An Uncommon Approach to Implementing Multiple Niches

An Uncommon Approach to Implementing Multiple Niches

If you follow my writing, you know that I generally recommend that RIAs focus on just one niche. However, for some firms, that approach can hinder growth. An RIA managing more than $1 billion in AUM may find it too limiting to market to a single niche. While being a generalist firm is one option, a second solution is to adopt a multiple-niche approach.

A multiple-niche approach can take several forms. The most common strategy is for an RIA to look at its book of business and categorize its client base. For example, here are some common niches I’ve seen when firms pursue a multiple-niche approach: business owners, executives, women in transition, and the health care industry. The firm then begins executing marketing tactics for each niche.

While this approach certainly can work, it is challenging to weave one compelling company message through all the different niches without resorting to something cliché like “Helping Affluent Individuals and Families Achieve Peace of Mind” or “Helping You Achieve the Retirement of Your Dreams.”

A second, less common approach is for the firm to focus on multiple niches that have a throughline connecting them. Let’s say the common theme is helping executives manage their equity compensation. One advisor team can focus on executives in the biotech industry, another may focus on the oil and gas industry, and a third may focus on the telecommunications industry.

Let’s see how you would implement this second approach.

Step 1: Pick a Common Throughline

The first step is to pick a throughline connecting the different niches you will serve. What is the one problem that you want to solve for all your niches? Do you want to help executives navigate the complexities of their equity compensation? Do you want to help professionals with pension plans maximize their benefits as they retire? Or do you want to help people in high-stress careers become financially independent and retire early? You will use this common throughline as the core company message that ties all the niches together.

Illustration by Ana Popović.

Step 2: Identify Niches

With a common theme identified, you want to pick the niches that fall into that theme. If you are helping professionals with pension plans maximize their benefits as they retire, you may work with employees in the federal, state, or local governments and publicly traded companies that still offer pensions. If you are helping people in high-stress careers become financially independent and retire early, you may choose niches such as law, health care, and tech.

Step 3: Assign a Team and a Leader

Once you have defined your niches, assign an advisor team to focus on each niche. The senior advisor on the team usually leads this effort, but it can also be led by a more junior advisor with ambitions of becoming an equity partner. The leader should have some experience with the niche and be dedicated to this marketing effort. They should also receive the time and resources needed to make the niche succeed.

Step 4: Add Niche Webpages

Before you start marketing to a particular niche, add a page to your website dedicated to the niche, and include that page in your main navigation menu. This webpage reinforces your specialty to prospective clients who research your firm. This step should be repeated for each of the niches.

Step 5: Create Tailored Marketing Campaigns

With webpages in place, build tailored marketing campaigns for each niche. This can include creating targeted content, such as blog posts or videos, addressing the specific needs and concerns of the niche. The step can also include social media, email marketing, and direct mail campaigns to reach potential clients in each niche. Finally, you may choose to have live or online marketing events for each of your niches.

Step 6: Network and Build Partnerships

The final step is for each advisor team to network and build partnerships within their niche community. This can include attending industry events and conferences, joining industry groups and associations, and building relationships with other professionals in the niche for referrals.

Final Thoughts

Pursuing a multiple-niche approach can accelerate growth for RIAs managing more than $1 billion in AUM. However, the danger is that the messaging will get watered down. Creating a throughline connecting all the niches will inspire more effective messaging. Once the connecting theme is identified, you can then give your niches the resources they need to succeed. The focused effort becomes a win for your firm as you now stand out from the competition with a profitable multi-niche approach.

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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: Maximize Your Marketing Efforts by Minimizing Low-Value, High-Time Activities

Maximize Your Marketing Efforts by Minimizing Low-Value, High-Time Activities

As a financial advisor, it's important to ensure that your marketing efforts produce tangible results. You don’t want to waste your time on low-impact activities that make you feel like you're doing something but, in reality, are just busy work (e.g., unfocused networking or constantly tweaking your website). Instead, focus on strategies that will drive real growth for your business.

Remember, time is a valuable commodity and should be invested wisely, just like you do with your money. By minimizing low-value, high-time marketing activities, you can maximize your return on investment and see real results in your business.

The 52: Standing Out in the AI Era: Humanize Your Educational Content

Standing Out in the AI Era: Humanize Your Educational Content

With the ease of generating educational content using artificial intelligence, it’s important to make your content stand out. One effective strategy is to humanize it by incorporating humor, opinion, and real-life examples. For example, you can add a touch of levity to your articles or videos to make them more engaging. If humor doesn’t align with your brand, consider sharing your personal opinions on a topic to add a unique perspective. Additionally, incorporating anonymous real-life stories or situations that reinforce your subject can make your content more relatable and memorable for your audience. By adding these elements, you can offer readers and viewers a more personal and engaging experience than what they can get from AI-generated content alone.

The 52: Different Roles, Different Marketing Pieces

Different Roles, Different Marketing Pieces

If you have different client types that you serve, you probably have different marketing pieces for each one. For example, you probably have a different brochure or webpage for widows than for business owners.

But do you have different pieces for the different roles in the client relationship? For example, do you have one piece for the spouse who is leading the charge and one for the spouse who is burying their head in the sand about their finances? Do you have one for the older widow who is suddenly in charge of her money and one for the child who will ultimately act as the power of attorney?

Often, there are multiple people involved in the decision to hire you. Customize your marketing materials for each role in the relationship to address their concerns or questions in advance. This will help you avoid any one person in the relationship derailing the opportunity to work with you.

The 52: Offer the Value-Adds That Actually Impact Your Niche

Offer the Value-Adds That Actually Impact Your Niche

In November, Kitces.com published the article “101 Things That Advisors Actually DO To Add Value.” Since then, I’ve been observing online conversations and having discussions with advisors who skipped over the article and jumped right to the chart of 101 services. The advisors I spoke with were enthusiastically planning to add as many of these services as they can to their practice.

The problem is many advisors missed the lesson the author was trying to convey. In his conclusion, Adam Van Deusen states: “Ultimately, the key point is that while there are more than a hundred different ways advisors can add value to their clients’ lives, advisors who are able to go deeper for their ideal target client have hundreds more ways to do so.”

He continues: “In fact, by crafting an ideal target client persona and shaping their service offering around the value adds that most apply to these clients, advisors can not only enhance their efficiency, but also better differentiate themselves from more generalist firms, potentially leading to more efficient marketing and greater client growth in the long run!”

The lesson of the article is not to offer as many of the 101 services as possible to a broad set of clients. The lesson is to offer only the most impactful services to your niche. Your operations will be more efficient, your marketing will be easier, and you will be happier.

The 52: Business Books to Read in 2023

Business Books to Read in 2023

This year, I read more than 50 nonfiction books, most of which fell into the categories of business and marketing. In celebration of the last business day of 2022, I thought I would share the ones that left a memorable impression.

The 6 Types of Working Genius by Patrick Lencioni (Amazon Rating 4.8 out of 5)

I’ve taken a lot of assessments in my career, and this book offers one of the simplest I’ve come across. It will help you quickly identify the strengths (geniuses) and weaknesses (frustrations) in yourself and your team. With this information, you can restructure your team so people do what they are best at, and you can hire for the areas where you have gaps.

Selling Is Hard. Buying Is Harder: How Buyer Enablement Drives Digital Sales and Shortens the Sales Cycle by Garin Hess (Amazon Rating 4.5 out of 5)

I stumbled upon this book as I was evaluating publishers for my upcoming book, and I’m so glad I found it. While written for companies that sell B2B services with complex sales cycles, the suggestions for improving a client’s buying experience are relevant to all service businesses. For example: Have different marketing materials for the different roles a prospect serves (e.g., one piece for the elder parent and one piece for the caregiver child). If you are an innovator by nature, this book will give you lots of ideas to implement in your practice in the new year.

Write Useful Books: A Modern Approach to Designing and Refining Recommendable Nonfiction by Rob Fitzpatrick and Adam Rosen (Amazon Rating 4.6 out of 5)

I read this book for guidance on how to make my upcoming book more helpful to advisors. If you plan on writing a book for marketing purposes, this is a must-read! And even if you aren’t, you’ll find lots of great tips on making the content you create more, well, useful.

The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks Than Others Do in 12 Months by Brian P. Moran (Amazon Rating 4.7 out of 5)

This book changed the way I think about developing marketing plans. Annual plans are out of date before you know it and rarely get implemented. If you follow the techniques in this book, 2023 will be your most productive and impactful year yet.

$100M Offers: How to Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No by Alex Hormozi (Amazon Rating 4.9 out of 5)

Read this book if you struggle with how to add more value to your clients and charge higher fees for your service. I especially recommend it to advisors with hourly, project, flat-fee, or subscription-based fee models. The author will provide scalable ways to increase your value and fees without increasing your workload. With nearly 10,000 Amazon ratings and an average rating of 4.9 stars, I’m not the only one who thinks this book is magic. In fact, I can’t wait to read it again in 2023.

Happy new year!

The 52: The Long-Term Consequences of ChatGPT

The Long-Term Consequences of ChatGPT

Last week I presented the short-term opportunities I see for ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that solves problems to questions you pose.

While I believe early adopters of this technology will see tremendous benefit in the short term, I predict it will present negative marketing consequences in the long term for generalist advisors—even those who don’t use it.

The ease with which ChatGPT creates content means that there will be more of it. And everyone who uses the AI for content will be conveying the same information. The result? It will be even harder to get noticed through your content marketing.

Another issue is that if a prospect can get their question answered using ChatGPT, they won’t need to do a Google search. This means content on your website that once attracted prospective clients will no longer be as effective.

If ChatGPT or a similar technology becomes ubiquitous, you’ll have to create content that AI can’t easily do in mere seconds. So it will be even more critical to differentiate yourself by positioning yourself as an expert in a niche.

Marketing influencer Seth Godin summed up the impact of this technology in his blog, stating: “Technology begins by making old work easier, but then it requires that new work be better.”

The Incredible "Silver Bullet" Potential of ChatGPT

ChatGPT: The Marketing Silver Bullet You’ve Been Looking for?

If you’ve followed the news over the last few weeks, you probably heard the buzz about ChatGPT. If you aren’t familiar, ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that is astounding users everywhere. As described on the Forbes website, ChatGPT gives “human-like, detailed answers to inquiries—like drafting a contract between an artist and producer and creating detailed code—and could revolutionize the way people use search engines by not just providing links for users to sift through, but by solving elaborate problems and answering intricate questions.”[1] 

Explaining the technology doesn’t do it justice. You need to experience it for yourself. Go to the website and ask it to “write a Seinfeld episode about a stolen car,” and be ready to be amazed by what it can do. 

ChatGPT is exciting from a marketing perspective because it can write marketing articles. And it can do an article in a matter of minutes. For example, I asked it to “write a 750-word article on the taxation of RSUs,” and it produced a decent article in less than two minutes. When I showed the article to one of my financial advisor clients, he said the content was equivalent to what the junior advisors in the firm would have produced. That’s remarkable for a technology in its infancy.

From testing ChatGPT, I have observed the following:

1. Articles written on general financial topics tend to be quite good. Advisors may find the output to be an acceptable alternative to canned content.

2. I ran each article through plagiarism software, and nothing significant was flagged. That being said, I wouldn’t feel comfortable using content generated by ChatGPT without running it through a plagiarism check.

3. While I didn’t find any factual errors in my tests, a known limitation is that the technology may produce incorrect information. You will want to double-check any content generated before using it for your business.

4. Because the technology is in such high demand right now, I’m often unable to log on. Also, it sometimes produces an error before finishing an article, and I have to start over. I’m sure this will improve as the company builds more capacity.

5. From a compliance perspective, you usually can’t claim content you have not written as your own. You should check with your compliance officer about the disclosures you need to attach to a ChatGPT-written article.

While ChatGPT is still in its infancy, I see a real opportunity for advisors over the next few months. 

The Short-Term Opportunity

I believe there is a window of opportunity for advisors who are early adopters of this technology. This AI will allow them to create large volumes of content quickly. More content on an advisor’s website can increase their search engine rankings, especially if optimized for their local geographic area or niche. 

ChatGPT also means that advisors can create more content to share and get noticed on social media. For example, I asked the AI to “write a tweet about RSUs,” and here is what it came back with, hashtags and all: 

RSUs are a great way for employees to build wealth and align their financial interests with their company. They provide a sense of ownership and can be a valuable part of a compensation package. #RSUs #equitycompensation

This window of opportunity reminds me of similar periods I observed when I worked with advisors who were early adopters of social media, SEO, and Google reviews. Those advisors who took advantage of these technologies early on reaped the rewards. But as more advisors entered the market, the advantage became harder to defend. I expect the same to be true with ChatGPT. 

The Long-Term Consequences

While I believe early adopters of this technology will see tremendous benefits in the short term, I predict serious marketing consequences for all advisors in the long run whether they use the technology or not.

The ease with which ChatGPT creates content means that there will be more of it. And everyone who uses this AI to create content will convey the same information. The result? It will be even harder to get noticed through your content marketing.

Another issue is that if a prospect can get their question answered using ChatGPT, they won’t need to do a Google search. This means the content on your website currently attracting prospects will no longer see the same amount of traffic. 

The Long-term Solution

If ChatGPT or a similar technology becomes ubiquitous, original thinking will be even more critical. You’ll no longer be able to write basic articles on topics such as Roth conversions or Social Security strategies because AI can do it just as well in mere seconds. You will have to create content that is different. The clearest way I see to do this is to focus on a niche market where there isn’t a lot of information for AI to pull its knowledge from.

For example, I asked ChatGPT, “What are the executive benefits available at [company name]?” and got this response: 

I’m sorry, but I am not able to browse the internet and therefore cannot provide information about any specific company’s executive benefits. In general, executive benefits are a type of compensation package that is offered to top-level executives at a company, and they can include things like stock options, performance bonuses, and additional retirement savings plans. However, the specific executive benefits offered by any given company will vary depending on a number of factors.

AI’s current inability to create niche content is a good opportunity for niche advisors. Will AI learn this information in the future? I’m sure it will. But right now, it appears unable to replace expertise in niche areas of financial planning, and this is where the opportunity lies. 

Marketing influencer Seth Godin summed up the impact of this technology in a recent blog, stating: “Technology begins by making old work easier, but then it requires that new work be better.” 

It has always been hard for generalist advisors to differentiate themselves through content marketing, and artificial intelligence will only make it harder. If you want to differentiate yourself, you will have to be different. You will have to offer value that no one else offers. You will have to become an expert in a specialized niche. In other words, you will need to become uncomparable—so different no one else can compete with you, not even AI.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ariannajohnson/2022/12/07/heres-what-to-know-about-openais-chatgpt-what-its-disrupting-and-how-to-use-it

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.