BDH Sterling has been operating for 15 years and currently looks after about 1200 families. It already has offices in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney following a buyout, but it wants to be in each of the major capital cities and to do that organically.
The firm's target client is a former professional who has moved to Australia on a skilled visa and has accumulated a reasonable level of wealth and is now looking to retire in Australia.
Often people will engage with the firm once they've been in Australia for five to 10 years and start moving their assets across, realising the challenges this brings.
But it also gets "hundreds of enquiries" from other people looking for information about their state pension entitlements and taxation issues, who are not ready for advice.
The marketing strategy is a way of filtering those down, says Harvey.
"So what we want to do is try and identify amongst all of our leads who are the clients that are going to get value from our service.
"But we have to sort those inquiries because our service isn't going to be relevant to all of them. And so it's a way for us to sort those inquiries into a manageable number that we know meet the profile of that target client."
All change
The firm hasn't always had a marketing strategy in place and there are some lessons it has learned on the way when it comes to building one.
It now has a marketing manager who works with marketing agencies, something Harvey deems important for any firm "serious" about wanting to grow.
BDH Sterling spends about 2 per cent of its overall revenue on marketing but in return gets more clients come in and more suitable clients, so it can be selective about who it decides to take on.
The firm used pay per click campaigns on Google in the past, which were "incredibly expensive", Harvey says.
So they switched to social media, which cost them a fraction per lead, typically only a pound, as opposed to a couple of hundred pounds.
"I'm not saying it didn't work for us because we did it for a number of years but the budget when there's competition for those keywords, it can get quite expensive," says Harvey.
A similar targeted approach could work for UK based financial advisers who want to target a particular group of clients, such as doctors, he says. "If you have a niche I think it's just a really good way to differentiate and attract new clients."
