Over the past few weeks, my team addressed the need to hire an additional designer. As we began thinking through the process of hiring someone as good as our current talent, we frequently found ourselves bemoaning the fact that we can’t just clone our lead designer. She’s excellent at what she does, so thinking of her as our “ideal designer” makes a whole lot of sense.
Finding your ideal person to work with extends beyond your team. One of the core building blocks of any successful marketing strategy is identifying your target audience and building your marketing materials around that. It’s one of the first things we do anytime we sign a new client because it tells us who we’re talking to, what we should write, how we should design, and where we should advertise – basically, it determines everything.
Marketing without first identifying personas is like using a duck call when you’re hunting deer. You’re not using the right tools for your intended audience. You may catch a duck, but that’s not really what you wanted.
Every advisor has specific types of investors they work best with, whether it’s retirees, young professionals, women in transition, physicians, business owners, or something else.
By identifying who your ideal clients are, you can attract more of the same kind. Yet we’ve found that most advisors haven’t taken the time to identify their personas. It’s understandable as it can be a time-consuming process, but it’s worth the investment.
This week, we’re excited to release a free tool to help you get a head start on your personas. Since we opened our doors almost two years ago, we’ve created over 100 personas for different advisors, so we went through all of them and compiled the eleven most common ones in an ebook . Each profile contains background information as well as tips on how you can appeal to that specific persona.
Not every persona will apply to your firm, and you probably have at least one that isn’t covered in the ebook, but we think it can spark ideas in developing and honing your other personas.
Everything we write, draw, design, layout, animate, and launch is done with unique investor personas in mind. If you’ve never taken the time to figure out exactly who your ideal clients are, I hope this ebook will, at the very least, help you start off on the right foot.