As a financial business owner, if there’s one thing you can expect with complete certainty, it’s the stiff competition in the industry.
But if you don’t want to end up as just another business in the industry struggling for existence over time, you need to put a lot of effort into building a brand that stands out from the crowd right from the day you start your financial business.
And while it might sound like a difficult thing to do, simply building and following a process involving actionable steps like the ones I’ll be walking you through would take a lot of challenge out of it.
Find Your Brand’s Unique Value
In today’s business environment, nothing’s harder to find than originality. So if you want your financial business to stand out right from the beginning, put some effort into finding your brand’s unique value and making sure your target audience becomes aware of it.
Remember, pricing is never the unique value of a brand that’s going to grow into one of the industry leaders. If you focus on competing on just the pricing front as a brand, you’re going to have a hard time growing or even just sustaining.
Do you offer something unique that your competitors do not? Do you focus on a specific part of the industry that makes you a specialized option at it than other jack-of-all-trades competitors? Or maybe most competitors leave something to be desired about their services and their clients aren’t really happy about it, and you plan to fill that gap?
Yes, it could be any of these things or anything else for that matter. It should just be important enough for your potential customers to take notice.
However, you also need to keep in mind here that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. As a financial business there’s often not a lot of room for innovation as clients like to go with something that has proven to work rather than something that involves a lot of experimentation.
Just focus on showcasing the things you do better than others or your unique value without getting too experimentative.
Show Your Personality
While it’s important to show your expertise as someone running a financial business, it’s just as important to show your personality too. As Dale Carnegie excellently puts it, when you’re dealing with people, you’re dealing with not creatures of logic but creatures of emotions.
If you can connect with your target audience emotionally, you’re going to have a much easier time building a brand with a lot of loyal clients.
Moreover, it’s also going to help your top line as clients that are emotionally connected with your brand are going to be quite active at referring others to your services.
So make sure your clients know the person behind the business, and also the story behind the brand. When they know the “personal” side of your brand they would be much more likely to connect with it.
Be a Client-Focused Business!
I know it’s a lot easier said than done, but it’s just very important. In the world of financial businesses where everyone’s trying to maximize their profits and get more revenue out of each of their clients, being a client-focused business and putting your clients first would help you easily stand out from the crowd.
If you’re thinking that would translate to compromising on the profits your business makes, then think again. When you have happy clients, the money automatically follows.
This is especially important in the financial industry, where gaining the trust of your clients really pays. Happy clients are not only willing to spend much more money with you, but they also work as a magnet for attracting new clients to you in the form of referrals.
After all, when it comes to a financial service, people like to rely more on real recommendations from their friends and family than online advertisements. So while your competitors would be spending wads of money on expensive PPC ads, you would have your existing clients bring you good, lifelong new clients for free.
Have a Clear Vision
It might sound like having a vision is not something that will directly impact your business in any way. However, you will be surprised at the kind of impact it can actually have when you really work with a vision towards your business.
You must have clarity about who you are as a financial business, where you stand today, and where you want to reach in your industry. The goals you want to achieve, the kind of impact you want to have in your clients’ lives, the kind of standard you want to set in the industry – all these things can be a huge motivation to put in your best, not only for you, but also for your employees.
It will also help you figure out why you want to help your clients, and how exactly you should go about doing it.
These ideas will make you build a much better business and brand than simply putting money at the center of everything. And great brands attract money like no other.
Further, as I just mentioned above, this will build a solid foundation for a positive mental attitude towards work for your employees, which will boost their productivity and help them work much better in sync with your brand than looking at it as just another job.
Offer Stellar Customer Service
While offering a great customer service is important in every industry, it’s much more important in the finance industry. This is simply because people take their financial decisions very seriously and have a lot of questions when it comes to these decisions.
So as a financial business, make sure you put a lot of emphasis on customer service and make an effort to answer their questions in a proactive way. Instead of your clients reaching out to you when they face a problem or have a question, you must reach out to them yourself and explain them the answers to common questions, solve any minor issues they might be facing, and set their expectations about what they are going to get at the end of it.
This will be a surprise for them, and you would instantly stand out among the other businesses that are just after their money.