Adviser feedback 10 June 1999 - Who is your target market?

Question: Who is your target market? Why?

Question: Who is your target market? Why?

"Our practice has been structured in a way where we are not required to directly market our services to the public. Currently, we have a network of referring accountants and solicitors who operate their own businesses in a professional and profitable manner. The opportunity for sound, ongoing financial advice is part of the total service of-fered to these clients.

We find that the referrals are successful people in their own profes-sion. They are usually wealthy individuals that have future goals es-tablished either for retirement or other purposes. Thus our practice has a fairly even weighting between superannuation and investment strategies. The clients are usually of middle to retirement age and within regions relative to the referral network."

Peter G Smith

Authorised Representative

Australian Financial Services

Director & Senior Certified Financial Planner

Brisbane

"My target market is a niche market, public sector employees taking redundancy packages. This sector is targeted, as clients are gener-ally pre-retirement enabling me to build a good long-term relation-ship. They often have a lump sum to invest, hence have a need for fi-nancial planning advice immediately.

I target this sector as my office of RetireInvest has been working in this area for around 10 years and has built up a good network of con-tacts. We are renowned for our knowledge of the intricacies of the various public sector funds."

Pam Gray

Financial Planner

RetireInvest

Adelaide

"Our target market is essentially existing Adelaide Bank clients. This tends to cover the full range of demographics. We do focus on high net worth individuals and those customers who already have sub-stantial business with the bank. Our main market is older, retired, conservative clients as this is the Adelaide demographic and addi-tionally that of many bank investors.

We do focus on this group because of the larger sums involved and profitability. There is no preference by sex or occupation, however the high net worth criteria tends to include more professionals. In terms of a niche market we do not target specific groups in our mar-keting."

Andrew Cooke

Senior Financial Planner

Adelaide Investment Services

Adelaide.

"My target market would have to be the pre-retiree in the age bracket of 48 to 60 although we do also deal with a number of retirees. This is my target market because this age bracket are obviously the people who most need our advice and assistance and are the most receptive to receiving advanced investment planning strategies which I enjoy com-piling.

The need to develop a long term relationship with a financial planner is easy to represent to clients in this age bracket as they are gen-erally concerned with their lack of preparation for retirement or want to gain comfort that their current plans are sufficient to fund the retirement they seek. From this platform, you can easily develop strategies that will identify what deficiencies (if any) there are and move to solve them within a portfolio that generally is large enough to fund the levels of brokerage or fee for service that my business needs to operate.

By dealing in this market there is obviously the continued generation of business that comes from these clients moving from pre-retirement to retirement and it is far easier dealing with people you have al-ready established a business relationship with than new clients.

My clients are generally male but by no means all male as I also deal with a number of women who are divorced or have been widowed. I am proud of the level of referrals that our business is currently gener-ating but there is always room for improvement, especially in the cross sell area.

I have a tendency to work in the small business market where I have been relatively successful and therefore a large degree of my clients are self-employed which provides multiple opportunities in the finan-cial planning, corporate superannuation and general insurance mar-kets. This market is untapped and the overall potential is generally under-estimated by our industry.

Paul Carter

Authorised Representative

AMP Financial Planning

North Perth.