As a financial advisor there are 3 critical components to successfully grow your client base.  You need to be able to identify, locate and reach your market.  Very simply I agree, so let's look at one way to do this.

    1. Identify Your Market
        To identify your market you need to profile your customer by:

    A. Identifying the Demographics

• * Age
• * Gender
• * Income
• * Education
• * Marital Status
• * Job Type
• * Location

    B. Identifying the Psychographics
        Psychographics focus on the personality, character, and views of the individual. For example, are they pessimistic or optimistic? Are they risk takers or conservative? Are they open minded or closed minded? 

    2. Locate Your Market
        Once you identify who your market is you need to locate that market.

• * Start with your existing customers and where they are located and branch out from there.
• * Follow up on inquiries since they will define the geographic area of those you have identified as your market
• * Locate those who are not currently your customers but who have the same attributes as those who are your customers.
• * Get in contact with your industry association to obtain any industry market analysis that has occurred detailing geographic areas.

    3. Reach Your Market
        There are all the traditional methods of reaching your market - direct mail outs, telephone solicitation, and referrals, but there are other ways to reach your market. Let's have a look.

• * The Internet - With more than 2 billion people using the internet in 2010, you have a market that's untapped just waiting to be targeted.  Use search engine optimization to target the market you've identified.  Create headlines that engage and motivate potential customers.
• * Social Media - Up until recently social media was thought to be more of a novelty and place of gathering strictly for social interaction.  The powerful marketing opportunities that exist here are in their infancy and only recently are they beginning to be recognized by business.  Try to get on the leading edge of this new medium.
• * Blogs - Offer an excellent way to target and reach your market, as well as engage them.  Blogs provide numerous benefits including: positioning you as an expert; building the trust factor by showing customers and prospects who you are and demonstrating how you do business; they can help to attract business from people who are simply surfing the web.  Search engines focus on keywords, if they're in one of your articles your site could appear at the top of the search screen.

Financial advisors, this might appear to be a bit simplistic and I agree it is.  The question is are you doing these things on a regular basis?  If not, why not?  To successfully grow your client base this is all it really takes: identify, locate and reach your target market.