Own Your Niche: Inbound Marketing for RIA Owners

How Do You Find Your RIA Niche?

If you know who Jeff Ross is, you know that he’s the king of Comedy Central Roasts. If you don’t know, Roasts are an annual television insult-comedy event where celebrities get together to “honor” a particular public figure by insulting them (I promise, there’s a point to this). Every single Roast in the last 10 years featured Jeff Ross on the “dais”, panel of insulters. He’s made a name for himself as the “Roastmaster General” and has gone on to create offshoots of these successful products including Historical Roasts, Roast Battle, and more. Jeff said once in an interview that he took what he was good at, and turned it into a “5-lane highway.”

This is a prime example of niching. In the convoluted world of comedy, Jeff Ross found something that worked, and “niched down” to grow big.

If you can find out the type of customer you’re good at giving financial advice to (dentists, nurses, tattoo artists, etc…) and make that a 5-lane highway, there will be very few limits to how you can grow your RIA. But you’re gonna need a bigger boat.

You’re gonna need an Inbound Marketing Strategy to help you organize the volume of interest and scale to the size you want to be. That way, growth remains manageable.

How can you leverage Inbound Marketing as an RIA?

Definition: “Inbound marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. While outbound marketing interrupts your audience with content they don’t always want, inbound marketing forms connections they are looking for and solves problems they already have. (HubSpot)”

Marketing has come a long way from the Don Draper days of spray-and-pray creative advertising. The continual focus on ROI has forced companies to design entire marketing machines.

The innovation of the marketing revolution is truly a sight to behold, but it’s also easy to not know where to start, how to start, and how not to get lost along the way. Getting started can feel overwhelming.

Inbound marketing lays out a simple framework that you can deploy over and over again and will grow with your RIA. As you gain momentum and gain more clients, you’ll have to put less work into the maintenance of your marketing funnel and spend more time doing what you do best - financial planning.

You got into this business because you love financial planning, not marketing, right? So let’s ensure you have more time to plan by setting up your funnel with the right components.

The Buyer’s Journey

To understand your funnel, you have to familiarize yourself with the buyer’s journey. Visitors to your website will be in all different stages of the buyer's journey, and you should have content and touchpoints that are tailored to them in each phase.

Below is a standard visualization of the traditional buyer’s journey. This visual will help you orient your efforts.

Looks pretty straightforward, right? Well, let’s dive into it and understand what kind of touchpoints and goals go along with each stage.

The Awareness/Interest Stage

GOAL: Convert inbound traffic into marketing qualified leads (MQLs). In the Awareness stage, visitors to your website are experiencing some kind of pain. They want top-level information. They want to know what they don’t know. They might even be figuring out how to ask the question they want the answer to.

In the awareness stage, you’re going to want to create high-level content to draw your prospective financial planning clients into your website incorporating their questions into the content in the way they would ask it. This is where SEO comes in handy. You’ll want to do a decent amount of keyword research to find out what people in your niche are searching for, and then create content around those terms. Effective awareness-stage content can include:

• Blogs about niche-specific finance tips

  • “Effective Retirement Options for Nurses”

  • “How Much Firefighters Should Set Aside for Their Kids’ College Funds”

• Podcasts & client success stories

  • “Estate Planning Strategies for Small Business Owners”

  • “How One Tattoo Artist Was Able to Set Aside for Their Future”

  • “4 Teachers That Grew Their Wealth Beyond Just a Pension” 

• Infographics

  • “Top 10 Investment Strategies for AirBnB Owners”

  • “6 Ways to Help Financially Recover From Divorce”

The essence of awareness content is this: keep it high-level enough that it reaches the right size audience, but specific enough to draw in the most relevant contacts from that audience. The goal here is to gain the trust of folks in the awareness stage.

They can stay in the awareness stage for a good amount of time, but the information you’re providing should be useful enough that they want to take the next step and enter the consideration stage. That step builds momentum.

Throughout your blogs, podcasts, and infographics, you want to offer them ways to reach out for more. You’re going to want to create gated content that can only be accessed by giving up some information.

This content is an even deeper dive into the nuances described in your blogs. It has to convey enough value that the user won’t hesitate to fill out a form and give you some information.