As financial advisers, attracting the right client is essential for sustainable business growth. The ideal client will vary for each individual adviser or practice, however, at the core, your ideal client should be one who will value your expertise and the services you provide when it comes to managing their finances and planning for their future.
There are a number of strategies you can use to help you find and connect with your ideal client – and this includes a mix of message clarity, consistency and positioning – but there is a process you need to take to get there first.
What steps you need to take
Here’s a breakdown of the best way to do it:
Ideal client: Firstly, you need to determine who your ideal client is. You should create a client persona to understand what the characteristics of your ideal client looks like. At the end, you should be able to build a picture of the client, what interests them financially, what motivates them and their choices. At a minimum, the profiles should include:
- Demographics
- Values
- Challenges
- Goals and objectives
Having an understanding of each of the above allows you to tailor your marketing strategy towards these clients and it will help you to focus more closely on your client and their motivations.
Client communication: Once you have determined who your ideal client is, you will need to consider your approach when it comes to communicating with this audience. What messaging will you use, and how will you address the pain points and concerns of these clients in a relatively simple way that will grab their attention? This is absolutely critical as you will generally have a very small window of opportunity to speak to your audience.
Marketing strategy: Now you have your ‘ideal client’ and clear messaging in place, you will need to develop a marketing strategy, how are you going to reach and communicate with your audience? What channels will you use – will it be one channel, or will you use a multi-channel marketing strategy, for example will you write website blogs, or will you create social media content, or will it be both?
While digital content may seem like an easy and the most obvious way to reach a wider audience, there are other considerations you should keep in mind when it comes to finding the right client.
Network, network, network. Networking can come in all sorts of fashion so you should do your homework first. Will you find your ideal client at an industry event, or will they be engaging in an online forum talking about retirement planning, or will they be at local community events like a weekend sports game? Whatever it may be, putting yourself in front of others can help to build your profile, establish credibility, find prospects or even increase referrals from existing clients.
Workshops are also a good way to attract new clients. You can create a referral program with existing clients, to bring potential clients to a seminar or workshop. Workshops give you an opportunity to share stories, not stats. Stories build emotion and emotion drives action.
When you’re in front of an audience you can give real-life examples of how you’ve helped existing clients, and when people hear about ways you’ve helped other people, they can imagine it for themselves.
Not a set and forget strategy
You will need to regularly review your strategy and determine whether it is still working for you. When you start this process, set benchmarks – how many new clients would you like? Are they still the right client? You should review your client personas each year as the demographics and goals and objectives of each client will continue to change.
If you would like to incorporate articles, videos or social media posts into your client communication strategy, reach out to us today.
