How to Determine, Describe, and Discover Your Ideal Clients

One of the scariest things for financial planners to do is to narrow their target market, or niche.

You may wonder how on earth you could possibly make more money by only appealing to a smaller segment of the population. The truth is, by narrowing your niche you have the opportunity to set yourself up to winby simplifying your marketing efforts and effectively attracting more of your ideal clients. Does this mean you don’t accept people as clients who don’t fit your niche? That’s certainly up to you, but when you narrow your focus in terms of who you want to work with, your marketing efforts get much easier and clients begin to seek you out. Your niche or your target market speaks to the WHO you want to provide your services to, the specific group of people or businesses that you want to focus your marketing efforts around. Now in order to clarify WHO your ideal client might be, I ALSO want you to think about YOUR desired income. As long as you have chosen an ideal client that will ultimately support you in reaching your financial and professional goals, you will be in a position to fine- tune your branding and your systems to serve more of your ideal clientsto create the win/win experience that you are truly looking for.Related: How to Target Prospects Near You

With that in mind, here are 3 Ds to clarify your niche: Determine, Describe, and Discover:

  • Determine the demographics of the type of client that would support YOUR financial goals. How would you describe that group? The more focused your market, the easier it will be for you to establish yourself as a credible expert amongst that group. Are they business professionals? Bay Area surgeons? Affluent families? High tech companies? Entrepreneurs or start ups? Or even more narrow such as employees of a specific company like Google, for instance?
  • Describe the top 3 characteristics of your ideal client whether it is their net worth, their profession or the geographic region where they are located.
  • Discover what their life looks like. What is their net worth? Where do they live? If they work, which industry are they in? What is the value of the car that they drive? What types of vacations do they take? Do they contribute to a particular charity or support their alma mater? Think about those people, that one ideal client.
  • Take some time to dig into these three “Ds”.