Hey everyone, welcome to this great piece on Financial Advisor Niches.
By the end of reading this, you will be well informed on what Financial Niches entails, the advantages and how to create a good niche and its usefulness.
If you belong to this category, no need to worry because, in this article, you’ll walk away with comprehensive knowledge of:
Without much ado, let’s get started!
Introduction
We understand that many independent Financial Advisors want to choose a niche, but they’re always confused about it.
What is a Financial Advisor Niche?
One of the easiest ways to be a successful Financial Advisor is to carve a niche for yourself in the industry.
It is an effective marketing strategy that differentiates you from the crowd.
Even as an expert financial adviser, you can’t be a Jack of all trades.
Top Financial Advisors don’t beat about the bush; they design a niche that best suits them and establish themselves as a force to be reckoned with therein.
Anytime you attempt to kill two birds with a stone, you end up missing out on both of them.
So, be more discerning, purposeful, and practical about your financial planning career by designing a unique niche for yourself.
A niche is a specially designed offer for a target group of clients in the market.
Most times, business consultants, researchers, and writers use the words: “niche” and “target market” interchangeably.
It is wrong!
A market, in this sense, is the group of people you want to sell your specialized services to.
A target market is the number of potential clients you can have, while a niche is an offer you design to attract clients from the market.
A registered investment advisor (RIA) who wants to succeed must first identify the people to whom he wants to sell his dedicated financial services.
This identification will help you create a unique niche that’ll become irresistible to your prospective clients.
For your niche offer to attract a large pool of clients, your market must be well-defined, small, and specific.
Wealth managers who usually target an undefined market end up offering their services to a meager percentage of the market.
For instance, if you make pre-retirees of no particular company your prospects in your bid to expand your clientele, you may not be able to attract a lot of them to your brand because of its undefined nature.
A brokerage that focuses on retirees of a specific firm or real estate planning in a demographic setting will most likely do better due to the small size of the target market.
Advantages of Creating Financial Advisor Niches
The types of financial services you offer will determine the quality of clients you’ll attract to your brand.
It’s so saddening to observe that many Financial Advisors have myopically become advocates of “casting a wide net to secure more deals.”
You don’t secure more business deals by offering different niches but through careful planning, analysis, and implementation of the right ideas in a specialized segment.
Below are some compelling reasons why you should create a niche:
It leads to more conversion rate
On the surface, it looks plausible to expand your catchment area and speak to more people in a bid to grow your business, but in the long run, it’s tiring and unproductive.
When your niche is carefully selected and well-defined, you stand a higher chance of converting more potential clients to actual clients.
Prospective clients are very particular about the area of expertise of an advisor before contacting them.
For instance, a doctor will prefer to subscribe to the financial services of an advisor who is a specialist in the medical niche than to pitch a tent with someone without a defined market.
Once you’ve chosen and established yourself as an expert financial planner in a particular niche, you’ll become too noticeable to be ignored by new clients.
The essence of designing a specific niche is to make you the go-to expert in the field.
It makes you work smarter and have better output
One of the disadvantages of not carving a niche for yourself is that you’ll work hard without a corresponding output for your effort.
Once you identify the right market, you’ll know how to design your niche to serve their needs.
It’s easier to meet the demands of people with similar needs than trying to proffer solutions to the problems of no particular person.
A generalist works hard to please everyone but ends up not pleasing anybody.
When you carefully understudy your target market, it’ll be easier for you to design prepackaged and customized solutions for your new clients.
It also helps you to deliver excellent services that will ultimately lead to an increase in your earnings.
Specialist Financial Advisors have an advantage over generalists because their prospects have similar financial goals, investment concerns, queries, and service needs.
Instead of moving across niche businesses, why don’t you focus on a niche group for better output?
It makes prospecting more fruitful
If your target market is not well-defined, you’ll end up channeling most of your marketing efforts to unqualified prospects.
But if you converse with carefully x-rayed niche groups, you’re sure of converting most of the prospects.
Once you’ve rightly positioned yourself in the right niche industry, you become the go-to person for clients’ specific needs.
Advisory firms with a clear focus know how to reach out to prospects and seal business deals.
You don’t want to waste time trying to get clients from everywhere and anywhere.
Otherwise, you’ll end up trying to run after everyone, but no one will take you seriously because they’re not confident in your ability to handle their special needs.
You stand a better chance of getting more referrals
How do you feel if your current clients become your unpaid advertisers by recommending you to their relatives and friends?
This is what having a specialty does for you; it makes people recommend your brand to those who need the specialized services you’re rendering.
Current clients who are satisfied with your service delivery and confident about your reputation will recommend you to those who need similar services like theirs.
If you speak with some of the best Fiduciary Advisors in town, they’ll tell you that referrals contribute highly to their annual earnings.
You’ll face minimal competition
Creating a specialized niche makes you a go-to wealth manager in that particular sector.
Clients will trust you because they’ve seen you consistently demonstrate service excellence.
This trust is the conviction an ideal client needs to patronize you.
Once you have a trusted reputation in a given niche, many people will begin to refer you to others, whether verbally or through social media.
With fewer competitors, you’ll be able to understudy them and develop creative strategies to stay top of the game.
Unfortunately, the reverse is the case for generalists who compete with everyone and no one in particular; they’re like wanderers with no specific purpose in the industry.
Whatever niche you settle for, run a quick search on LinkedIn to have a glimpse of who your competitors are.
Apart from the points x-rayed so far, there are some other reasons why you should be niche-specific.
Outstanding Niches for Financial Advisors
Now that you’ve understood why you should create a niche, it’s time to talk about niche ideas that work.
You should know how to develop a niche market as an advisor if you want a breakthrough in the industry.
Below are carefully selected niche categories you can choose from:
Technical Niche
It is also known as “occupation niche.”
It is the act of offering financial advice to people of a chosen career or occupation.
Advisors who have had a stint in another career before venturing into financial planning will easily make themselves a force to be reckoned with by offering invaluable financial advice to those still in the advisors’ former occupations.
Career-changers have two pronounced points of advantage over others: they have experience in the occupation, and the target market will take them seriously because they believe that the advisors know their specific needs.
If you can offer financial services that others don’t have the experience, resources, knowledge, connections, or skills to provide, it’s wise that you design a niche along this line.
Jonathan Lachowitz, CFP of the White Lighthouse Investment Management, has distinguished himself by offering cross-border wealth management tips to his clients.
He’s able to masterfully operate in this niche due to his vast understanding of the real estate and tax management system of different countries.
Education Niche
When people go through life transitions, they need professional guidance on living well in the new stage of life.
For instance, if an individual is planning for retirement, it’s a life transition they need to properly prepare for because they have to be better financial managers at this stage.
They’ll earn less at retirement and might need to spend more on healthcare due to old age and other factors.
Thus, an advisor may decide to focus on retirement planning as a profitable niche.
Further, when people win a judgment, lottery, or receive an inheritance, they’re mostly not mentally prepared on how to spend the largesse.
They need guidance on making well-informed financial decisions, fending off opportunists marauding as friends, and being realistic about their needs.
If you can help such people with personal finance planning, then the education niche is a good choice for you to explore.
Company Niche
Another niche strategy you can use to build your brand is by identifying specific companies that need your services.
The companies may be within your demographic region or your area of interest.
If you’re able to understudy the workforce of a large company and come up with a tailor-made solution for their financial needs, you can direct your marketing effort to them and build a client base in the company.
For instance, if you’re in Atlanta, you can make Coca-Cola your company of target because it has thousands of employees receiving wages within the same period and with a similar pattern of life.
Move closer to the company’s workforce, chat with them to know their unique needs, design a retirement plan for those planning to retire in the next few years, and create a rich client profile that’ll be used as bait to lure them to your company.
Clients are enthusiastic to subscribe to your services if they discover that you’ve done the necessary background works about them.
A niche marketer must not be docile, but they should be proactive and strategic with how they interface with their prospective clients.
One of the advantages of focusing on specific companies within one’s neighborhood is because the firms have a ready-made market base; one only needs to come up with potent niche tips to convert them.
Specific Product Niche
The kind of service different types of Financial Advisors offer serves as the niche differentiator.
From the beginning of this piece, we’ve emphasized that you can’t be a master of all trades in Financial Advisor marketing and be remarkably successful.
You can design a niche out of any given financial product, build it from scratch, and deepen public opinion about it.
There are different types of financial planning services, and you shouldn’t be adamant about a specific one even when you don’t have the intellectual wherewithal to perform it excellently.
Your niche target should be on a specific product you can authoritatively handle.
The question of how big should a Financial Advisor niche be is never a determining factor in choosing a specific product to focus on.
What is paramount is that your product has a clear-cut focus and addresses the specific needs of your clients.
When your niche focuses on a specific product, you’re able to create a unique client experience that keeps subscribers loyal to your firm.
From the types of niches considered so far, it’s crystal clear that only those who make their niche targeting specific and client-driven would stand out from others.
Millennial Niche
Technology-savvy millennials whose interests differ from traditionalists are fast dominating the world.
They thrive through new business ideas which are digitally run.
While there’s no gainsaying that this is one of the top niche markets that an advisor can explore, it is also essential to state that an advisor must familiarize himself with the language of the generation to be accepted.
You must know how to actively host meetings via webinars, record a podcast and broadcast it, and ultimately, put social media into use because these are platforms through which you can easily hold a conversation with them.
Conclusion
Overall, we have discovered that the popular niches are not necessarily the best.
There’s neither a bad nor good niche because a poor financial planner can mismanage even the best niche market.
Also, apart from the niche groups discussed here, there are many other niches, such as social, market, and business niches, worth exploring.
Marketing niche becomes easy after identifying target markets for Financial Advisors; the most daunting niche challenge for Advisors is identifying where they best fit in in the market.
Advisors must therefore learn niche marketing before setting up with advisory firms.
Have you found your niche yet?
