When I first started my financial planning business I had a dream of being all things to all people.
I thought I’d be helping a carpenter on Monday with his income protection and a doctor on Tuesday with his investment portfolio.
I set up a fantastic website which contained loads of articles and plenty of information on how we could help people.
But pretty soon reality set in – it just wasn’t happening!
So I quickly identified that I needed to target individual niches at a micro level. To do this I set up a number of websites targeting specific occupational areas such as doctors, tradies, lawyers etc with specific information relating to those people and their individual problems that needed solving.
The result? After a few weeks I started to get some traffic trickling though. Then after a month or two I started to get an enquiry or two each week, and within a year I was getting so many qualified leads that I had to start selling them to other advisers!
What I discovered is that trying to be everything to all people is fine if you have a huge existing client base, but if you’re trying to establish yourself from a small base you simply have to specialise in order to give yourself a point of difference.
How do you do this? Well first you need determine your ideal target customer, which I’ll talk about in my next post.
You have hit the nail on the head. Specialising is the way of the future for advisers. Gone are the days of being the local adviser. The internet will take over the insurance business. If you don’t specialise there is nothing special about you and you will fail. If not today, tomorrow.