At this time of year, you may be evaluating your financial advisor marketing budget for 2020. One thing you should be looking at is whether your website is converting traffic into leads. Because:
The best RIA websites are producing the best financial advisor leads.
Conversions are what turn your website into a sales tool, rather than an online brochure. Financial advisor websites have unique compliance needs and therefore have to present content, CTA’s, and offers in a more specialized way. Is your approach working?
Today’s investors are online, savvy, agile and quick to rule out a potential advisor or firm based on their first impression. But if you can get your website to actually convert – meaning someone completed a desired action on your website, then your website has just become one of your most powerful sales tools. The more leads your website produces, the higher your ROI becomes.
Here are 5 questions to ask yourself to test if your RIA website is converting visitors into leads:
1) Does Your Website Grab Visitors’ Attention Quickly?
By some estimates, visitors spend less than three minutes on financial advisor websites. Sometimes they are spending less than 15 seconds! That’s less time than the average television commercial break. This is because while an investor is searching for firms, they may be visiting a number of sites and will only stop on the ones that attract their attention. And that’s certainly not enough time for the visitor to read through all of the pages of content on your site.
You have to grab their attention from the very beginning. For example, do you have a CTA (Call to Action) button above the fold? For those not familiar, “Above the Fold” is an old newspaper term but put into internet terms it means is the action above where the user would have to scroll down the page to see it.
If you don’t have your CTA somewhere near the top, you may be missing out on golden opportunities for conversions. An important part of this strategy is also to not clutter the homepage (or landing page if that applies) with too much other information which could be a hindrance or distraction to someone converting.
Be sure to have a clear message on your homepage that explains what you do, who you serve, and what makes your firm different. Otherwise, your website visitor may just move right on to the next search result.
2) Are You Transparent?
The internet has aided in making financial advisors more transparent. There are many things potential investors should be looking for when searching for a financial advisor and, with a few strokes on the keyboard and a click or two, a potential investor can find out quite a lot.
With all of this readily available information, there is no point in not being transparent on your website, especially when it comes to your services and fee structure.
Just like any business, your clients understand that you are selling a service, and will be compensated as such. That’s not to say that financial advisors work the same way as an online retailer selling a tangible product, but there are some similarities. If you were going to research watch companies and didn’t see how much the watches cost on one of the websites that popped up in your Google search, would you move onto a different search result that provided the costs?
The same is true for someone looking for help investing their money, and probably even more so. If you’re not transparent upfront about your investing philosophy, business practices and compensation, you could be giving a bad first impression and preventing that person from ever reaching out for more information.
3) Do You Have a Blog?
Blogs are a great way to gain conversions from your website. By producing compelling original content, you’re putting your advisory firm and your personal brand out there to provide useful information about the investment space. There are many ways a blog can help your website to convert:
- People sharing your blog posts via email or socially can introduce new non-clients to your website.
- Use your blog as a vehicle to deliver content such as offers or infographics and whitepapers that require a contact form download to access the full or printable version.
- Feature an email signup link on your blog page that will automatically send new blog posts out to those signed up. This also gives you more email addresses in your database.
4) Do You Use Dynamic Content?
Dynamic content is a way for marketers to create a user experience on your website that is personalized to them based on previous website interactions or other online factors/behaviors. Using dynamic content is a way to show many different types of investors that your firm can deliver the services they’re looking for and that they can stop searching!
Some types of dynamic content include landing pages (including customized images), emails and forms. If this sounds like something that would help your business grow, consider utilizing a full-service digital marketing agency to help you navigate the dynamic content space. The list of content that can be dynamically populated is growing, and the more you implement the better chance you have at converting your website visitors.
5) Do You Use Analytics Data to Measure Conversions?
Now that you understand what a converting website does and doesn’t look like, how do you measure those conversions? If your answer is “I don’t” then you need to fix that right away!
There are plenty of tools to help you measure your website’s overall performance, including conversions. Tracking this data regularly not only gives you the pulse of your overall website performance, but also the places you’re converting visitors and the places you’re not. This allows you to make changes in real-time, and also get month-by-month stats to see if you’re seeing any trends. These reports also make great tools for assessing your overall site strength, where visitors are coming from (i.e. search engines or other sources) and how long visitors are staying on your page.
Armed with this information, you can then decide where you have strong conversion rates and where you’re weaker. Plus, if you do enlist the help of a digital marketing agency, you will already have this data to show them and they can do their job of improving those conversion rates even faster.
As 2019 rolls to a conclusion, perhaps 2020 will be the year your firm creates the best possible website. A website that converts. At Paladin Digital Marketing, we are passionate about creating the best financial advisor websites. Contact us today to see how we can help with your website.
