What’s the first thing that a financial services firm needs to publish a high-quality client newsletter? Is it an editorial calendar? An experienced financial writer? A template and distribution system? All of those things are important, but actually the first step in creating an effective newsletter is determining the target audience.
Having a clearly defined target audience allows you to think strategically about how you should write, design, and distribute your newsletter to support your content marketing efforts.
Remember, publishing a great financial services newsletter is all about providing valuable, relevant information to your readers. In order to do that, you need to have a clear idea of who those readers are.
Five Questions to Define Your Target Audience
Answering these questions will help you define your target audience:
- What’s the primary content marketing goal of your newsletter? Financial services firms can get numerous content marketing benefits from publishing newsletters, including strengthening client relationships, cross-selling, improving client service, generating new leads, and building brand awareness. While newsletters can accomplish several of these goals at once, you need to identify which goal is the most important. For example, an accounting firm may determine that improving client service is the primary goal, while building brand awareness is a secondary goal. An asset management firm may decide that cross-selling is the primary goal and strengthening client relationships and generating new leads are secondary goals. Meanwhile, an estate planning firm’s primary goal for its newsletter may be generating new leads, while building brand awareness is an ancillary benefit.
- Are you trying to reach clients or prospects? The answer to the previous question will go a long way in answering this question. For the accounting firm that is focused on improving client service, obviously the target audience will be existing clients. For the asset management firm looking to cross-sell its wealth transfer, tax planning, or philanthropic planning services to clients that currently only use the firm’s portfolio management services, the target audience will be existing clients. But for the estate planning firm that is focused on using the newsletter to generate new leads, the target audience will be prospects.
- What are the defining characteristics of your target audience? An important part of financial services content marketing is defining your target audience using concrete, quantifiable criteria. This information will likely already be included in your company’s marketing plan, so most firms won’t have to start from scratch when it comes to their newsletter’s target audience. If you’re a B2C company, think about criteria such as income, net worth, investable assets, age, job title, geography, or industry. If you’re a B2B company, think about criteria such as revenue, number of employees, geography, or industry.
- What are the biggest questions that your target audience is struggling with? When answering this question, don’t start by thinking about what products or services you want to sell them. Instead, start by thinking about the issues that your clients or prospects are facing, and then identify the ways that you can provide information through your newsletter to help solve those problems. For inspiration, think about the most common questions you’ve received from clients over the past three months.
- How does your target audience like to receive information? When it comes time to determine the best way to distribute your newsletter, you will want to think about how your target audience prefers to receive information. This involves more than just the channel(s) that you use to send out the newsletter (i.e., e-mail, hard copy, and social media); it also has to do with the format of how you convey the information. Some audiences, particularly younger investors, prefer to get information delivered via video, infographics, or other formats that make the ideas easy to digest. Other audiences, such as institutional investors or private equity firms, prefer longer-form articles with lots of in-depth analysis.
Examples of Target Audiences for Financial Services Newsletters
After going through these questions, here are some hypothetical examples of what a target audience might look like for various types of financial services companies:
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- Accounting: small businesses (less than $5 million in annual revenue) in the technology, real estate, and healthcare industries in Chicago and the surrounding suburbs; these companies are looking for ways to streamline their bookkeeping and payroll systems and ensure compliance with tax laws
- Estate planning: founders and owners (40-60 years old) of companies with at least $3 million in revenue; these entrepreneurs have built successful companies and are starting to think about ways to generate liquidity and transition the ownership of the company to the next generation of leaders
- Investment banking: senior partners of private equity firms and venture capital firms across the United States and Europe with at least $200 million under management; these investors are looking for information about trends that are creating growth and investment opportunities in various industries
- Private equity and venture capital: individuals with more than $20 million in investable assets and chief investment officers of private foundations, university endowments, family offices, and other institutional investors with more than $150 million in assets; these investors are looking to increase their exposure to alpha-generating, low-correlation asset classes
- Private wealth management: high-net-worth individuals and families ($1 million to $5 million of net worth) within 50 miles of Boston; these investors want to make sure all of the various parts of their financial lives—including retirement planning, tax planning, college savings, and insurance—are all working in unison
Building a Newsletter Around Your Target Audience
Once you’ve gone through the questions listed above and have defined your target audience, you’ll be ready to start creating your newsletter. Having a clear picture of who you’re writing for will give you a great idea of what you should be writing about.
About th
e Author: Scott Wentworth is the founder and head financial writer of Wentworth Financial Communications. At WFC, he’s helped firms across the asset management, private wealth management, investment banking, estate planning, accounting, insurance, and legal industries write and publish newsletters. And, wouldn’t you know it, WFC also publishes its own newsletter, Return On Content. Use the form at right to subscribe to our newsletter.