Conversational Marketing: Learning To Farm, Not Hunt

Traditionally, the world of professional services has largely been a world of hunters—leave your cave every morning, hit somebody over the head and drag them back. That’s how so many of us got clients in the past.

But things have fundamentally changed—and thank goodness. Hunting for new clients every day doesn’t work well anymore. Perhaps it was never terribly effective. Certainly a hunter-style approach doesn’t resonate with today’s highly desirable affluent prospects. Today, people don’t want to be beaten over the head or be sold to. They want to buy in by getting the information they need to make the right decisions about whom to work with to solve their most pressing challenges.

In our experience, before prospective clients make almost any significant decision, they gather information and do their research—typically using the internet, of course. This helps them winnow down the options to service providers who they think look highly credible. After that, prospects want to have conversations with those few credible sources that they believe can solve their challenges so that they can choose the right solution provider. They are having a much smaller number of conversations significantly later in the marketing and sales process.

Your marketing efforts to attract new clients should therefore be focused on generating awareness, then engaging people in conversations that nurture strong relationships.

This type of conversational marketing takes time, of course. But that’s a good thing! It ultimately leads to better and more loyal relationships, builds a genuine connection with the members of a community—your target niche—and continually enhances those connections over time. When you have conversations with someone in a niche you serve, you are very likely to have them raise their hand to explore working with you.

The upshot: We need to stop hunting and start farming—growing relationships that yield huge benefits down the road. Farming for clients is a key way to differentiate yourself and get prospects to buy in to what you offer. It’s a big shift in the way many professional service providers think, but it’s vital to being successful on purpose and attracting prequalified, pre-endorsed prospective clients.

A client-driven world

So how do we start farming, leverage conversational marketing and get those prospective clients to raise their hands? It’s important first to acknowledge that the old firm-driven model of advice—where large firms send their great ideas down the chain to their employees, who then push them on their clients—is dead. Today, we operate in a client-driven world. You work for your clients, even if you’re employed by a larger practice. What you do is choose which firm to work with to implement the best solutions for your clients and bring huge value to them.

In this client-driven environment, your approach should be all about enhancing relationships and getting conversations started. You don’t shout what you offer—you share your beliefs, ideas and insights. You don’t mass market yourself—you take a targeted approach. And you certainly don’t talk, talk, talk when you’re in front of a prospect—you listen and reach out to understand that person better.

The importance of a niche

With that mindset in place, consider honing your nichemanship—the art of skillfully selecting market segments in which you can compete effectively. You can’t have conversations with everyone. So the more you can identify the right affluent clients to work with, the more successful you can be. The more focused you are on understanding a niche’s unique needs, the more you can emerge in the center of that community and start engaging in conversational marketing.

Keep in mind the five key steps to picking a niche:

1. Identify the largest pockets of wealth in your community.
2. Identify a few promising niches in that community.
3. Determine which ones offer the most significant opportunities.
4. See if any existing clients are part of these niches.
5. Pick your niche.

Once you’ve chosen a niche to pursue, it’s important to conduct market research on that group of investors so you understand their key concerns and so you know how to best attract them. The first outlet for such research is your existing clients in the niche you have chosen. Profile these clients so you can replicate them again and again. And, assuming they are happy with you, offer a second-opinion service to other people whom they care about. It’s a complementary service in which you assess where the person is today and whether you believe they’re positioned to effectively pursue where they want to be in the future. If you think they are, you’ll tell them so. If you think they could benefit by working with you, you can propose next steps.

Next, move on to centers of influence—the key leaders, movers and shakers in your chosen niche. These people will give you insights into your niche, such as the major financial, business or legal challenges they are facing today. They also will be the ones who will spread the word about you and what you offer the niche. Think of them as the early adopters (to borrow a technology term) of your solution; once they come aboard, your business has a stronger potential to accelerate fast.

And don’t forget to subscribe to the newsletters, journals and other publications that members of your niche read, as well as any published research you can find.

Content to connect

From a marketing perspective, the reason to do all this research is so you can start creating content that will spark conversations with your target audience and enhance your credibility with them over time. Again, the point is to farm and nurture relationships. With all the noise out there today, it’s your credibility in the eyes of your niche that will help you succeed. To build credibility and get people wanting to talk with you, consider taking steps such as:

• Align your website with your focus, and spell out what you do. Your website may very well be a prospect’s first “touch” with your firm. Make it count by clearly communicating what you do and why and for whom you do it.
• Write articles aimed at your niche market. Writing your own articles is more effective in building credibility and starting conversations than is getting quoted in other people’s articles. Being seen as an author of an entire article shows you to be a thought leader with deep knowledge on topics that your ideal clients find important.
• Create an email newsletter that you send out regularly with fresh content.
• Write white papers that detail the issues facing your niche and how they can solve them.
• Conduct group presentations that are targeted to your niche.
• Leverage social media. Online videos on YouTube and LinkedIn articles you share across social media remain good ways to get noticed by ideal clients, even as social media has become an increasingly crowded arena.
• Conduct webinars. These are great tools to provide content and get people to converse and raise their hands. Keep in mind that 95% of your content should be valuable insights that address the challenges your niche faces. Wrap up the webinar by saying, “If you’d like to schedule an impact assessment to explore working with us, we’ll accept the first 50 people who schedule a phone appointment.” Usually it takes about two minutes to have 50 interested prospects raise their hands.
• Videos. Professional-looking videos of you speaking to your niche members or interviewing people of importance to them (such as the centers of influence you have built relationships with) can be very effective as well. Just be sure to focus on providing information and ideas that could jump-start conversations. Remember, your job is to farm. No selling!

Conclusion

You don’t need to do all of these things—few, if any, of us possibly could. These are simply ideas that often work well with professional services providers, in our experience. Your job is to take the steps that will resonate especially well with your particular niche market and get people and families from that group to take the key action you want them to take: Schedule a meeting to review the current state of their situation (be it financial, legal or professional) and determine whether it makes sense to work together. This should always be your call to action.

So start farming for the right ideal affluent clients. Having effective conversations with prospective clients will ultimately lead to a much more successful practice and a much higher quality of life for all stakeholders.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: This report was published by the VFO Inner Circle, a global financial concierge group working with affluent individuals and families, and is distributed with its permission. Copyright 2025 by AES Nation, LLC.