If you were running a gym and wanted to attract more clients, you’d have two options:
- Try and create demand for your service
- Channel demand that already exists
Let’s say you chose option 1.
By choosing this option, you might try and educate potential gym users about the benefits of exercise and the improvement in their health and how they could feel. Or perhaps you might try and appeal to their vanity by telling them how much better they’re going to look with regular exercise. There’s also the social value they’d get as friends and family gasp in admiration of the new-look version of them.
The problem though is that we’re investing a lot of time ‘swimming upstream’ with our message. We first have to instil the ‘want’ in our potential client’s minds before we can even start to convince them that our gym is the best solution for them to achieve this new desire that they have.
Option 2, however, is far easier. We spend time on those who already have a desire for the ideal outcome that you help them achieve. The people who already feel the need to be healthy or already spend time and money trying to make heads turn as they stroll down the aisles of their local supermarket.
As these people already have the ‘want’, we can focus on making sure our offering helps them get to their outcome in the best way – be that more quickly than any other gym, or with less effort, or with a higher chance of success, or with zero risk if they don’t achieve their goal, etc etc.
And the same applies to financial advice.
The advice profession spends a lot of time educating young people on why planning for the future is a good idea and why they should think about their pensions now, rather than in 25 years’ time when it might be too late.
This message is important and I wholeheartedly support efforts to instil better financial behaviours amongst the population.
But from a marketing perspective, we need to distinguish this from how you grow your business.
Unless you have very, very deep pockets, trying to create demand will be far more difficult than channelling it.
Who are the people who are already feeling the burden of managing their own portfolio? Who’s already feels like they need a clearer idea of what their retirement will look like?
Spending time focussing your offering on the right people at the right time is the best way to maximise your impact and convert prospects into clients.