Editor's note: This blog article was originally published in 2016 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
When a digital marketing agency is designing your financial advisor website and you want it to produce results, there are three key elements that should be included.
Let’s start with a mutual definition of results. Many experts would define results as the percentage of website visitors that initiate contact with your firm. This percentage is referred to as your financial advisor website’s conversion rate - that is, the percentage of visitors who relinquish their anonymity and submit their contact information.
FYI, leads also deserve a definition to make sure we are on the same page. Leads are investors who are seeking financial advisors or information about a financial topic and they submit their contact information on financial advisor’s websites to obtain it. Ideally, your sales funnel will know the difference between investors seeking advisors versus investors seeking information. Both types of leads have value because information-seekers may be seeking financial advisors in the not-too-distant future.
Pro Tip: A primary goal for a financial advisor website should be to convert visitors into leads.
There are two potential problems if your current financial advisor website is not producing leads. Your website is an online sales brochure that is not designed to convert visitors into leads or you lack the Internet visibility you need to produce the traffic your website needs for the conversion process to be completed.
Following are three tips that will have the greatest impact on the productivity of your website.
Specialization Works Best
Your website has to convey the right messaging and information to your target market(s) and help these investors understand how you can solve their financial problems and help them achieve their financial goals.
The narrower your target markets the more successful your financial advisor website will be. For example:
- Early retirees
- Pre-retirees
- Small business owners
- Executives
- Women
Our two decades of experience show investors prefer to work with financial advisors who specialize in working with investors like themselves. They believe this focus on a particular market will create specialized knowledge that benefits them. For example, the investor is a pre-retiree and the financial advisor specializes in working with pre-retirees.
It is easy to see how an investor might prefer this type of advisor versus other advisors who will work with anyone who meets their minimum asset requirements. The former benefits investors. The latter is more of a sales pitch. Their primary goal is to produce a commission versus help investors achieve their long-term goals.
It pays to point out on websites that you are a specialist, work with particular types of investors, and how your specialization benefits your clients. Specializations are more than capable of creating unique differentiations that can motivate investors to want to work with you versus other firms that are not staffed with specialists. Knowing your audience and speaking their language will help convert more of your website’s visitors into high-quality leads.
You must describe your expertise and philosophy so investors can quickly understand why they should do business with you. You are the answer to their financial needs.
Pro Tip: Are there missed opportunities when you are specialized? Yes, but the trade-off is a higher conversion rate for your ideal types of clients.
The Content Marketing Alternative
There are three important financial features that motivate investors when they use the Internet to find financial services and information. What they find on the Internet has to be good enough to bring them to financial advisor websites. Plus, your content needs to be compelling enough to address their particular circumstances, needs, and goals. The bottom line, financial advisor websites have to be strong, modern, and competitive enough that investors are willing to give up their contact information to get what is being offered on the websites. This means financial blogging is not for the faint of heart and it is a critical business practice for reaching target clients, building credibility and trust, and producing high-quality leads and contacts.
For example, you can create a list of keywords that your ideal clients are likely to use and then write compelling content that utilizes those keywords. As an example, say your ideal client (persona) is a married couple who will be retiring in one to two years. They both have 401K accounts with their employers and are starting to research when they should start taking social security distributions. On your financial advisor blog site, you would want to start writing blog posts with titles like: “When is the right time to take social security?” or “Tips for directing my 401K assets into a rollover IRA”. These are the types of headlines that your ideal clients may be searching for on the Internet.
Successful websites also create a calendar for content so that new information can be added to the blog on a consistent basis. Google rewards websites that publish a consistent flow of new content. It doesn’t have to be daily content, but it is a good idea to produce new information to help with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) at least once a week. This can help to get more visibility within the search engines as well as continue to show your level of expertise about financial issues and concerns.
Free Offers That Produce Leads
The advisor websites that gain the most traction are also providing free offers to increase the odds that visitors will interact with the site. For example, if you want people to fill out a landing page so you can contact them about your services, then you should give them a value-added reason to complete it. Some of the more popular free offers are eBooks, Guides, newsletters, webinars, and free reviews (plans and portfolios).
Think about the specific personas that you are targeting and what types of offers would motivate them to contact you. Remember that you are trying to help solve problems so the free offers should be doorways to starting conversations with potential leads about how your services can help them resolve their most pressing financial issues. Be creative and come up with unique offers. Without an offer, you could lose a visitor to another site that has something more interesting or compelling to offer than your site.