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When deciding who to market your financial planning and investment services to, there are many specific target markets you could potentially cater to. From retirees to newlyweds, advisors have endless choices for where to address their marketing efforts. Recently, we’ve seen many advisors whose target demographic are HENRYs.
What Exactly is a HENRY?
HENRY stands for the High-Earners-Not-Rich-Yet demographic. Think along the lines of the 26-year-old investment banker. If you’ve never heard of this phrase, that’s probably because this is a fairly new and emerging demographic that advisors have begun focusing on. While more upper-class clients can be lucrative for your financial planning business, many advisors are beginning to shift gears towards targeting the HENRY market instead for various reasons.
Why Should HENRY’s Be on Your Radar?
The HENRY demographic has a few key qualities that make them great potential clients for your financial planning firm. Besides the large size of this market, these include careful spending habits, greater spending power and a higher average income. This makes them life-long clients and a great investment for a future relationship. As they get older, they’ll continue to increase their spending and invest more. This group is expected to be driving the economy for years to come, especially as the “traditional” middle-class (incomes of $50k-$99.9k) are spending less and less following the recent recession.
HENRYs are more likely be to married and live a more or less traditional lifestyle with a focus on financial planning and a long-term perspective, rather than a ‘live fast, die young’ approach.
– Forbes
If HENRYs are your target market, you already know that they work a lot and it can be hard to reach them through traditional marketing methods. Therefore, as marketers, we need to tailor our approach to the specific habits of this unique demographic. HENRYs have many unique needs and motivations that your marketing strategies will need to reflect if you want to be successful in capturing this segment of the market.
In addition, the lives of many HENRYs are still in transition, so it’s always a good idea for firms to maintain a relationship with these customers in order to deliver relevant products and services. It may sound overwhelming, but focusing on a few key marketing activities can really help you edge out the competition. In today’s blog post, we’ve put together our five top tips for marketing to this particular target segment.
5 Top Tips for Marketing to HENRYs
1. Tailor Your Content
While customizing your content to the intended customer is a good strategy for any target market, HENRYs have some especially unique values that make this essential for this market in particular. First and foremost, you’ll want to position products as solutions and meaningful long-term investments. HENRYs are always looking for a good value with results that will continue to help them through the years. When doing this, use transparent product information and honest value propositions. HENRYs want to work with people they can trust and won’t be as apt to give their business to advisors who use gimmicky or “salesy” taglines without real meaning behind them.
Twenty Over Ten client, Werth Weil Wealth Management, has a beautiful website with a video home page and a straightforward tagline, “Plan. Preserve. Grow” with clearly laid our services showcasing a professional and trustworthy team that will help you to plan for the future and accumulate wealth.
Another thing you can focus on is appealing to local and regional cultural cues. HENRYs often have strong ties to their hometowns and will have positive reactions to any associations your marketing makes. In addition, HENRYs are often looking for authenticity. They love to hear your business story and tend to not care as much about your brand name. Having a meaningful background, passion for your job and genuine care for their lives and finances will go much farther with this segment.
2. Keep Your Social Presence Updated
For this particular age group, your social presence is everything. Most of them use multiple platforms every day, if not multiple times per day. They’ve grown up surrounded by social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and this is where they get a lot of their information. Therefore, they’ll expect to be able to see your business presence on these platforms as well. If you can be present on platforms where they are already visiting often, you’ll be able to increase their exposure to your brand.
Twenty Over Ten client, WealthKeel, LLC, serves Gen X and Gen Y Physicians and their families, looking to navigate the unique financial waters of physicians and medical professionals in the financial world. They do a great job of consistently updating their social platforms with useful articles that will provide them with the information they need to plan for their future.
You’ll also want to consistently update your profiles to make sure they display accurate and useful information. Making frequent posts on social media will serve as a great way to remind them of and promote your firm in a more natural, unobtrusive way. Additionally, social media can help provide great analytics so you can see what’s working well and link back to your website for more traffic.
3. Make Use of Email Marketing
You may think email marketing isn’t of great importance anymore due to the increase of social media, but it may have especially huge appeals for this market. Because they work a lot, HENRYs are always checking emails and looking for quick, easily accessible updates. By creating a simple email list, you can utilize a marketing technique that is beneficial for keeping in touch with them while appealing to one of their preferred and methods of receiving information. This is a great way to implement things like weekly newsletters and promotions to keep your firm at the top of their radar.
LEAD PILOT
Lead Pilot, which gives financial advisors an all-in-one, intuitive platform to dramatically increase the number of leads and simplify the entire inbound marketing process. With this platform, users can launch robust, multi-touchpoint content campaigns from a streamlined, easy-to-use dashboard. The content in the media library includes video, editorial and infographic content, and it is completely editable and can be tailored to fit the needs and niche of each user.
Once you have pored through the content and figured out which you would like to send, put on your website, etc., the content can be scheduled to be sent out via email or social media with the use of branded landing pages. We know that compliance is a huge deal, especially in the financial industry, so all of your content and work are automatically archived to meet these standards.
4. Use Website Integrations
Website integrations are a key component of comprehensive, easy consumer use of your site. This is especially true for the busy, tech-savvy HENRY demographic. By incorporating technology that makes wealth management easier, you’ll attract more of the millennials who have a desire to be in control of their finances. The CRM (customer relationship management) tools and systems you choose to include on your advisor website can make a huge difference to the HENRY segment.
This is especially true if you’re trying to stay competitive with the increasingly popular robo-advisors. You’ll need to go out of your way to make sure that consumers are going to be able to have some of the independence they desire through the integrations on your website. They won’t always have time to stop by your office or give you a call with questions. If they find your website easy to use and manage, they’ll be much more inclined to stay with your firm for life.
Advisors and broker-dealers using the Twenty Over Ten platform have access to our one-click integration panel, which gives users access to integrate with various tools and platforms such as Redtail, Google Analytics, Mailchimp, and more!
5. Ensure Your Site is Mobile-Friendly
If you want the best chance of appealing to the HENRY market, your site HAS to be mobile-friendly. Most of the time, this group will be checking information on the go and on their phone. Therefore, it’s important to deliver cross-platform experiences that are visual, engaging and shareable. Our internal research shows that for most advisors, about 30-50% of all their website traffic comes from mobile devices and that number is only expected to increase over time. Having a mobile-friendly website is no longer just a convenience but rather a necessity Not only is having a mobile-friendly site important to the user experience, but Google and other search engines will lower your ranking if your website is not mobile-friendly.
Twenty Over Ten client, Freya Financial Services, has a beautiful mobile-friendly website with a video hero image that looks great on any device, making for an optimal search experience for those landing on their website.
At Twenty Over Ten, we know having a mobile-friendly site is of the utmost importance that’s why all of our sites are built with a mobile-first approach. When developing our frameworks, our designers held priority on a seamless experience regardless of the device a user was viewing the website on. Through our platform, advisors can choose the framework that best fits their business and all respond to desktop, mobile phone, tablet – any device users may be on.
Related: 5 Steps to Help the “Right” Prospects Find You Online