Buyer Personas. Another strange looking term to apply to the world of marketing for IFAs.
It jars somewhat with a lot of financial advisers. They don’t tend to refer to their potential clients as “Buyer Personas.” However, it is a useful expression in strategic marketing, and the concept holds great value for financial firms.
What are Buyer Personas? Simply put, they are broad descriptions of your “perfect client.”
This will, of course, depend on the specific needs of your business, and your distinct target market. Good marketing for IFAs must recognise this fact. For instance, your ideal client might have over £250,000 of assets. They are over 55 years old, are married and own their own business.
For another financial firm, they may want to stay well clear of this kind of client. It all depends on your needs and strategy. You might have just a handful of buyer personas. You might have as many as 20. There really isn’t a correct number.
So what’s the use of sitting down and imagining who your ideal client would be? First of all, Buyer Personas assist all of your business functions and staff digest who it is you are trying to attract, allowing your business to more effectively engage them as people with real needs and emotions.
Understanding buyer personas is also vital when creating content and when engaging in sales follow up. In other words, it adds value to anything in your business to do with acquiring clients and retaining them.
It isn’t particularly hard to generate buyer personas when marketing for IFAs. It simply involves approaching the right people to ask the correct questions. Their answers then need to be fed back to your business in an understandable way.
What are some practical ways to do this? Get insight into your target market. For instance, analyse your current client base (e.g. focus groups, interviews or surveys) and engaging in market research through a reputable market research partner.
From there, we recommend that you also identify your “negative personas.” These are the people you really don’t want to work with. In many cases, marketing for IFAs rules out negative personas such as a younger, asset-poor graduate in his early twenties who still lives at home with his parents.
Unless you’re convinced there’s a pool of future Mark Zuckerberg’s here, it might be a good idea to gear your content and brand towards another demographic – your Buyer Persona.
Once your buyer personas are established, it’s so much more straightforward to develop your message, services and content to the worries, habits and needs of different demographics. These personas will also allow you to personalise your content to your audience segments, making your message more relevant to these groups according to what you know about them.
You can find out more about Buyer Personas on the Buyer Persona Institute website or speak to a member of our team about creating Buyer Personas for your IFA.
