The death of their spouse would put them into the sailboat category. Or there may be multimillionaires planning their legacy but have such complicated family dynamics (e.g., blended families, children with special needs), they feel like they are drowning and need a life raft.

Whether a person needs a life raft or a sailboat has nothing to do with how much money they have. It has to do with their mindset. Do they just want to know that they’re going to be OK, or do they want to achieve something greater than what they’ve already accomplished?

Your marketing needs to communicate the message your prospects want to hear today. And if you are trying to sell both life rafts and sailboats by “helping you get the boat you need,” neither group will hear your message.

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About Kristen Luke

Kristen Luke is the President of Kaleido Creative Studio, a marketing consulting firm that positions Registered Investment Advisors and their employees as experts in a niche, making them “uncomparable” to other advisors. Over the past 17 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 Hide Behind Development

Don’t Hide Behind Development

Marketing is about getting your name in front of your prospects. That can mean speaking to a group, networking, or actively participating on social media, just to name a few.

Yet so many advisors hide behind developing their marketing instead of interacting with their prospect community.

A common scenario would be spending your allocated marketing hours each week perfecting your website and obsessing over search engine optimization in the hopes that prospects will just find you. In this case, you would feel like you are spending a lot of time on marketing, but in fact, you aren’t moving the needle.

Instead, you would be better off having a mediocre website and spending your time actively getting in front of prospects, directing them to your website to schedule an appointment.

Ask yourself: Is your marketing time spent developing or interacting? While development is important, it should be a fraction of the time you spend interacting.

The 52: Be Consistent with Your Niche Message on Social Media

Be Consistent with Your Niche Message on Social Media

When starting with a new niche, make sure you communicate a consistent message on your social media posts. Your goal is to be known as the go-to person in your niche, so every post needs to be clearly for them. If you start integrating non-niche content into your posts, you’ll fail to reinforce the positioning you are trying to establish.
For example, let’s say you are an individual advisor in a larger RIA, and you have decided to focus on the niche of employees with equity compensation in a specific industry. Every post should address the things that are top of mind for this niche (e.g., how your RSUs are taxed). Do not post other content your company is creating, such as economic outlooks or blogs on non-related topics like estate planning.
You need to be laser focused on communicating that you are an expert in one niche. Every time you post a non-niche topic, you are failing to differentiate yourself.

The 52: By the Time You Need Marketing, It’s Too Late

By the Time You Need Marketing, It’s Too Late

Marketing is an investment of time, money, and energy. And like any investment, it takes time to see a return.

When you get to a point when you need marketing to keep your business going, it’s too late to do much. Just like a prospect coming to you with $150,000 in assets who wants to retire this year, there just isn’t enough time for the investment to pay off.

If you need prospects immediately, focus on outbound sales. Pound the pavement, make calls, and hit up your referral partners.

If you want your business to easily generate prospects in the future, focus on marketing now. Establish your identity, build your reputation, and put systems in place to execute consistently.

The 52: Not Every Firm Should Niche

Not Every Firm Should Niche

Through our work with financial advisors, we have discovered the easiest way to market is to specialize in a niche. However, not all firms should niche. Here are four situations where focusing on a broad market is the better choice:

• Firms in small, close-knit communities with widespread name recognition

• Firms where the owner is going to sell to an outside entity in the next five years

• Firms that consistently generate enough referrals to achieve annual growth goals

• Firms with outside investment that can spend significant money on national mass marketing campaigns

The 52: Sell Solutions, Outcomes, and Transformation, Not Products or Services

Sell Solutions, Outcomes, and Transformation, Not Products or Services

Many advisors focus on selling their services, such as investment management, financial planning, and retirement planning. But prospective clients aren’t looking to purchase a service—they want a solution to their problem, a specific outcome, or a transformation.

In your marketing, help your prospects visualize the transformation they will experience after working with you. For example, instead of promoting “retirement planning,” say: “Have a plan so you can stop being afraid of spending your hard-earned money and start enjoying the best years of your retirement.” The second message is not only more desirable to your prospect but something they’ll want to pay you to help them achieve.

The 52: Marketing Strategies for the Introverted Financial Advisor

Marketing Strategies for the Introverted Financial Advisor

Introverted advisors don’t always see themselves as marketers because so many of the people held up as “good marketer” role models are extroverts. You know them. They constantly self-promote on social media and can be seen at every event, and you feel like they are literally everywhere.

If you are an introverted advisor, this type of marketing can be exhausting. But being an introvert doesn’t mean your marketing has to be less effective. Here are three strategies introverted advisors should follow to be successful marketers:

Strategy 1: Focus on a niche. When you take a rifle, not a shotgun, approach, you’ll find that your efforts spent interacting with people in the niche community will multiply much faster than if you target a broader market.

Strategy 2: Take advantage of content marketing. Content marketing allows your expertise and knowledge to shine, helping you overcome the extroverted characteristics usually associated with good sales and marketing people.

Strategy 3: Utilize digital channels. These channels allow you to network from the comfort of your home or office and give you the opportunity to think before you “speak.”

Marketing Strategies for the Introverted Financial Advisor