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Many advisors get stuck in a marketing quagmire when they pick out target clients. Others work for decades settling for half the earnings of their growth-oriented colleague down the street.
What makes the difference?
They haven’t found an effective system for adding new highly-profitable clients to their practice each and every month. Still, others create and execute a marketing plan for a year or more but have little growth to show for it.
While most advisors understand that “riches are found in niches,” they feel as if they are picking a niche for life. They aren’t ready to make long-term commitment.
It is nearly impossible to develop a marketing plan that doesn’t disappoint you if you do not define an addressable market.
Suppose, though, that you emphasize your a market now, understanding you may modify it later.
Consider this advantage: Selecting a specific target market or type of client to multiply makes it much easier to differentiates your practice and set you apart as the go-to expert.
Narrowing your target market unlocks advantages
It enables you to tailor your communications to multiply your response.
That’s how you can stop your best prospects in their tracks and prompt them to pay attention to your message.
What’s more, with proper targeting, you will be able to:
- Eliminate unprofitable prospects who will never value your advice as clients and eat up tons of time and attention,
- Save up to 80% on your marketing budget by laser-targeting your messages,
- Avoid wasting time with unqualified prospects,
- Select the very marketing media and tactics that will cut through the clutter with your audience, and
While all of your current clients may not look like your ideal prospects, you can use one set of communication for clients and one for prospects.
Doubling your most profitable client base, let’s say the top 20% of your clients who contribute 80% of profits, is one of the few ways to successfully scale a practice without driving yourself crazy with work or going on a hiring binge.
Five ways to pick your target client
- List your top target market options beginning with your highest priority
If you have a few markets you are thinking of, list them, and force a stack rank to yield the one with the highest priority. Then, build your plan for that market.
For those who like to analyze before making decisions, outline criteria such as ease of access, fit with your practice, size of market, relationship with Influencers, profitability, etc. and score each of the options High, Medium, Low through 3, 2, or 1 points.
The highest scoring market wins.
- Select the top three clients you’d like to multiply
If you have three clients that you would like to multiply, you could go through the same ranking exercise.
Still stuck? Here’s a way out: Go through the criteria ranking for the three clients and translate that description into a market.
With any market you select, it is a valuable sanity test to create a mini-marketing plan for that market.
A simple executive summary of who, what, when, where, why, and how as it pertains to that market should suffice.
- Review the top 20% of your practice for commonalities
Yes, there are some hyper-analytical consultants who will tell you to simply multiply your top 20%.
If you want to go that route, let’s say it is 20 clients, look for commonalities of characteristics that make them your “A clients” as well as be sure to track back to their situation when they became a client.
Beware of outliers: If 18 of 20 clients had between $500,000 and $1 million when they became clients, the ones with $10 million and $100,000 may be eliminated from the analysis.
- Select a natural market
I like to work with…. ___
I naturally get along with ____ kinds of people
I like to work with people like myself, which means the following ___
While a natural market is often where a start-up or new advisors begin, it can be a valid approach for established advisors as well.
- Access someone else’s customer base
Your target market could be someone else’s customer base.
For example, a CPA firm or top real estate broker in town may have hundreds of the types of clients you want and be willing to create a strategic relationship.
It could be a defined group like members of an association or a profession.
No one is forcing you to pick a niche for life. Have fun with the process.
When you are creating or updating your marketing plan, remember to identify your target market – one that will help you reach your growth goals.
Then, enjoy working with these special clients you handpicked.
Bob Hanson is a fractional marketer and author of Marketing Power for Financial Advisors. Get his checklist, Nine Questions Advisors Must Ask Before They Hire a Marketing Agency, Fractional or Full-Time Marketer, click here.
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