For advisors use only. Not for use with investors. 

Why is it that top advisors who focus on niches earn, on average, 40% more in revenue and 67% more in take-home income than those who don’t?*

One reason is the “sea of sameness” among financial professionals. Many of them make the same claims and use the same words. Many of their websites, brochures and business cards look and feel similar.

That’s according to Kristen Luke, the founder of Kaleido Creative Studio, a marketing consulting agency that works with hundreds of advisors across the country on their client acquisition strategies. She is the author of the bestseller “Uncomparable: The Financial Advisor’s Guide to Standing Out through Niche Marketing.”

“When you focus on a niche, it helps you distinguish yourself from other advisors. It shows the prospects that you are designed just for them,” Luke explains. “It also makes you a big fish in a small pond.” Carving out a niche decreases the size of your addressable market and thereby increases your ability to become a well-known, trusted resource in that community.

Here are three steps to winning a niche as a financial advisor.

1. Go deeper to define your niche

Many advisors may think they already have niches. But oftentimes, the “niche” people have in mind is something like women, business owners or executives.

None of these are niches, says Luke. Saying that your niche includes half the human population, after all, isn’t saying much.

A better approach is to look at your existing book of business for niches hiding in plain sight. That can be a good starting place. “But if you just look at your client base,” Luke says, “you’ll come to the conclusion very quickly that everyone just wants retirement planning. And so you do have to dig a little bit deeper.”

Luke suggests looking at three areas to define your niche:

• Passion: What do you enjoy doing, both personally and professionally?
• Aptitude: What expertise, experience and education do you have that other advisors don’t?
• Profit: Can you make money serving this client segment?

Using criteria like these, you can identify and evaluate niche opportunities.

2. One client, one problem, one solution, one outcome

Once you’ve identified the niche you want to specialize in, what do you do next? “Develop your messaging,” Luke says. “I think this is one of the areas that gets ignored, and it’s actually one of the most powerful.”

Stand out by aligning your message with your niche. Luke offers a simple formula to articulate your value proposition: “One client, one problem, one solution, one outcome.”

This formula can anchor and focus everything you do. Revisit your value proposition and reorient your practice around it. And while you may feel like you’re doing yourself a disservice by not cramming everything you offer into one sentence, it’s better to say something specific than to try to say everything – which is really to say nothing at all.

“I find that a lot of advisors try to say they kind of do everything for everybody,” observes Luke. Many advisors’ websites are little more than laundry lists of everything from investment and risk management to retirement and tax planning, all wrapped under terms like “fiduciary,” “goals,” “personalized” and “holistic.”  The common failure to develop a differentiated message might be why 62% of advisors say that their websites are ineffective at generating leads.**

Once you’ve clearly articulated your value proposition, you’re on your way to marketing yourself to your niche.

3. Build your marketing plan based on where your niche congregates

Your expertise is in financial planning, not marketing. You might see that as a disadvantage. After all, it’s nearly impossible for you to stay on top of the latest marketing trends – new advertising channels, social media platforms, technologies like generative AI, algorithms and forms of content.

But according to Luke, a benefit of sticking with a niche is that you don’t need to worry about staying on top of every new marketing trend. The trends you should care about, she says, are about where the people in your niche are spending their time. Instead of asking questions like, “Should I make a TikTok or YouTube shorts, too?” advisors should ask themselves one simple question: “Where does my niche congregate?”

They may well be watching TikTok and YouTube shorts, but they might not be. Luke recommends Facebook groups as a good place to find people with specific interests and needs. They can congregate offline, too. One advisor she has worked with specializes in working with firefighters and delivers copies of his book to local fire stations every year.

She finds herself constantly warning advisors against “random acts of marketing.” “This is something that everyone does,” she says. “You find some sort of shiny object that you hear about, and you follow it.” Let your niche strategy, not marketing trends, dictate how you find clients.

Luke has one final encouragement to advisors: give it time. She points out that it typically takes three years for advisors to gain traction in their chosen niches. “That’s how long it takes for people to know, like and trust you.”

And then, she says, you “get that flywheel going where things are just going to flow naturally.” Advisors she works with eventually streamline their operations, build a steady stream of clients and can service them all with fewer staff and fewer hours.

In fact, Luke says, “sometimes people will stop marketing and they'll still get clients for years after that just because they’ve already created all that goodwill within their niche community.” That can create more time for doing what you love – serving clients instead of searching for them.