Want More of the Right Clients? Get More Specific

Most advisors want more clients who are a natural fit for their practice—the kind of clients who value their approach, need the work they do best, and are more likely to build a lasting relationship with the firm.

Getting more specific about who you serve can help you reach more of those people. Still, that can feel limiting when your practice already serves a broad range of clients. You may work well with professionals in their 40s, couples approaching retirement, business owners, and clients who have already retired. Why would you want your marketing to suggest otherwise?

Keeping your message broad seems like the safer choice. More people fit the description, so you preserve more potential opportunities.

But what if trying to keep more potential clients in your audience is the very thing making fewer of them interested?

Make It Easy for Prospects to Recognize Themselves in Your Message

Imagine a 48-year-old professional looking for a financial advisor.

She and her spouse earn a good income. They have kids, retirement accounts from different employers, other investments, and several financial decisions that are becoming harder to consider separately. Nothing dramatic has happened. Their finances have simply become more complicated as their careers and assets have grown.

She visits an advisor’s website and reads:

“We help individuals and families pursue their financial goals through comprehensive financial planning.”

She fits the description. The problem is that almost everyone else does, too.

She knows the advisor provides financial planning for people like her, but she has no idea if this firm regularly works with people in her situation.

She visits another advisor’s website and sees:

“We help successful professionals build and manage a financial plan as their wealth grows.”

This description gives her more reason to pay attention. She can see herself in the type of client the advisor serves, even though it still doesn’t say much about the specific financial challenges that brought her there. 

Finally, she visits a third website:

“We help professionals in their 40s and 50s bring increasingly complex financial decisions into one coordinated plan.”

This time, she recognizes more than her demographic. She recognizes the situation that led her to search for an advisor in the first place. 

At each website, she’s asking herself, “Is this firm for someone like me?” The more specific the website’s positioning, the easier that question is for her to answer.

Of course, there’s an obvious tradeoff. The third advisor has also made it easier for some prospects to decide the firm isn’t for them.

Some Prospects Won’t See Themselves

This is the part of niching down that makes many advisors uncomfortable.

The first description in our example includes almost anyone who might hire a financial advisor. The final description doesn’t. There may be plenty of people the advisor could serve well who wouldn’t see themselves in it.

That tradeoff is real. 

The question is whether including those additional people in marketing materials was actually helping the advisor attract them in the first place.

When your message has to apply to almost anyone, there’s only so much you can say about the person you’re trying to reach or the problem they’re trying to solve. That’s when marketing tends to fall back on broad language like “experienced,” “personalized,” “comprehensive,” and “client-focused.” Those things may all be true, but they don’t give a prospect much reason to think, “This advisor understands people like me.” 

Go back to our prospect, the 48-year-old professional. The broadest version technically included her, but it gave her the least information about why this particular advisor might be relevant to her.

As the advisor websites got more specific about who they work with, her reason to pay attention became clearer.

Still, that raises another question. What if professionals in their 40s and 50s aren’t the only good clients this advisor has?

Focus Your Marketing on Who You Want to Attract

Suppose an advisor has built a practice around two primary groups: professionals in their 40s and 50s whose finances have become more complicated as their careers and assets have grown, and couples within five to 10 years of retirement who are starting to make decisions about how their savings will support the next stage of their lives.

The advisor may also have other longtime clients who don’t fit neatly into either description. That doesn’t make the niche meaningless.

There’s an important difference between asking, “Who could I help?” and “Who am I trying to attract?”

An experienced financial advisor could probably come up with a long answer to the first question. The second should be much more focused.

Your Quick Win

Finish this sentence:

“I help [specific type of client] who are dealing with [specific situation] achieve [specific outcome].”

You may have more than one answer because you have more than one core client group. That’s fine. The goal isn’t to squeeze every good client you’ve ever had into a single sentence.

Now look at each sentence from the prospect’s point of view.

Would someone in that group immediately recognize themselves? Would they recognize the situation that brought them to you? Is the outcome something they actually want, rather than a description of the services you provide?

If you start with “professionals in their 40s and 50s” but keep adding qualifiers until the sentence also accommodates retirees, business owners, young families, and everyone else you could potentially serve, narrow it again. 

Your positioning doesn’t need to account for every person your firm is capable of helping. It needs to make the right prospects stop and think, “This advisor works with people like me and understands the kind of problem I’m trying to solve.” That’s what specificity gives you.