How to Create Perfect Personas | Summer School Lesson 1

Download the worksheet here.

Video transcription:

Hey, everybody!

Welcome to summer school. I know you hated hearing those words as a kid, but this is going to be fun.

For the next couple of months, we’re delivering a Marketing 101 for Financial Professionals, and we are going to cover all of the basic fundamentals that you need to create great communications with your clients and with your prospective clients.

We are going to start things off where everything should start. And that’s a focus on your clients.

Today’s video is about developing perfect personas.

So, what is a persona? Well, if we’re going to break it down and talk about simply, it is your ideal client audience.

For the sake of shortness, I’m going to say personas throughout this video. But if we’re going to define it, that’s really what it is. It is the type of person who needs your services most, who you enjoy serving best.

In today’s video, we are going to cover five questions to ask yourself so you can define and create your own perfect client personas for yourself.

Let’s get started.

Question One

Ask yourself, “Who is my favorite current client?”

I know that this sounds super basic, but this is a great place to start because ultimately when you are building your perfect personas, you want to build around people that you really enjoy working with.

So, identify who your favorite client is and see if there are some things about them that you can extrapolate to a wider audience.

Was there a problem that they came to you to solve that more people are going to need?

Were they in a specific part of their life that other people need financial assistance and advice during?

If you can find some common threads that relate to more than just that person, this is a great place to start because then you can build the rest of your personas to look like this person.

They can start to serve as a type of archetype for you.

Question Two

Identify some of those demographics.

So, how old are they?

Where do they work?

Where do they live?

These are the types of questions that you can start to use to niche down and identify a segment of people that you can serve really, really well.

A lot of times, the focus right now is on advisors being able to serve people nationwide. And that’s a great thing.

But you also can identify-as you take a look across your client base and answer these types of demographics, information-if you have an opportunity to specialize in something that you’re already serving.

So, for some advisors, this can mean that they get super specialized in comp packages at a specific company and they work with a lot of people at this one company in their town.

And that can be a great way to grow.

Question Three

Ask yourself, “What’s their financial situation?”

Are you trying to work with people who are high earners but who are younger, or are you trying to work with just people who are in retirement?

The answer to this question can radically change the types of services that you offer to people and the way that you charge fees.

Understanding this is also going to change how you communicate to people.

Someone who’s 35 and doesn’t have very much in savings yet, but who has a high annual income, they’re going to different needs, different planning that needs to happen for them.

It can be radically different than somebody who is 65, has already stopped working, but now they need some intense retirement income planning because they haven’t done any planning for the first 65 years of their life.

Question Four

“Why do most people come to me?”

What you want to think about when you’re answering this question is what are the common problems that people bring to you?

The way that I would say to approach this? Take a look at the last six months of new clients that you’ve brought on and see if you can identify some common threads on the types of problems that people brought to you.

Was there a specific event that occurred in their life that moved them to believe that they needed to take action and seek financial advice?

There might be a common event that moves somebody to decide that they needed to take action and seek financial advice.

Whatever it is, identifying those problems is going to play a large role in how you address and speak to your ability to solve those problems, which brings us to question number five.

Question Five

“How do I help solve those problems?”

After you’ve identified those problems that people bring to you, go the next step and take a look at how you added value into their lives, how you helped them move past this place of being uncomfortable to being confident and take stock of your solutions to the problem.

If we want to make things super simple with marketing communications, what it’s about is delivering the right message to someone at the right time that they need to hear it.

That starts by understanding what are their problems, how do I help solve them? And then you can communicate that message out to people and when someone hears that message at the right time, they can see that you’re someone who can help them solve the problems that they’re experiencing.

We’ve got a worksheet for you so you can go through and answer these five questions for yourself on your own time and build out those perfect personas for your business. So check the links, grab that, and we’ll see you next time!

Learn More with Three Crowns

We’re here to help you craft perfect personas and build your book of business. Click here to connect with a member of our team today.