For wealth management firms, one of the best ways to grow your business and find more clients is to identify your perfect client. That may seem like obvious business sense, but the majority of firms haven’t taken the time to actually document and formalize their ideal client profile.
A 2022 RIA Benchmarking study from Schwab found that only 25% of advisory firms have a formal ideal client defined at their firm, despite 81% of advisors rating “having a clearly defined ideal client” as critical to success. This disconnect means most firms are missing out on one of the key factors driving growth. The study also found that firms with documented ideal client personas attracted 42% more new clients and 45% more client assets.
Let’s break down how you can find your ideal client, what possible client personas might look like, and where you can start attracting more clients.
Break Down Your Ideal Client Profile
The first step to finding your ideal client isn’t to brainstorm what traits they should have or what demographics they should fall under. Instead, you’ll want to start by looking at your current clients and organizing them into a client profile based on your current work. The caveat here is to only include the type of existing clients you want to continue to work with (and attract more of).
You can do this by taking a list of your best clients and creating a list that finds the common thread connecting all of them. Add columns like:
- Assets
- Annual revenue
- Career
- Family status
- Age
- Personality
- Source
Once you have an organized list, identify any commonalities between them. Perhaps it’s age, career path, or referral source. This will help you see where you have the strongest connections between the group and what segments start to arise.
Once you’ve identified those connections and named them, there you have it — your ideal client profile. This profile can be very beneficial in helping you find your ideal clients, as it can help you determine where to spend your time marketing to find new clients, what qualities to look for in future clients, and make a stronger case that you’re a fit for their interests (since you already have existing clients that fit a similar profile).
Documenting Your Ideal Clients
As we learned above, documenting your ideal client profile and disseminating it across your firm is key for success. Having a formalized and documented profile in place can serve as a north star to guide your future marketing decisions and strategic growth areas in the future.
One method of documenting your client profile is to identify which investor personality they fall under. These five can give you an idea of what this could look like:
- The Protector: A DIY investor who believes in as little risk as possible.
- The Competitor: Has multiple advisors and allocates solely on performance.
- The Collector: Proudly spreads their assets among multiple advisors to diversify.
- The Verifier: Focused on the client experience and wants to establish a relationship.
- The Simplifier: Invests as a lump sum and wants to keep it simple.
By codifying your client profile in groups similar to these, you can figure out which personality is right for your firm’s goals and client profile. Then, you can start to attract and focus your growth efforts on clients who already fit the bill instead of casting a wider net that may or may not yield results.
Start Finding Your Perfect Clients
Ultimately, doing the work to find your ideal client helps you more easily attract and win the business of those types of investors. Now that you have an idea of your client profile and formal documentation about what they care about, you can start marketing specifically to their needs.
For example, if you’ve identified that your ideal client is middle-aged doctors, you can focus your marketing efforts on local organizations for doctors, referral programs for your existing doctor clients, and even do digital marketing targeted toward that age group and career path.
Docupace’s digital operations platform can help you unlock more productivity and time with clients so you can spend more time creating an ideal client profile and less time doing paperwork. Contact us to learn more.
