From the desks of Joe Bayliss and Roy Furr
Who, specifically, is your ideal prospect?
This is perhaps the most important question in business. Miss it, and your sales and marketing efforts will be full of waste. But if you nail it, it’ll be easier to target exactly the prospects who are most likely to become leads and clients. And it becomes easier to know what to say, to speak to their needs and get them interested in becoming clients.
And yet, many financial advisors (among other professions) are unclear on this. And as a result, their business suffers.
We’re working on a new campaign that forces us to get clear on it. We’re developing multiple direct mail initiatives that allow us to target down to the individual recipient — based on whatever data or targeting we choose.
Here’s where things get tricky. It’s incredibly easy, but extremely inefficient, to say, “Everybody is our prospect.”
If we did that, we could send a lot of pieces of mail. But profitability would be terrible.
The USPS offers Every Door Direct Mail. That program does what it says on the tin — allows you to mail to every household in a target geographic area. It’s an extremely cheap way to get marketing in mailboxes. Great for the neighborhood pizza joint, but terrible if only 1 in 50 households are your ideal prospect.
On the other end of the spectrum, if you know that you want households of a certain age window and net worth within a certain driving distance of your office, that’s possible. It will cost you more per recipient. But because of hyper-targeting, the net campaign profits will likely be much higher.
We apply this same principle in other media.
For example, we know our clients’ ideal prospects well. And even though you can’t target by household on TV, you can do a reasonable job of targeting by interest, which can be a proxy for other targeting.
So, for example, we can target people who view certain news talk TV on Saturday or Sunday mornings, on certain high-trust channels. By advertising during these programs or putting a 30-minute show immediately after, we are able to get a high proportion of viewers in the right audience for retirement planning concerns.
Finding the right target is extremely valuable.
We know the transition to retirement is a sweet spot for changing financial advisors. Someone may have set up an IRA or 401K through work, and contributed to it for years without much thought. Now they’re getting closer to retirement, and realizing they need more of a plan. So they’re looking for a new financial advisor who can help with the specific concerns associated with this big life transition.
Not only does this prospect often have much more money than younger prospects, they also statistically have a lot more years ahead of them, during which they’re likely to stay clients of a trusted financial advisor.
When you know these are your ideal prospects, you have a huge advantage.
You know how to target them. You know what to say to them. You know what offers to make, that will encourage them to reach out to you. And you can spend to acquire them as leads and new clients with reasonable confidence they will contribute significantly to revenue for years or even decades.
By working primarily with independent financial advisors and similar practices who are targeting this very specific audience, we are able to quickly and effectively generate leads even for brand new clients.
If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you target your ideal clients through high-trust media, schedule a free Marketing Audit by clicking HERE. In just 30-minutes, we’ll share objective and straightforward advice on your strategy, marketing channels, marketing copy and offer.
We only work with financial advisors, tax consultants, and estate planners who invest more than $250,000/year in marketing.
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