Target marketing is rapidly becoming the prospect delivery system for the new millennium. Target marketing delivers financial advisors into markets where they can build profitable professional relationships with people with whom they relate. Due to the relational nature of
the prospecting activity, it reduces call reluctance, significantly increases prospecting activity, opens new doors to highly successful referred leads and processes and delivers a new dynamic dimension to the terms "client service" and "client loyalty."
Unfortunately, while target marketing (which has been in practice for many years in other industries) has finally captured the attention and produced stunning results in the financial services industry, many good intentions are being thwarted by a lack of tactical planning and
execution.
For target marketing to be a viable strategic initiative it must be empowered with the strategies that ensure success. A case in point is a major firm who, after having spent two years and large sums of money preparing to become market driven by implementing target
marketing throughout its branch system, was shocked to realize they could not get the results they expected.
Imagine their surprise when they discovered that the important strategies of identifying viable market segments and thus lead sources had largely been ignored. Once this strategy was identified and put into place, their efforts roared to life and are now eagerly and
successfully pursued by the field force.
There are three essential strategies that must be in place for an advisor and the firm to tie themselves to their target markets. Each one requires management and advisors to play slightly different roles. Management's role is to determine market viability, provide advisor
oversight and determine market share. An advisor's role is one of determining target market compatibility and accessibility and implementing a highly focused market penetration effort.
To accommodate these roles the following tactics are critical in the target marketing process.
STRATEGY 1: FIND OUT ABOUT THE SPECIFIC TARGET MARKET
SEGMENTS
Using resources such as Gale's Encyclopedia of Associations, your firm's research department, Dun & Bradstreet SIC listings, trade magazines, lifestyle publications, and one-on-one meetings with directors and executives of specific associations, clubs and
organizations, management should determine the state of each target market segment they are focusing on and from which they would like advisors to select. The key viability issues are:
· What is the competition in the market?
· What is the size of the market overall?
· How and where do they network?
· How and where do they communicate?
· What is the general state of the market, i.e. growth, maturity, decline?
If in the final analysis this target market segment stands up to this viability scrutiny, and if individuals in the segment network and communicate with one another, then management can be confident an advisor can select this target market segment and begin his or her efforts to find out if this segment is right for them.
The advisor's role should begin by your helping them develop a simple yet highly functional market information questionnaire. Now, of course, at this point the hue and cry normally heard from various areas of management is that advisors will not do research. Without a
doubt, advisors will not do research that requires the preparation of market briefs and in-depth analysis.
But, when advisors are presented with the right reasons, methods and tools to gain market information, they are in actual fact testifying to the absolute advantage they have gained from the process. Advisors need to meet with individuals within their target market segments to find out what makes people in that segment tick. Access to a questionnaire that allows advisors to determine how people in that segment network and communicate, and to the best ways to approach and build relationships, empowers the advisors and enables them
to work smart and avoid prospecting mistakes.
The networking advantages gained from market information interviews prior to penetration efforts are quickly becoming legendary in companies where target marketing is being adopted as the platform to create a flow of prospects to an advisor. This tactic properly
applied and monitored allows advisors to determine if this target market segment is a compatible match.
STRATEGY 2: IDENTIFY SOURCES OF QUALIFIED LEADS
Contrary to some current trendy ideas, management's role in lead sourcing is not a role of being the lead provider. Unfortunately, those who adopt a lead provider position with advisors learn too late what their counterparts in other industries have learned years before
them, and that is, providing and becoming the lead source for advisors creates a dependency that is unhealthy and promotes lethargy and advisor dissatisfaction. Instead of building motivational and relational ties, all too often it destroys advisor incentive and drive.
Management's role in lead sourcing is one of oversight and guidance. Management should ensure that the leads advisors are using network and communicate with one another. They should ensure that advisors are avoiding the purchase of traditional mailing lists of people
within a segment. Instead, they should encourage and promote the use of lists of people who belong to market segment organizations.
Mass mailing lists as a lead source are a last resort and work best when used as part of a targeted mass mail market penetration campaign, which should be closely coordinated with relational market penetration strategies.
The advisor's role in this tactic is to pursue and procure the lists of individuals who belong to their specific market segment organizations. These lists, although not always easy to obtain, are in fact obtainable. The increased number of appointments gained by advisors
who have been educated on how to acquire these lists and been coached through the process of acquisition and cross-networking speak loudly to the necessity to focus advisors on these lead sources. There is no substitute for these types of lists to gain quick access to a market.
STRATEGY 3: WORK EACH MARKET DEEP
The whole purpose of target marketing is to allow advisors to become well known and selected as the vendor of choice with a large number of the individuals within a specific target market segment.
Unfortunately, not only are advisors diffusing their marketing efforts, thus preventing them from becoming well known with those segments, but often that diffusion is preventing them from becoming the vendor of choice.
Management's role in this tactic is to identify how many individuals are in a particular specific target market segment and subsequently track, as frequently as quarterly, how much market share their advisors and their firm is acquiring.
In addition, management would be well advised to monitor advisor marketing activity to ensure that target markets are being worked deep to build market share and that cross-selling and spin-off markets are not being neglected.
An advisor's role in this tactic requires them to stop fishing for a market and find a market and begin to fish it not once or twice, but fish often and fish deep. Advisors currently cast about from lead to disjointed lead selling anyone who is willing to stand still long enough to listen.
To tie a firm and an advisor successfully to a market these tactics should be analyzed and implemented analyzed for the adjustment necessary in mindset, attitudes and current practices that may have prevented the successful adoption and use of target marketing to
date; and implemented through a series of definable steps that educate advisors and enable them to master these tactics.
By mastering these tactics, advisors and management can achieve the benefits of increased prospecting activity and commissions that their target marketing colleagues currently enjoy.
