Financial client profiling is crucial if you are to get the best from your marketing strategy. It’s about working out your ideal client type so you can better understand your clients’ needs and goals, improve communication and tailor your financial advice services to attract the right audience.

This blog is designed to guide you through the process of creating detailed client personas, offering a step-by-step guide.

What is a client persona?

When we talk about client personas for financial advisers, we are talking about semi-fictional representations of ideal clients based on research and data.  

These personas can help you identify pain points, motivators and goals specific to financial services clients. For example, retirement planning, wealth management, debt reduction, and so on.

They are also known as customer personas, buyer personas, target personas, audience personas or marketing personas. They all have the same meaning, though each client persona will vary according to each individual financial services business.

Why financial advisers need client personas

So, why is it so important to establish client personas for financial services businesses?

There are many reasons, including:

• Building trust through a personalised approach: Financial advisers, more than most, need to evidence trustworthiness. Client personas help you target your marketing efforts to ideal client demographics, providing you with the opportunity to personalise your content, highlighting your dependability in all necessary areas. 
• Tailoring your messaging to your target audience: This ensures it meets their needs, concerns and behaviours and addressing specific financial challenges improves client acquisition.
• Client personas inform product and service development: If you can see that you need to do more for certain client types in the area of pensions, for example, you can look at this.
• You can establish the best ways to connect with your clients: For example, by emails or SMS.
• Targeted marketing strategies can be tighter: If you are running an email campaign on wealth management, for example, you can segment your contacts so your message only reaches those who may have a need for these services.

Creating detailed financial client personas is a crucial step before engaging in any marketing activity. WEBPRO Adviser can help.

Steps to create a detailed client persona

For more information on how to create a persona in financial planning, take a look at our step-by-step guide, complete with actionable tips.

Step 1 – Conduct research
The best personas are based on facts around your audience’s interests, behaviour and demographics. This means the most effective way to create your client personas is through:

• research
• client interviews
• surveys with prospects and those not on your database, who fit into your target audience profile
• your existing data

Investigate income, savings goals, investment preferences and financial challenges.

Step 2 – Identify common traits 
Look for patterns in age, income, occupation and financial priorities. For example, you might find a common persona is ‘high-earning professionals planning for early retirement’.

Step 3 – Outline demographics and psychographics
When it comes to demographics and psychographics, establish age, income, education, location and marital status. Add psychographics like risk tolerance, financial goals and spending habits.

You might find some interviewees are more open than others. It might be worth having ‘optional’ sections for information that’s particularly sensitive or private.

Step 4 – Define pain points and goals
Pinpointing interviewees’ biggest financial challenges is a significant step, as it gives you superb insight into common needs and the opportunity to look at the services you offer. Could you provide an additional service to meet a common need? Financial challenges could look like lack of retirement savings or navigating tricky tax laws, for example. 

For the same reason, make a point of highlighting their goals too, such as building a diversified portfolio or paying for their children’s education. Are there niche wealth management services that you could add to your provisions?

Step 5 – Create a persona profile 
Once you’ve collated all the necessary information, use it to create a persona template with a name, photo and detailed description.

Step 6 – Apply the persona to your business strategy 
Use the persona to refine your marketing messages, being careful to choose the right communication channels for your tailored financial solutions.

Applying it to your business strategy means you can adapt your sales presentations accordingly and even improve your client relationships.

Tools and resources for creating personas

If you are undertaking this project yourself, it’s worth looking into the types of tools you can use that will help. For example, Google Forms or SurveyMonkey are great for surveys. And for analysing client data, check out HubSpot, Pipedrive, Monday CRM or Salesforce.  

Recap: A client persona is a semi-fictional representation of a typical ideal client for financial advisers, based on research and data. Collating this information gives you an incredible tool for not just understanding clients but attracting them too.

If you’re new to the concept, you might want to start small by creating just one or two personas. You can refine these, or add to them, over time.

WEBPRO knows

More than 70% of consumers expect personalised interactions from companies. And 76% become frustrated when their expectations aren't met.