Financial Advisors: Don’t Have Buyer Personas? Be Prepared to Lose with Your Online Marketing

 

“A buyer persona enables you create marketing content that is for someone and not everyone.”

 

Does your firm have buyer personas for your ideal clients? An intro on this topic from Hubspot:

 

 

More importantly, do your marketing efforts, including those online, reflect your buyer personas?

 

Sure, you and your team may know you provide special expertise to business owners, but if that’s not clearly reflected on your site with a dedicated page for entrepreneurs, how will they know?

 

Buyer personas allow you to:

 

• Create engaging content that speaks to your target customers

 

• Optimize your marketing campaigns, such as SEO & social media, based on your personas’ online behavior and habits. These insights will help you know which keywords to target with your SEO strategy, your blog posting schedule, your activity on social media, and the strategy behind your email marketing campaign.

 

• Develop customer acquisition and retention strategies that align with your niche and clients’ needs. For example, let’s say your target multimillionaires. Even within that large group, there are niches such as:

 

• • Entrepreneurs who experienced a liquidity event
  • Heirs of large family fortunes
  • Widows/Widowers

 

Each of these personas is part of the same target market, but has unique needs and goals.

 

 

How Financial Advisors Can Get Started with Buyer Personas

 

It’s time for you and your team to move away from using demographics as an end all to be all, and evolve to using buyer personas:

 

These are some tips you can use to develop creative buyer personas:

 

https://www.hivemindinc.com/creating-implementing-buyer-persona/

 

Need more details? Try these 7 steps from Brent Carnduff of Echelon SEO:

 

http://www.iris.xyz/technology/why-buyer-personas-are-critical-financial-advisors

 

If you have been serving clients for some time, you’re in luck: your current clientele can serve as the perfect starting point!

 

You have years of data, starting with the information your clients share on client intake forms. Use surveys of your current clients to get invaluable feedback.

 

More tips here from Samantha Russell of Advisor Marketing:

 

http://www.iris.xyz/advisor-marketing/3-steps-creating-marketing-personas-financial-advisors

 

Leverage Your Buyers Personas in Your Firm’s Inbound Marketing Efforts

 

After you have collected the information you need for your buyer personas, make sure you leverage it!

 

Start with writing content that speaks to each persona in your blog and site content.

 

 

To determine topics for your content, start with Aaron Agius of the Content Marketing Institute’s 3 questions to dive into the mindset of your prospective clients:

 

1. What is the first thing your prospective client thinks about in the morning?
2. What is the last thing your prospective client thinks about at night?
3. Why? Dive into the why behind the first two questions.

 

Read more here from the Content Marketing Institute:

 

http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2017/07/hacking-buyer-personas

 

Key Takeaway: You should always be thinking who is the content for, what are their pain points, and how can you set your financial services offering apart in addressing those pain points.

 

For more resources, take a look at these great articles from around the web:

 

The Buyer Persona Institute

 

An Interview with Tony Zambito

 

SpotOn Vision’s Persona Marketing Slide Presentation

 

What Purpose do Your Buyer Personas Serve?

 

4 Tips for Improving Web Personalization

 

A Simple Buyer Persona Sheet