Generating leads off of the Internet is a tricky proposition for any financial advisory firm. One of the best ways to leverage your Internet exposure is to make your financial advisor website serve as your virtual greetor and lead generation platform. Here's how to get clients as a financial advisor using your website as a marketing tool:
Your website should always be one of the main focal points of your advisor marketing plan. Even if you have a roster of satisfied clientele, generating new leads off of your website should be a priority for every financial advisor. To set yourself up for success here are a few tips you should know about the best advisor websites that produce leads.
1.Give Your Online Image An Update
Your website is your digital calling card. Every time a prospect hears about your business, whether it is from a referral, a promotion, or their own internet search, their first step in learning more about you and your firm is to visit your website.
You have one opportunity to make our first impression with your website so you need to ensure that it’s a positive one. Here are some best practices to follow to ensure a successful first impression:
1. Ensure that your website has a modern look and feel
a. Use team photos as well as high quality graphics/photos that resonate with your visitors
b. Use white space to break up heavy text blocks
2. Use intuitive navigation that makes it very easy for visitors to navigate through your site to find information that is important to them
3. Ensure that your page load times are as fast a possible. The faster the better from Google’s standpoint (3 seconds is a good benchmark).
a. A recent survey noted that finance related sites loaded on average in 8.3 seconds. You can test your current page load time here
b. By incorporating the latest tools and best practices now, your website will look and operate the way consumers have come to appreciate and expect
2. Ask & Receive
The old saying holds true for many occasions--if you want something, you must ask.
One of the best lead generation tools you can utilize on your advisor website are free offers. You want your website to provide something of value to visitors, such as an eBook, and in turn, they provide their contact information to you. Once you have their contact information, you can begin dripping on them as a possible prospect.
A free offer can be in many forms, including:
- eBooks
- White Papers
- Infographics
- Free consultations/portfolio reviews
- Checklists
Your site should present a Call-to-Action (CTA) that explains the offer and then asks the visitor to submit their information. Used effectively, CTAs can be extremely productive marketing tools that turn strangers into leads.
3. Building Rapport with Prospects
Because a lead does not magically turn into a client in one visit, nurturing these prospects is vital, and not that hard to do. Here are some best practices for lead nurturing:
- Add any new lead into your CRM system
- Develop various distribution lists of leads based on their interest level
- Develop automated email workflows that consist of a series of emails that go to prospects over a period of time to keep your name in front of them
- Establish yourself as a subject-matter expert on various topics that you blog about and share with your prospects on a regular basis
4. Make Search Engines Work For You
Millions of people use search engines, like Google, every day to find answers to questions, concerns, or issues that they need help solving. Another best practice for your advisor website is ensuring that people can easily find your content. This is done by using on-page SEO strategies (see example below):
1. Build succinct, intuitive page titles2. Create meta descriptions that include keywords and overview of the page content, as shown here:
3. Create compelling, original content on the website with a keyword focus on 5 to 10 most important keywords that will be important for your site to rank for over time
4. Ensure your page structure includes the use of sub-headers, graphics, and bullet points to highlight important facts or information
5. Don’t Forget To Link
Another way to boost your website’s Internet visibility is to develop a linking strategy. The more relevant third-party websites who are linking back to your content, the more credibility that Google will give your site for ranking purposes over time. The key word here is “relevant”.
Back in the day, many sites participated in “link farms”. This was a pay-to-play strategy where you pay for other sites to include links back to your site. It worked for a while….but then Google began penalizing websites who participated in these schemes by reducing your keyword rankings, sometimes by a very large amount. Google’s position, rightly so, is that any link from a third-party website back to your website should be “earned” and not paid for. Sites linking back to yours should be relevant to your site. Example: A website about butterfly migration has nothing to do with finding the right financial advisor!
A great way to establish a linking strategy is to network with personal finance bloggers who often write about money management issues for their readers. By creating a relationship with these influencers, you can increase the flow of traffic to your site over time as well as boost your rankings on Google for important keywords that your prospects may be searching for. When they create a new blog post, they can link back to your site and/or to one of your blog posts that covers a similar topic. You in turn, do the same thing and link back to the blogger’s site and/or blog post. This helps both your site as well as the blogger in building credibility with the search engines over time.
The last tip under linking strategies is to add social share buttons to your website. These encourage visitors to easily share content on your website via social media, and/or via email.
Seize Your Opportunities
If you don’t have the time or inclination to put a lot of time and effort into ensuring your website is firmly set up as a lead generating machine for your firm, consider hiring a web development agency that specializes in working with financial advisory firms. You want to work with a digital marketing agency that understands how to attract investors over the Internet, which not all web development agencies have experience doing. know how to do. An experienced digital marketing agency for financial advisors can help you:
- Create and develop pages, titles, and blogs
- Automate marketing with communication workflow
- Optimize images, forms, and fields
- Structure data to qualify for rich snippets
- Promote key concepts through information architecture
Following these tips will help your site rank high on all the search lists. Don’t let another opportunity for acquiring new investors slip by. With these tips in place, your firm will be set to generate leads long into your successful future.
