Attracting your ideal clientele as a lender

As a lender, repeat customers are essential for building and maintaining a healthy business; but expanding your clientele and attracting new customers is the key to growing your business, as well as growing your income. Financial lending is one of the growing niches in the Fintech space and will experience massive growth in few years to come.

This growth proves that the demand for both private and business loans will be on the rise thereby providing many new opportunities for lenders to acquire new clients. However, don’t be quick to forget that both commercial and Microfinance Banks are competing in this space. The question is, what can you do differently to stand out from the crowd?

In this article, I’ll lay out several methods by which you can distinguish yourself from your competitors and how to attract your ideal target audience which will help you build a loyal clientele, turning potential new customers and promising leads into loyal clients.

As a financial lender, automatically, a borrower is your target audience but this sounds very cliché and vague. It’s important to understand what niche of lending you want to focus on. Do you want to be a lender who lends only to individuals, business owners in the e-commerce sector, tech sector, agriculture sector, etc. Having an understanding of this will help you define your ideal client.

In defining your ideal client, you want to know to draw out what is called a buyer’s persona. A buyer’s persona is a profile of who your ideal should look like/ close features.

Let’s dive into how to define our target audience:

“If you try to sell to everyone, then you’ll end up selling to no-one.” This is a common saying in the world of digital marketing which highlights the importance of a target audience.

Who’s a target audience and why you need to know your ideal audience in lending?

According to Wikipedia, a target audience is “the intended audience or readership of a publication, advertisement, or other messages. In marketing and advertising, it is a particular group of consumers within the predetermined target market, identified as the targets or recipients for a particular advertisement or message.”

In lending, having a target audience allows you to focus your message on the right market — and the people who are most likely to lend from you. It allows you to spend less while being able to reach the most valuable people that’ll become your clients. The goal is to ensure that you engage your audience most cost-effectively and efficiently.

To know your ideal audience in lending, create a complete and comprehensive description of your target audience. This will be based on specific factors like location, age, income, hobbies, gender, etc. Also, identify their motivations as you build the target profile. This is important because when you know their motivations, you can help them achieve their goals while you achieve yours. For example, if your target audience is an entrepreneur, their motivation might be to make more sales and not run out of money.

Now, after you have identified your target audience, the next thing to plan is how to attract them. Essentially, when you’re sure of your target audience, it gives you a direction for your marketing and ensures consistency in your messaging to customers. However, to attract your target audience in lending, you must first know where to find the kind of people you want to talk to, the things they want and how to speak to them. Find a way to understand their language (words) because it’ll help you create keywords and SEO strategies to rank for the right words and phrases. Ask yourself: “how would I find my ideal audience?” identify the channels that are best to communicate to them and follow through. For example, as a lender, you can identify what borrowers want and adapt your value proposition so that your brand is relevant to a specific need or problem. Make them compelling offers.

The ultimate goal is to establish relevance. If your offerings/ products match what your audience is looking for, you’ll be more likely to gain a customer. Remember that your target audience profile is simply a specific group of customers most likely to respond positively to your promotions, products, and services. The more you connect with them, the more likely that they become an advocate and loyal customer of your brand.

Why knowing your idea clientele matters?

In marketing, when you don’t know who to market to, you end up marketing to everybody. In lending business as with other kinds of businesses, identifying your ideal clientele narrows the scope of your marketing efforts and enables you to utilize your marketing budget efficiently and effectively.

Conduct formal research, write down all the findings and draw a game plan. Ask yourself:

  1. who will lend from me, and why?
  2. What client will deliver the best revenue?
  3. What’s the easiest way to find and develop a relationship with them?
  4. Think of everything that makes a great client.

When you have a clear picture of your ideal client, marketing your business becomes a lot easier and more cost-effective. Having an understanding of your ideal client helps you stay focused on them.

Lendsqr allows you to reach out to your target audience yourself and attract them to borrow from you.

Lendsqr is a platform that takes the pain out of lending. Our initial focus is on small and individual lenders.

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