Why your financial planning business needs hypertargeting.
Updated: Mar 21, 2021
In setting up your financial planning business you have a unique opportunity to focus on a very, VERY specific group of people - Seth Godin calls it your ‘tribe’ - where your knowledge base and personal passion or affinity lies.
HYPERTARGETING. What do we mean by that? Generally speaking, hypertargeting is a marketing strategy where you clearly identify a target customer and deliver extremely relevant messages in the places where they will be most likely to see it. For financial planning practices that steps up another level in that you develop financial knowledge specific to your target market – for instance if your target market is medical professionals you may become an expert in how medical practices are bought and sold, specific legislation pertaining to financial transactions in medical practices, relevant professional and personal insurances, how their equipment is financed and how the cashflow cycle effects family finances.
On the other hand, your niche may be those seeking an adventurous lifestyle – you may develop special strategies to always be investing and funding upcoming trips and challenges, search out the best insurance policies to suit that lifestyle, or get insider knowledge on how to create passive or secondary incomes to support the lifestyle and stay on track with a wealth plan.
Hypertargeting is extremely powerful because it helps you:
know and understand your customer better than anyone else
to develop a deeper personal relationship and trust
to tailor your ongoing communication and content in a very specific and relevant way. You only need to talk about issues that are going to be relevant to your subset of clients.
get qualified leads from people who are likely to become clients and avoid filling your funnel with uninterested audiences.
gain more clients by marketing the right offerings to the right customers on the right platforms.
deliver better quality advice for those particular clients
Your biggest opportunity in financial advice is taking advantage of the fact that consumers are becoming used to extremely personalised service and information. Highly tailored advice will soon be the low bar for client value. Clients increasingly expect their wealth advisors to have an intuitive understanding of their financial and personal situations and want advice customized to their preferences and goals. Too often, financial advisers are afraid if they pick a niche and speak to one target audience, they will lose out on opportunities. They get nervous about pigeonholing themselves, so they keep their options open, and do not commit to the type of client they serve.
A significant portion of your success will be determined by how much your clients like you, connect with you and trust you. These metrics will be greatly enhanced if you can relate to them on a very granular level about their needs, their lifestyle, their problems and their goals. Not only that, when you know exactly who your target clients are and how to reach them, building and growing your business becomes much easier. Marketing messages and communications are streamlined, it can also improve efficiencies in your business processes.
To fully understand hypertargeting, it helps to also understand the following definitions:
Client persona: an in depth customer profile that outlines who your target customer is by defining their demographics, sociographics, professional roles, values, goals, challenges, influences and buying habits.
Segmentation : the act of dividing an audience into smaller group based on their interactions with your brand or their demographics, sociographics, professional roles, values, goals, challenges, influences and buying habits.
Geo-targeting : The act of targeting a customer based on their location. This could be as broad as targeting people in Australia, or as narrow as targeting by postcode or kilmetre around your business.