How to find the best audience niches to target in wealth management: Our tried-and-tested process, revealed

The wealth management sector is set to grow by 67% by 2030, presenting huge opportunities for firms to expand—but with that growth comes fierce competition. In an already crowded market, standing out and maintaining a steady flow of high-quality leads is more challenging than ever. 

As more firms invest in digital marketing, simply putting out content won’t cut it anymore. To truly capitalise on this growth, you need more than a one-size-fits-all approach. Targeting the right audience niches is the key to breaking through the noise and attracting clients who are not just leads, but the perfect fit for your services.

That’s where the power of niche targeting comes in.

Why target audience niches?

Identifying and focusing on the right audience niches not only lowers your cost per lead but also ensures that the leads entering your pipeline are the kind of prospects who are genuinely interested in your services. However, finding those high-potential niches can feel like looking for a needle in a haystack.

In this blog, we’re unveiling our tried-and-tested process for discovering the best audience niches to target, drawn from years of experience running successful campaigns for wealth management firms. 

If you're ready to unlock the key to more tailored, cost-efficient marketing that speaks directly to your ideal clients, read on. We’ll show you exactly how to make niche targeting work for your firm.

“Smaller audiences can still work well if your persona is extremely niche or you have a tight budget.”

Step 1 - Start with your ideal client profile

With so many options for filtering and building your audience in LinkedIn and Meta, it’s easy to get caught up in the details. The first step is to make sure that you’ve accurately defined what your ideal client looks like.

Best practice is to develop detailed buyer personas that bring your customers to life. Think about your best clients and go through this exercise:

Complete a profile that captures:

1. Demographics – e.g. age, gender, income

2. Background information – e.g. where they live, education, family situation, lifestyle

3. Job details – e.g. role and seniority, employer size and turnover

4. Pain points or challenges – what keeps them awake at night?

5. Goals and aspirations – what do they want to achieve in their personal and professional lives?

For each of the above, ask yourself these questions:

1. How does this uniquely impact their financial situation?

2. What is the biggest financial challenge that relates to this?

3. What is unique about this challenge that self-qualifies them as a good client?

Document the output of this exercise in a simple table or spreadsheet. Once you have completed this for one client, pick another client and go through the same process. Work on creating 3-4 of these profiles. Your goal is to identify niche audiences, with a unique challenge that self-qualifies them as an ideal client for your firm.

Once you have carried out this exercise you should have a much more defined audience you can build in Meta or LinkedIn (or both!).

Step 2 - Aligning your offering with their needs and wants

Once you’ve developed 3-4 detailed personas, you should have built up a solid picture of what differentiates them from each, including the nuances in their goals and pain points. These unique drivers are what we’re going to focus on. 

Proactively talking to prospective clients about the things you know keep them awake at night, whether in person or via your digital marketing, will: 

• Position yourself as an expert for the audience niche and its unique challenges

• Build trust and credibility with your brand

• Enable you to stand out amongst wealth managers with a more generic approach to their messaging 

“Don’t rule out LinkedIn for B2C, it’s a great platform for targeting high-net-worth individuals.”

Take this example: imagine you’re a female CTO working for a global firm such as Microsoft. You’re disappointed with the service levels of your current wealth management firm but you’re time-poor and haven’t gotten around to talking to any new firms. 

You start seeing ads appearing in your Facebook newsfeed from wealth managers. Which one is going to appeal to you?

1. 40s retirement guide

2. Get your retirement planning guide

3. 10 Crucial steps to the perfect retirement 

4. Get your guide to future-proofing your retirement

5. 7 Steps to help women in tech achieve financial independence 

Number 5, right?! 

(In case you’re wondering, the above are all real-world examples of ads from top wealth management firms).

Step 3 - Research the viability of your audience niche(s) 

With your target personas and bespoke messaging firmed up, the final step in building your audience niche is to look at the targeting options available in Meta (for Facebook and Instagram) and LinkedIn. This will determine the final size of your audiences, based on the readily available information on the platforms, from job titles to company size to sector.

This step requires a good knowledge of the ad platforms and their range and specificity of targeting through the native filters. Without this, it can be easy to end up with an audience that is too broad or too small.

“Aim for an audience size of 50,000 - 500,000 on both platforms. This will help maintain a reasonable budget and offer a good frequency”

Generally, the rule of thumb is to aim for an audience of 50,000 - 500,000 on each platform. This will provide you with enough volume to generate good lead numbers, but is still small enough to ensure everyone in that audience will be a good fit and find your offer relevant to them. Ultimately, this results in higher-quality leads that turn into clients.

For a more detailed look at how to carry out in-platform audience research on Meta, read our step-by-step guide to carrying out audience research on Meta for wealth managers. 

By applying these core steps to your digital marketing planning, you'll set your wealth management campaigns up for success. Niche targeting is the secret to standing out in a crowded market, building trust, and attracting high-quality leads who genuinely need your services. 

Instead of casting a wide net, focus on creating a tailored message that resonates with your ideal audience, ensuring your marketing budget is spent efficiently and effectively.

To find out how to identify and reach the right audience niches, get in touch with our agency. We can provide detailed insights and examples of our work that have driven high volumes of qualified leads through targeted digital strategies.