How To Attract Younger Clients (And Why You Should)

By Hillary Gale

As a financial advisor, you might be accustomed to serving clients who have a high net worth with considerable amounts of money to invest. These are the people who seem like they can benefit most from financial advice and wealth management.

They’re also the people who can afford to pay you what you’re worth. In all likelihood, these clients are a bit older and probably belong to the baby boomer generation. 

Is there anything wrong with this approach? Not at all, at least for the next few years.

But what if you were among the first financial advisors to begin setting your sights on a new generation?

You might have to make some adjustments to your processes and fees in the short-term, but this approach could ensure the viability of your business for decades to come. 

And because you’re setting your sights on this generation now, the transition process from one set of wealth-builders to the next will be seamless, unlike financial advisory firms that continue marketing exclusively to older clients who possess the money today, but may be gone tomorrow.

Millennials Are The Next Big Market

The truth is, many signs are indicating that millennials will soon become the wealthiest generation in history, even if it doesn’t seem that way now. Sure, millennials love to talk about their student loan debt and the burden it places on their finances, but in reality, millennials carry less student loan debt than both Generation X and Baby Boomers.

And while it’s true that average millennial salaries are positively dismal (the average millennial makes just $35,592 a year), and their average net worth rests at a sad $8,000, millennials are slated to inherit over $68 trillion by the year 2030.

This inheritance, coupled with the likelihood that millennials will move into higher-paying positions as older workers retire, as well as their creative methods of making more money (about half of millennials earn extra income with a side hustle), position Generation Y to start making up for their slow start on wealth-building and retirement savings. 

Millennials may be struggling now, but the fact remains that in less than a decade, more and more millennials will need robust financial planning and wealth management. If your firm offers help and advice for millennials for where they’re at today, you just might be developing trusted relationships with the next wealthiest members of society.

So how can you start attracting millennials while continuing to serve your older clients?

State Your Niches On Your Website

The most important step you can take is to state your willingness (or, perhaps, excitement?) to take on millennial clients. When I was searching for financial advisors, 99% of websites I landed on said nothing about serving younger clients. So I didn’t reach out to those financial advisors. 

Were they willing to take on millennials? Maybe not. But if they were, the lack of copy on their website identifying me as a potential client cost them a warm lead. Maybe you don’t want to take on just any millennials, so you can narrow down this niche with terms like rising millennials or millennials building wealth. 

I ended up finding my current financial advisor by simply Googling “millennial financial advisor near me.” Voila! Up popped my advisor. You could be missing out on a unique SEO opportunity here. Financial advisors for millennials aren’t saturating the market, so you might see SEO results much faster with your inbound marketing techniques.

If you’re not ready to fully cater to millennial clients, I recommend writing a Who We Serve page on your website so you can clearly signal to your different niches they’re in the right place. Even better, if you can tell millennials what you can specifically help them with, they’ll feel more confident in reaching out to you.

Prioritize Values-Based Financial Planning

If there’s one thing that’s true about millennials, it’s that they’re strong in their convictions. More than half of millennials consider a company’s values before making a purchase, and millennials have high expectations for brands and companies they work with to take a stand on values.

For this reason, millennials hold their values in high esteem. And no part of life is more personal and values-based than personal finances. 

Many financial advisors I know practice values-based financial planning (which I think is the best kind of financial planning there is). So if you’re expanding your client base to include millennials, you can bet they’ll eat values-based financial planning right up. 

Your website copy should scream that you’re values-based. It should permeate every page. And you should absolutely be blogging about it.

Emphasize Partnership And Education

Additionally, millennials are obsessed with personal improvement. According to one survey, 94% of millennials are committed to some type of personal improvement and are willing to spend significant money on it. So what if you could reimagine your services to emphasize financial partnership and education, which is probably something you do for your clients anyway?

If millennials recognize that your services are also learning opportunities they can apply to their lives in a meaningful way, they’re sure to come running. After all, what’s more meaningful than good financial habits? Emphasizing these aspects of your service on your website, in your blog posts, or on a Who We Serve page will increase your appeal to millennials tenfold.

Publish Blog Posts That Appeal To Your New Audience

A bonus to catering to millennials? You can expand your blog topic ideas exponentially. With a younger audience, there are all types of things you can blog about that might not have appealed to your older client base. Millennials are interested in posts about paying off debt, saving more money, increasing their net worth, and catching up on retirement savings, just to name a few.

And millennials might be more likely to read your blog than older generations. As digital natives, millennials are comfortable, and sometimes even prefer, reading and learning on digital platforms. Not to mention, blogs reveal your business personality and increase your credibility, both of which are important to millennials. 

Switching Or Expanding Niches? Hire A Personal Finance Copywriter To Help

If you’re switching or expanding niches and don’t know where to start on your copy, consider hiring a personal finance copywriter. In addition to rewriting or adding new pages to your website, I’ll help you brainstorm topics, write blog posts that appeal to your new niche, and increase your SEO so your website becomes more visible to ideal clients who are searching for your services. 

To learn more about how I can help you expand your niche and improve your inbound marketing efforts, schedule a free consultation call by emailing me at hillary@galecreativeagency.com, calling 480-353-1608, or finding an available time in my calendar here.