First, pick your target market and niche
Scattershot marketing of your investment or financial advisory services will sap your energy. Plus, it makes it harder for you to distinguish yourself from your gazillion competitors. This is why I’d like you to pick your target market–the group of people whom you target–and niche, meaning the services you provide, before you write any marketing materials, including your blog.
Don’t know how to choose your target market or niche? “Why People Buy What You’re Selling,” Chapter 2 of Michael Port’s Book Yourself Solid offers exercises that will help.
“What are your clients’ compelling desires?” asks Port in this chapter. Understanding the answer to this question is a key to your marketing – and blogging – success.
Knowing your target market, niche, and your clients’ “compelling desires” will tell you who to address in your blog and which benefits of your services you should stress.
Edited July 21, thanks to comment from Ben.
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SUSAN WEINER, CFA
July 21st, 2010 at 2:54 am
Hi Susan. Great advice. You said, “…pick your target market and niche, meaning the services you provide…” Target market and niche may be the same thing, but for most advisors, neither one is a “service”. So how do you know when you have a niche? When it looks like a bunch of people. A niche has a pulse, an IQ, a mailing address, a job title, and a club or association where it likes to hang out. Niches “flock together”. “Retirement planning” is not a niche, but left-handed welders, interventional cardiologists, and Subway franchisees would all be examples of niches or target markets.
July 21st, 2010 at 4:19 pm
Ben,
Oops, I misspoke. Michael Port defines “target market” as the group of people whom you target and “niche” as what you provide to them. He points out that some people use the two terms interchangeably.
As for niche, I think of financial advisors as mainly providing a service, although products often come into play.
You seem to be saying that a niche is associated with a narrowly defined group of people. I buy that.
I’ll go back and edit my confusing sentence.
Thanks for your comment!
August 8th, 2010 at 4:14 pm
During August 2010, you can read an article about niche marketing in the Journal of Financial Planning at http://www.fpajournal.org/CurrentIssue/TableofContents/HowtoBuildaNichePractice/
August 22nd, 2010 at 1:46 pm
Here’s a link to Michael Port on the difference between target market and niche: http://networkedblogs.com/75Cld
December 21st, 2010 at 6:11 am
[...] so little time. One way to narrow your scope is to focus on a target market, as I described in “First pick your target market and niche.” A next step is to distinguish between prospects, leads, and opportunities as defined in The [...]
March 3rd, 2011 at 12:36 pm
Great article I’ve just added to my bookmark list.
July 15th, 2011 at 5:46 am
I enjoy reading your writing but unfortunately this time you might have been too sick while writing because the blog post it feels rushed.
September 29th, 2011 at 12:06 pm
And that takes more guts than I’ve seen from anyone in Washington, except maybe Bernie Sanders