Am I in a market niche I have not seen?

Marketing a financial planning practice is not always a difficult task and may be much easier to do than first thought. Rohan Mead finds it can be a fairly unscientific affair and with good reason.

Good financial planners often tap into a client base by exercising their native talents for effective person-to-person communications and relationship building. This leads them to a stream of new business built around an ever expanding web of referrals.

So it can be that financial planners find themselves in a market niche that they may have had no particularly detailed plans to get into and this may have arisen from a number of factors.

These factors may include geographic location, the age of the financial planner and the industries and/or professions the planner may have good knowledge of through past experience.

Other factors may also inlcude types of market conditions that prevailed when the planner started their business such as increasing client interest in DIY super funds or perhaps an economic downturn that was producing a significant number of redundancies.

All of these factors and more may have combined to establish the character of a financial planner's practice.

So what use does a successful financial planner have for complicated marketing concepts like market niche, segment analysis and targeted business development activity. Well, it may be that disciplined analysis of the pattern of a financial planner's business yields very positive growth opportunities.

Marketing professionals may have developed a bad name in the jargon stakes. But despite this, a lot of marketing analysis is aimed at something very simple-clear and useful descriptions of markets, customers, and product/service features and benefits.

And in the frantic world of day-to-day client servicing pressures, a financial planner may not take the time out, or have the proper tools at his or her disposal, to reflect on the characteristics of their client base and identify where unexploited opportunities might be hidden.

For example, I have worked with one financial planner who had a successful practice in a semi-rural retirement centre that was tapping into a client base that he described broadly as a group of high net worth individuals, predominantly self-funded retirees from a small business background.

Importantly, however, the financial planner felt that most of the referrals and new client leads he got from his client base were for people in the same region. And in fact when he was questioned, he admitted that the referrals he actively sought from his clients were for people in the district.

The financial planner was ambitious and wanted to grow his practice but he could not see a clear way to significantly increase the rate of growth of his client base and so he sought the assistance of a marketing consultant to investigate new growth options. The marketing consultant suggested the first thing they should do is examine the characteristics of his client base and the services he supplied to them.

The investigation brought to the surface a number of factors the financial planner was aware of but had not thought about from a marketing or business development perspective.

After investigating the practice's client base and service offering it was suggested that it might be more useful for the financial planner to think about his "average" client in the following terms:

- Retiring and retired small business couples who had relocated from the nearby major metropolitan centre

- Who were seeking tax effective retirement income streams and portfolio management advice

- With a range of estate planning requirements that were sometimes difficult to address because of critical business wind-up decisions clients made before fully considering retirement and relocation.

Cast in these terms, the financial planner saw new opportunities for growth and employed the marketing consultant to assist him in executing a disciplined business development program.

He saw the opportunity to seek referrals from his clients to their colleagues, friends and business associates who were still actively engaged in their businesses in the city but who were approaching retirement.

The financial planner advised his clients that he planned to open an office in the city and work from there 1 or 2 days a week. He let his clients know that this would allow him to assist their friends with important pre-retirement considerations.

He set about communicating this with his clients in a well planned manner and at a business level, he increased the resources in his "head" office to allow him to take the time for appointments at his serviced office in the city.

The results were very positive. Clients responded with new leads that they had never passed on before because they did not feel the financial planner was interested, or set-up, to serve these people as clients.

At a business level the planner's company has taken a big step up in growth and his mix of business has changed-he is now providing a more diverse range of services to small business owners including advice to a growing book of active DIY superannuation funds.

So sometimes focused thinking about marketing can provide a new perspective, one that can reveal hidden opportunity. Marketing professionals are one of those resources you should not overlook as you think about achieving new growth for your business.

Rohan Mead is the group manager for business development with Perpetual