Uncomparable: The Financial Advisor’s Guide to Standing Out through Niche Marketing

Introduction

Finance had never been something I was interested in. In fact, the only D grade I ever received in school was in a finance class in college. Never would I have imagined that I would end up in a career in financial services.

But that’s what happened. In 2005, during my last semester in graduate school, I was laid off from a marketing position. I had to figure out how to pay for school and my living expenses. I needed a job, and I needed it fast.

Throughout business school, I had been learning to be a marketing generalist. Most of my classes were focused on consumer product marketing and food service marketing. Case studies were focused on marketing behemoths such as Procter & Gamble and Starbucks. Marketing jobs in those types of corporations just didn’t exist in San Diego. For the few marketing jobs in the area that did exist, there was a ton of competition, and I wasn’t a very competitive candidate.

Through a referral from a networking contact, I fell into a job at a hybrid Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) that was heavily focused on marketing. The RIA I worked for was in high-growth mode. At the time, there were nearly forty employees, and the company was putting significant resources toward marketing.

While at the company, I organized public workshops at Sizzler. I coordinated a weekend radio show on an AM station. I placed ads in the San Diego Business Journal’s Top Wealth Management Firms awards issue. I coordinated client events. Basically, if there was a marketing activity that financial advisors were using in the mid-2000s, I did it!

Not only did I market financial planning and investment services, but the company also had a tax practice, an insurance division, and a sister estate planning law firm, all in the same building. Working there was a crash course in wealth management marketing.

A couple of years after falling into financial services, I found myself really enjoying it. The marketing was focused on two aspects I really enjoyed: relationship building and education. The services I was helping to promote actually made a real difference in people’s lives. I realized that this was the industry where I wanted to spend my career.

Three years after first being hired at the RIA, I broke out to start my own financial services marketing agency. October 15, 2008, to be exact. Lehman Brothers had filed bankruptcy, the stock market was crashing, and the housing market was tanking. It was not a great time to be starting any business—especially not in financial services. But marketing financial advisors was all I knew how to do. And starting a business was a decision I had put in motion ten months earlier when I told my employer of my plans to start my own company. I couldn’t pull out of the decision now just because the country was facing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

In late October of 2008, I found myself with a brand-new business with only two clients during one of the worst periods in the financial services industry’s history. My future was not looking bright. Then, it got worse. My only two clients ended up in a legal dispute over a few employees, and I found myself having to choose which one to work with. I was left with only one client and not making anywhere close to what I was previously making as a full-time employee.

I didn’t have much money saved up. In fact, I only had a small amount of savings in my retirement accounts (that I couldn’t access) and a $17,000 line of credit. Single and living alone, I had no one but myself to rely on financially. And I didn’t have a viable Plan B. There was very little chance of me finding a full-time, salaried position in financial services marketing while the markets were in free fall. Uber didn’t exist yet. My only option was to make my new business work before blowing through my line of credit. That, or—at the age of thirty—move back in with my mother, who lived five hundred miles away.

Desperate to make my business work, I did the only two things I could think of to do at the time: write and network. I attended any financial advisor networking event I could find just to meet people. And I wrote what I knew about financial services marketing in a blog and emailed it to the advisors I had met at the networking events. I realized I needed a bigger audience than just my email list, so I started posting my blog on LinkedIn groups and then on Twitter. From there, my business started to grow. I picked up clients locally in San Diego but also in Puerto Rico and Orlando. The articles I posted on social media started getting noticed, and popular industry publications asked me to write articles for them. Those articles led to speaking engagements. In just a couple of years, I had more than replaced the income I had earned as an employee, and I had a team of four employees.

From 2008 to 2020, my firm primarily helped fee-only RIAs develop and implement marketing plans. We have worked on every marketing collateral and campaign you can imagine—websites, brochures, workshops, radio shows, podcasts, videos, social media, client events, client referral strategies, center of influence referral strategies, search engine optimization, ads—and the list goes on. My company worked with firms just starting out to as large as $3 billion in assets under management (AUM). Our sweet spot was $100 million to $500 million in AUM.

During those twelve years, marketing was getting harder. While digital marketing made marketing more accessible to businesses of all sizes, it was also adding complexity and noise. To market a business today, it feels like you need to be an expert in search engine optimization, Google ads, social media, video marketing, webinars, podcasts, and marketing automation systems, just to name a few. And the rules of the game constantly change, which means you have to keep changing your strategy just to keep up. Even with a marketing agency employing specialists in different areas of marketing, I found it harder and harder to keep up.

Then COVID-19 happened. It completely disrupted the marketing landscape for financial advisors. Social distancing protocols and lockdowns made marketing through personal relationships, such as referrals, more difficult. In-person interactions, workshops, and client events were canceled. The traditional way advisors had marketed their businesses nearly came to a halt in the spring of 2020.

In response to the changing environment, many firms shifted to digital marketing channels such as social media, search engine optimization, and webinars. As a result, digital marketing channels became saturated, making it difficult for firms to get noticed, especially when going head-to-head against financial companies with larger marketing budgets and staff. It felt as if every financial advisor was now online, saying they worked with high-net-worth individuals and families.

Marketing, which was already challenging, got that much harder. But there was one group of advisors I worked with who didn’t skip a beat. They were the ones who had clear expertise working within a niche. They had been focusing on creating awareness and credibility within their niche for years. Even prior to the pandemic, attracting clients to these firms didn’t necessarily require in-person interactions. They had truly positioned themselves as different from other advisors and weren’t competing in all the online noise. Their marketing strategy suffered very little disruption compared to the generalist firms I worked with during those initial months of the pandemic.

From my personal experience with my own business, I knew that marketing to a niche was easier than marketing to the general public. I knew generalist marketing required unnecessary hard work to stand out and get noticed. I knew there was an easier and more effective approach—niche marketing. I felt exhausted from hitting my head against the wall trying to come up with new ways to market the same old thing. In January 2021, I decided it was time for a change. I niched down and exclusively accepted new advisors as clients who also wanted to focus on a niche.

If you are frustrated with your marketing, I understand your frustration. And I know there is a better way. Through this book, I will show you this better way.

The recommendations in the book are not only from fifteen-plus years working with financial advisors and the insights from the advisors and experts I interviewed but also from my personal experience applying them to my own business.

Niche marketing has helped create success for both my firm and the advisors we work with. Whether you are a solo advisor or run an enterprise RIA, this book can help you. Although this book was written for the independent, boutique RIA, I believe all advisory firms can benefit from niching. The next section offers suggestions for adapting the strategies in this book depending on your firm type.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

When I first set out to write this book, I was writing it for the financial advisors I have primarily worked with throughout my career. These are owners of independent, boutique RIAs with AUM between $100 million and $500 million. When they come to me, they are struggling to get real traction in their marketing. Often these firms have one to three advisors and a handful of other employees, including associate advisors, client service associates, and administrative staff. These are the firms that’ve been in business for a while, building it by pounding the pavement to bring in clients. These RIAs have grown a respectable business through client referrals and personal relationships, but they’ve never been able to find a strategy that consistently brings in leads. The owners of these firms are motivated to find a better way to bring in clients than continuing to grind it out for the next couple of decades. While this book was written with this type of boutique RIA in mind, many of the strategies I discuss apply to all independent advisors and RIAs. (I will reference adaptations throughout the book.) If you don’t fall into this boutique RIA category, here is how to adapt the advice to your own situation.

Solo Practitioners

Solo practitioners who are just starting their businesses are in a great position to begin with a niche. This could be the twenty-something advisor breaking away from their employer to create their own business or the thirty- or forty-something career changer starting an RIA from scratch. As you start, you should absolutely take any client who can pay your fees, but implementing a niche will focus your limited resources, so you are getting the most impact for your dollars and effort. While you need to make sure you have enough money to sustain the years it takes to build a niche practice, you will get much better results putting all your time, focus, energy, and money into one niche than if you spread yourself thin across multiple niches or have no focus at all.

The advisors I interviewed for this book, who started their businesses with very few financial resources behind them, niched almost immediately. With resources thin and no time to waste, the advisors I spoke with moved quickly to a niche. I did the same when starting my own business. In contrast, the advisors who had a longer runway, meaning more financial resources to sustain them when they started their business, initially chose a traditional generalist path and only later came to the conclusion they needed to niche when they weren’t getting the results they wanted. While the sample size is small and the stories are anecdotal, this tendency to adopt a niche approach when you have no room for error suggests it is the more effective and efficient strategy for bringing in clients and revenue quickly.

Employee Advisors

If you are a young advisor employed by an RIA, you know you are at a disadvantage when it comes to attracting new clients to your firm. You most likely lack the network, relationships, and experience needed to convince prospective clients to work with you. And if you have chosen to work at an independent RIA, you probably don’t possess the killer sales instinct that is stereotypical of financial advisors of the past. Instead, you may find yourself prioritizing servicing existing clients over marketing and business development.

Your employer likely hasn’t equipped you with the marketing skills, knowledge, or resources you need. You may be expected to pound the pavement in the same way the owners did to build the business. But you know many of those tactics aren’t as effective today, nor are they your natural marketing style. You need a different strategy than the traditional networking or cold-calling approaches of the past.

If you are young or new to the business, having a niche will help you overcome any perceived lack of experience (as measured by years). It will help you overcome the lack of a large network because you won’t need long-standing personal or professional relationships to send you referrals. Word will spread about your expertise alone.

Whether you have ambitions to become an owner at your current firm or break off and start your own business, you’ll need to be able to bring in clients. Rarely do pure service advisors ever end up with equity in a firm.

While you won’t have the opportunity to implement all the areas mentioned in this book, you can choose a niche and focus your sales and marketing activities on it. If you start bringing in clients, you will be more valuable to the firm, incentivizing them to find ways to retain you. Or you will build up enough of a reputation that you can translate it to your own business someday. Even if you aren’t allowed to take clients with you, you will have the marketing momentum behind you to set your business up for success.

Enterprise