I spent close to two years looking for a business coach. I read testimonials, took discovery calls, and never quite pulled the trigger with anyone.
Then I found one who worked specifically with marketing agency owners. Same industry, same pressures, same problems. I signed up straight away.
It wasn’t that she was more qualified on paper. It’s that the moment I read “marketing agency owners,” I knew she got it – I didn’t have to explain my situation, she’d clearly already thought about it.
That’s the difference a niche makes. It turns someone scrolling past you into someone deciding, “yes, this one.” And it’s exactly the decision most financial advisers are missing out on with their own marketing.
I hear a version of this conversation almost every week.
A financial adviser comes to me wanting help with their marketing, and one of the first things I ask is, “who’s your target market?” Nine times out of ten, the answer is, “oh, we don’t really have a niche, we can help everyone.”
And they’re right. You’re trained across such a broad range of skills that you probably could help almost anyone who calls.
But being able to help everyone, and running a business that performs well with a queue of the right people waiting, are two very different things.
The gap between them is a niche. I’ve worked with hundreds of financial advice businesses through Crisp Marketing & Communications, and the ones growing the fastest all have one thing in common: total clarity on who they’re for.
A niche gives you clarity on your client
Your niche might be a type of person, a specific service, or a client at a particular moment in their life. Someone going through a divorce. Someone two years out from retirement. Someone who’s just taken over the family business.
Once you know exactly who you’re talking to, you can get specific about what keeps them up at night, what they’re afraid of when it comes to money, what they want their future to look like, and what they’re willing to invest to get there.
One of our adviser clients used to market to “anyone aged 40 to 65 with investable assets.” It was technically true but also… completely useless.
The moment she narrowed her focus to women navigating divorce, everything changed. Her email open rates jumped, her enquiries started arriving warmer, and people began telling her, “I felt like you were talking directly to me,” because she finally was.
A niche sharpens everything you write
Once you know your client at that level of detail, the rest gets so much easier.
Your website copy.
Your social posts.
Your emails.
Even the conversations you have at networking events.
You stop trying to appeal to everyone in the room and start speaking to one person. And that person feels it. That moment of “oh, this person gets me” is one of the most powerful things a potential client can think when they land on your page, and you can only create it when you’re talking to someone specific.
Crispy Tip
Try rewriting your website’s homepage headline as if only one specific client will ever read it. If it still makes sense to everyone else, you haven’t niched enough yet.
A niche makes your business run like clockwork
Here’s the part most advisers don’t see coming.
When you specialise, you start repeating the same types of work. And when you repeat the same types of work, you get faster, sharper, and better at delivering it. You can build templates, processes, and systems that actually scale, instead of starting from scratch with every new client.
The business side of niching is just as valuable as the marketing side. Maybe more.
Nobody refers a friend to “an adviser who does a bit of everything.” They refer them to the person who fixes exactly the thing that’s keeping them up at 2am.
So before you write your next post or touch your website again, ask yourself one question: if you could only ever work with one type of client from here on, who would it be?
Start there. Everything else gets easier once you do.