You're listening to “Financial Advisor Marketing”: the best show on the planet for financial advisors who want to get more clients, without all the stress. You're about to get the real scoop on everything from lead generation to closing the deal.
James is the founder of TheAdvisorCoach.com, where you can find an entire suite of products designed to help financial advisors grow their businesses more rapidly than ever before. Now, here is your host, James Pollard.
James: It kills me when I see people talking about stuff they have no business talking about, and there are a lot of so-called experts and gurus out there talking about niche marketing who have no earthly idea what they're talking about. I've seen them criticize financial advisors for having niches like athletes, and they'll say, “Oh, actually, that's a target market, not a niche,” and it's so stupid. [00:57.5]
Sir and/or Ma'am, do you even know what those words mean? Do you understand that it's possible and beneficial to have both a niche and a target market? Do you understand that in many cases, they are the same thing? It's always the people who have accomplished the least who say stupid stuff like that. If you do the least, then you say the most. That's just the way it goes. It's the Dunning–Kruger effect at work. They read one bestselling marketing book and suddenly think they know everything.
I'm recording this episode to, hopefully, fingers crossed, help financial advisors get a little clearer on what a good niche is and how to make it work, because many financial advisors think they have a niche, but they don't. What they actually have is a big demographic. They sprinkle on the website, thinking that it'll magically produce clients, and then they wonder why their marketing falls flat. So, in today's episode, I'm going to show you how to fix your niche, or at least, get started on the process of fixing your niche, in just 20 minutes. By the end of this episode, you'll know exactly who your marketing should be designed for. [02:06.3]
Let's get started with what are not niches, or at least, not effective ones. “Women” is not a niche. “Business owners” is not a niche. “Pre-retirees” is not a niche. There are millions of pre-retirees in America that's equal to some countries’ population. Would you say, “I'm targeting all of France,” or “all of Spain”? No, you would not.
The word “niche” has roots meaning a shallow recess in a wall. It's where you put something. You can put a vase or a book in a niche in the wall. It is not a wide recess. It is a shallow recess. The clue is right there in the origin, in the definition of the word. Besides, there are a few reasons why broad niches fail.
First, people ignore vague messages because the brain is wired for specificity. There's even a cognitive psychology concept called specificity bias, which means people trust and respond to specific messages more than broad ones, because specificity signals expertise, competence, relevance, all that good stuff. [03:10.8]
I want you to compare these two statements: “I help people retire comfortably” vs. “I help Lockheed Martin engineers retire without losing money to taxes.” Which one wakes up that reticular activating system? The reticular activating system, by the way, is the thing that is responsible for filtering the millions of inputs you encounter every day. It's the internal bouncer at the door of your attention, deciding what gets in and what gets ignored.
I want you to imagine that you're on the freeway and you're observing hundreds of cars either traveling with you or passing by you on the other side of the road. If I stopped you and told you to tell me how many red cars you saw in the past 30 seconds, you would likely have no idea. But if I told you to focus only on the red cars for the next 30 seconds, you would probably be able to give me an exact number, because your reticular activating system had been activated to spot the red cars. [04:07.8]
The reticular activating system only pays attention when something feels personally relevant. That is key. It's why you can be in a crowded room with dozens of conversations happening all at once, and yet, if someone across the room says your name, your head snaps around instantly. “Who said that? Who said that? Who said James?” in this case.
There's actually a term for that. It's called the cocktail party effect. Your reticular activating system filtered out 99.9 percent of the noise and pulled that one relevant signal into your awareness, because you were looking for it. Your whole life, you have been trained to respond to your name. When somebody says your name, it gets to you right away, and that's exactly what happens in marketing when you have one specific niche. [04:50.1]
The second reason why broad niches fail is because they create fee pressure. When you market yourself as for everyone, prospects immediately think, Okay, then how do you compare to this advisor? How do you compare to the person I found on Google, or the other two or three advisors that were recommended to me by ChatGPT? Because that's where we're going right now. You become a commodity, and commodities, in many cases, in almost every single one, I mean, except for control and market cornering, compete on price, but when you set the criteria and define the rules, the buying decision is changed in your favor.
The third reason why broad niches fail is because they dilute your marketing. If your niche is too broad, you end up trying to be all things for all people simultaneously, and it does not work. I have been helping financial advisors for more than 10 years now. I have done everything from content marketing to email marketing to direct mail marketing, and more, and I can tell you unequivocally that being specific about who you want to respond almost always increases conversions. It is so much better to send a direct mail piece specifically to surgeons, where you can talk about problems surgeons encounter with their money, in order to get surgeons to respond. [06:05.7]
Let me give you an example that should make this click instantly. You may have heard this before because this is a popular example. Even financial advisors use it to convince their clients or prospective clients to work with them. I want you to imagine you have a serious heart problem. I mean a real problem where your doctor looks at you and says that this needs surgery right away.
You have two options. Option A is you go to a cardiologist who says, “Don't worry, I can work with anyone with a pulse. I help people with all sorts of heart issues. I'm kind of a general heart guy.” Option B tells you, “I specifically specialize in this prolapse in men ages 50 to 60, and I have performed this exact surgery 400 times over the past five years.” Okay, obvious question, pop quiz time—which option are you going to trust more? Which one are you going to pick? [06:59.1]
You already know the answer. People almost always choose the specialist. That's option B, even if the specialist costs two or three times more, even if the specialist has a longer wait list, and he or she probably does, even if this specialist is further away. If you are in my home state of Delaware, and that's on the East Coast, for those of you who don't know, and the specialist is in Albuquerque, New Mexico, you are going to book that flight or pack up your little truck and hit the road, because specialization does something extremely important in the mind of buyers and prospective clients—it removes uncertainty. It makes them feel like the risk is lower, because it actually is. Not just as a marketing strategy, it actually is lower.
It makes them understand that the person has seen their exact situation before, the person has solved their exact problem before. They're not some weird one-off case. They're just something the person does or people the person deals with every single day. That's the sort of psychological relief that you get when you specialize, and it is priceless. [08:01.4]
In fact, the more I work with financial advisors, the more I have come to appreciate this part of niche marketing, because, at this point, I have seen almost every single scenario that a financial advisor can be in. I have worked with financial advisors in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and beyond. I have worked with financial advisors from all walks of life, all backgrounds, all niches. I have heard all sorts of stories.
At this point in my career, there's really not much a financial advisor can say to me that would be new to me in the marketing world, and that makes financial advisors comfortable. When I say stuff like that, they understand they're not going to challenge me with whatever their situation is. I'm not going to walk into unknown territory. I can help them improve their marketing and get clients in my sleep.
That's one of the reasons why I have office hours for financial advisors with Inner Circle members. I put myself out there. I walk the tightrope, okay? I could easily be embarrassed if somebody just asked a question and I'm like, Oh, gee, I don't know. But, actually, that happens frequently. Sometimes financial advisors will ask stuff and I just say, “Look, I don't know. I can't help you. I'm sorry.” At least, I'm honest about that. [09:03.6]
Lots of different marketing people would try to make something up and damage your career forever, because you trust people and you follow them. I don't want to do that. I don't want to be that guy for you. If I don't know something, I'm just going to tell you, and that does actually happen a lot more than you might realize.
But my point is that I really put myself out there and I really make myself available to help financial advisors, and I can just fix a lot of these problems. I can tell them exactly what to do, how to do it, why to do it, and if they just do what I say, I mean, not to sound super arrogant or conceited or anything, but if they just literally do what I say, then the things will probably work.
See, people don't question that for electricians or plumbers or anything like that. If an electrician says, “Okay, connect this wire to this point and then connect that wire to that point, then your lights are going to turn on.” Nobody says, “Oh, I don't know. Gee, should I follow what this person is saying?” No, they just listen to the electrician and flip the switch, and the light comes on. That's how I think about marketing, just listen to what I'm telling you. [10:02.8]
But enough about that, back to the niche thing. Broad niches communicate, “I might be able to help you,” and you don't want the “might.” Specific niches communicate, “I can help you. I've helped you, people like you, a thousand times already,” and that's what closes the deal. Even Netflix does this. Once you see this, you can unsee it.
Netflix doesn't really make content for everyone. Yes, I mean, they have a vast library they can put together and people can choose from. That's their business model, but that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about the actual end user of Netflix and what the end user sees. Netflix curates their content for these little micro niches, these little tribes. You have Korean drama. You have dads who like science fiction. You have teenagers who want high school romance movies with a supernatural twist. You have history nerds who love World War II documentaries. They can get extremely specific. [10:59.7]
Here's the weird part, or the amazing part if you're a marketer like me. The smaller the group they target, the more loyal the group becomes, because the more specific the content is, the more it feels like it was made specifically for the end user—and when something feels like it was made for you, you don't just watch it casually. You devour it. You tell other people about it, aka give referrals. You become emotionally attached to it, aka become loyal, and that's what a strong niche does for financial advisors. [11:30.1]
Listen up, financial advisors. This is something special I'm doing exclusively for people who listen to this podcast. If you subscribe to the Inner Circle Newsletter over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching, I will send you a collection of seven copyright-free emails, personally written by me, that you can use right away to begin getting more clients.
I call these my “objection-busting” emails, because they are designed to overcome the biggest objections financial advisors face. All you have to do is send me an email letting me know you’ve subscribed and I will reply with a link where you can download them for free.
I originally offered these in the May 2024 Inner Circle Newsletter issue, and it was one of the most popular bonuses I've ever given away. Today, these seven objection-busting, copyright-free emails are only available to listeners of this podcast, because I'm not mentioning them anywhere else. Go to TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching to subscribe today. Now, back to the show.
The next thing I want to talk about is the number one misunderstanding that financial advisors have about niche marketing. Lots of financial advisors believe that if they niche down, or get more specific, they're going to lose opportunities, but that's not true, unless you get way too specific, like, “I only work with potato farmers in Rhode Island who drive Chevy Silverado,” just something goofy like that. You're not going to do that. You're not going to get that specific. [12:57.0]
But the whole “I'm going to lose clients if I get specific” thing is the wrong mental model, because you're thinking like a generalist. You're thinking like someone who believes growth comes from being broad, but the reality is the opposite. When you niche down, you finally become visible to the people who you were supposed to work with all along.
When you're broad, nobody feels spoken to, so they ignore you, but when you get specific, your marketing suddenly triggers the “That's me” reflex. People see themselves in your marketing, and you get more clients, especially if you do things the way that I tell you, and these clients will already trust you. They will already believe you understand their world. They will already assume you're competent. It's just so much better.
I want you to imagine the direct mail example that I referenced earlier with surgeons. I want you to imagine that you send 1,000 direct mail letters just to random people in a zip code. You rented a mailing list. You didn't target it at all. You didn't make it more specific. You just mailed to everyone, and I mailed specifically to surgeons, and my mailing talks about how I help surgeons, and I know them, and I've helped hundreds of them over the past few years. [14:04.2]
Let's say that you get an average response rate of 0.5% and I get an average response rate of 2.5% because of that specificity. My mailing is going to get me five times the clients. I am going to have five times better economics, actually more than that, if you understand how marketing works at scale, and I'm going to have a more efficient business model, I'm going to have a higher close rate than you, too, probably, because all of my business is built around helping surgeons, and I have tremendous credibility, authority and rapport from the jump. Everything about my marketing and my business is going to be better than yours, simply from that specificity.
So, now you might be wondering, how can you do this? How can you make your niche more specific? I'm going to give you several examples. Big disclaimer here. I'm just going to rattle them off. You don't have to do all of them. You don't have to do any of them. These are just merely ways you could do it and possibilities for you to explore. [14:59.2]
One of the first things you can do is to start with actual people, not just a category, not something you're thinking about, actual people. Most advisors, when they're pressed to choose a niche, will pick a category. They'll pick business owners or women, or retirees, like I talked about earlier, and that can take you farther than working with anyone with a pulse. That can get better results, right? If you work with anyone and then suddenly you only work with business owners? Yes, you're going to get better results. But what if instead you started with real names and not labels?
Here's what you do. You write down all of your clients. Go to your CRM, where all your clients are housed. If you have 100 of them, then you should have a list of 100 people in front of you. Then you ask these questions:
“Who was the easiest to work with?”
“Who was the most profitable?”
“Who had the fastest time to close?”
“Who could clearly explain why they hired you?”
“Who gave you referrals? Who gave you the most referrals?”
Suddenly, you will see that some clients are better than others with these metrics. [16:07.0]
So, I want you to study the top 10% of your clients. If you only have 30 clients, that means they are the top three clients that you like best and that are the most profitable, and so on. Let's say that you circle someone who worked for Exxon, someone who worked for Chevron, and someone who worked for Shell. It seems like your niche should probably be oil and gas professionals.
Or if you want to get even more, even more specific, it could be oil and gas retirees with concentrated retirement benefits and pension decisions. I mean, you could get as specific as you want, but I'm just telling you, if you are marketing to everyone, and you discover that your top three clients are in Shell and Chevron, then you should probably specialize in oil and gas. [16:47.7]
Another thing you might want to do, and this won't apply to all financial advisors, but there are a lot of you who are listening to this podcast episode right now who could benefit from this, you could identify people’s triggering events. Instead of being focused on just a demographic or something like that, you focus on the transition that they experienced or the pain point they experienced in order to hire you. This could be anything from inheritance to divorce to forced retirement—that's a big one. Lots of people retire way earlier than they project—to leaving the military, to whatever it is for you. If you're a financial advisor who falls into this category, then you will know what the transition is for you.
If you go through your clients and you realize that the best ones all had the same one, two or three triggering events, then you should specialize in those events. This is not insanely difficult stuff. It's just getting clear on what has worked for you. If, for example, I go through my business and I find out that the absolute best clients for me came from two or three sources, then I'm probably going to want to focus on those two or three sources. That's kind of how you should think about it. Again, not super complicated stuff. [17:53.0]
Another thing you could do is to identify the financial pains that they all share. Your niche in this case, if you do it this way, is not necessarily who they are, but what hurts. What you do is list as many pain points as you can think of that your best client had or can maybe continue to have.
Maybe it was too much company stock or they were scared about outliving their money. That's common in a bunch of financial advisors’ businesses. If you're working with retirees, that's the first thing I would do, that I would go to, which is being afraid of outliving the money. Maybe they had no idea what to do with their 401(k), or whatever it is for you. Make a note of it and pick the one, two or three that occurred the most often, the ones that create the most urgency, meaning, you could use it in your marketing going forward and you can solve it extremely well, because you don't want to build a business around something that you can't do well.
If you are the master at helping people navigate sequence of returns risk and that's a pain point that people come to you with, even though I think that's unlikely—it’s not like people are coming to you using that language, but maybe it's possible—then you should go all in on that. [19:01.4]
One more thing you could do, and this is something I really enjoy and recommend, is thinking about the personality type you work best with. This is something I have personally done in my business, so I'm practicing what I preach here. I work best with financial advisors who think abundantly, who are mentally tough, who are serious and committed. Those are all traits of certain personality types. They just gel with me. I help them make a bunch of money, get a lot of clients. If you're someone who is like that, then you and I are probably a match made in heaven. If you're not like that, then we will probably not work well together.
In this case, when you're doing it this way, you don't want just a demographic. You want a psychographic as well. If you work best with analytical people, then you go towards that personality. If you work best with risk-averse clients, then you should try to get more of them. If you work best with people who want everything explained to them and want their hands held, and you're that type of financial advisor, you like doing that, then that's awesome. [20:01.2]
Some more examples off the top of my head are pilots and engineers. I know this is all going to be very stereotypical here, but I have seen this again and again. Pilots, engineers, professions like that, they tend to be very analytical, very detail oriented, and they have to be in order to do their jobs well, so you want them to be.
Dentists tend to be perfectionists, again, very good for their careers. They have to be. Most tech employees, secretly, deep down, want autonomy. They don't want the golden handcuffs, necessarily, and all the stuff that comes with it. Entrepreneurs want speed. They want clarity. They want their time saved, not wasted.
Your niche could even be something like detail-oriented people or analytical pilots entering the retirement window. I don't know, I'm just riffing here. It doesn't have to be that specific, but, again, this is just meant to give you ideas. I'm not giving you life-changing advice that you're going to do forever and have it set in stone. I'm just giving you ideas, okay? [20:55.2]
One more, and then I’m going to wrap up this podcast. I've saved the best for last. Again, this is something that I personally do. It works extremely well for me. It has worked well for financial advisors who have taken me up on it. It is building red flags and green flags to use as filters in your business.
This is something very few people are willing to do. They don't have the guts to do it, but it prevents you from ever picking people who can't afford you, are not motivated, who will be slow to move, who will just cause big headaches and problems in your business. If you know what your red flags are, you can just say no, and it should be an if-then rule. There should be no room for error here. There should be no misinterpretation. You should not break that rule. If someone comes to you with a red flag, you should not work with that person. If someone comes to you with a bunch of green flags, then that person should be given higher priority in moving through your conversion sequence. Here are some examples of green flags.
High income, high assets, recurring financial decisions, meaning, they're going to need you. That's huge. Lots of financial advisors never think about that. [22:01.5]
Existing complexity. Again, this is a way for you to make them need you and to demonstrate your value.
The risk of making big, irreversible mistakes. This is another way to demonstrate your value very clearly.
High desire for clarity, strong referral networks, so you can tap in, and you can get some referrals from them, and you can build yourself into their networks as well.
Those are all very desirable things to have in your clients and in your niche market.
Red flags are—again, these are just ideas. These are things that I'm putting out there. Your red flags may be different.
Chronically low urgency. If someone just doesn't see the need to work with you and is dragging his or her feet, you probably don't need that person.
No shared pain points, meaning, they don't really have any pain point that you specialize in or that you work with, or that your other clients have.
They have a low financial capacity. That's a nice way of saying they ain't got no money. Low willingness to pay even if they have money. They really don't want to give some of it to you.
Those are all things that could and should, in my opinion, disqualify people from working with you if you choose to take this approach. I highly recommend that you do it. It has changed my business forever. I think it's awesome, but you may not want to do this. [23:14.0]
Most advisors never get to feel what it's like to have prospects reach out and say, “I feel like you were talking directly to me.” Most advisors never build a business where referrals spread naturally, because clients can explain their true value in a couple of sentences, or maybe even one, just super simple sentence: “My advisor helped me fix X, Y, and Z.”
But, you, my friend, don't have to be most advisors. You can build a business where your marketing works with you, not against you. You can build a business where your marketing and your messaging cuts through the noise like a laser, instead of evaporating into a cloud of generic financial jargon that doesn't appeal to anyone. A strong niche gives you that foundation. [23:57.6]
I hope I've inspired you today to pick a niche if you don't have one, or to get clearer on your niche if you do have one, and I want you to watch how much easier and more profitable your entire business becomes when your marketing is finally designed for the right people.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you want to learn more about how I can help you get clients and build a better business, go to TheAdvisorCoach.com. I am so thankful for you, and I will catch you next week. [24:24.4]
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