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At Twenty Over Ten, we love helping our clients create beautiful, lead generating websites for financial advisors. Through working with thousands of advisors, we have learned that every business is unique and every advisor we work with is different than the next, which is another one of the reasons that we love our job so much.
With every client, it’s important to us that we create the perfect website that really shows off a unique brand and company. If you’re just getting started on your website journey it can be difficult to know exactly how to do that. When it comes to what you should or should not do when creating your site, we have nine tips for what you should do and three you should avoid.
9 Ways to Create a Strong Your Advisor Website:
1. Look Professional
This is key because if your website is cluttered with mismatched fonts, tricky navigation and low-quality photos, then visitors are not going to take your company seriously. This is one of the more important parts of building credibility as a financial advisor. We take pride in the work that we do on advisor websites, and people come to us because of our work.
When working with a new client, we offer several frameworks that can make your website look outstanding and professional. It’s so important to make a good impression right off the bat when trying to drive traffic to your site.
2. Boost Security By Using SSL Certificates
What exactly is an SSL Certificate and what does it stand for? It stands for Secure Sockets Layer. This is one of the most important parts of a secure internet and a safe method that allows for the encryption of data when being transferred over a server.
When someone clicks on your site’s webpage, they want to be able to trust that none of their information will be stolen or used without their consent. SSL certificates help to protect the transfer of sensitive information such as credit card numbers, passwords and usernames, consumer information and more. Also, having an SSL certificate can also protect your own website from scammers.
There are four main benefits when it comes to using SSL Certificates:
- Authentication – Ensures the servers we are talking to are who they claim to be.
- Data Integrity – Makes sure the data is not modified in transit between your client and the servers
- Encryption – Protects the actual communication from eavesdroppers so that they cannot tell what the communication is about
- SEO Ranking – Google now provides a slight ranking boost to websites using HTTPS.
3. Make Sure your Contact Information Is Easy to Find
If a visitor can’t find out how to contact you, then that’s a huge problem for your site. Be sure that your information is easy to find, so when there is a question for you, then clients and prospects can easily figure out how to reach you in order to take the next steps.
Some key things that you should include are:
- Google Map
- Address
- Phone Number
- Directions
- A Contact Form and email address (It’s important to include multiple communication options)
The below are a few additional options to liven up your contact page a bit more!
- Call-to-Action
- Video
- Photos
Twenty Over Ten client, Innovative Retirement, LLC has two office locations, both of which are included on their contact page. Additionally, they have a Google map for reach, email address, address, phone number and a contact form. They have included a CTA with the phrase, “Schedule A Call” giving their prospects another option to connect with them.
4. Showcase your Unique Selling Proposition
What makes you, “you?” How does your company stand out from the others? There are so many financial companies offering similar services, so how do you stand out in your niche? If you can’t offer a USP, then you will get lost in the hundreds of advisors in your area, so be sure to point out what makes you unique!
When you are starting to develop your USP, be sure that you are doing your research. Look at some of your competitors and check out what they are doing. See what they may do well or not as well, and then see where you can go from there.
Identify a target market, as well. Who would want your product or services? Figure out what works for them and go with that. Also, try to figure out what exactly will make a client want to work with you over another financial advisory firm.
As you can see in the above image, Twenty Over Ten client, Storybook Financial caters to a very unique market, individuals and workers that are affected by Cystic Fibrosis. They offer financial services to help this particular market and help them to live a fuller life and plan for a stronger financial future.
5. Offer Fresh Blog Content
Adding a blog to your advisor website is pretty easy in itself, but making sure that it’s really benefiting your site is a whole other ballgame. You want to create awesome content and ensure that it is easily accessible and continuously updated for your readers. You want to make your content accessible for those who can use it.
As an advisor, your blog content not only influences someone’s financial well being but also helps to position yourself as a thought leader in the industry. You want to prove that you really know your stuff, because if a potential client found answers on your site, then they are more likely to pass this information along to other potential clients. Blogging is the perfect platform to build trust with prospects, develop yourself in the industry, drive traffic, increase SEO rankings and many other benefits!
We know though, that as a busy advisor, it can be hard to find the time to blog in a timely fashion with informative new content every week, which is why we created Content Assist. With this add-on service, users are able to choose blog posts by category (retirement, home-buying, young adults, etc.), load them into their website, and then edit and further optimize the content for search engines. Advisors have the ability to customize and edit the content to add their voice, SEO keywords, and further promote their expertise, or use the content as-is.
Blogging and content marketing has become such a huge part of your digital marketing efforts, and we have simplified this for clients by offering Content Assist and Lead Pilot.
CONTENT ASSIST
We offer useful tools, such as Content Assist to all Twenty Over Ten users so that if you are struggling to come up with content ideas for your blog, you can use our content then edit it to make it your own. With this tool, you can choose from different categories, such as retirement, home-buying, young adults, business and much more. Once you have chosen which blog that you want to use, advisors can easily customize and edit the content to add your unique voice, keywords to fit your niche or you can use it as-is.
LEAD PILOT
Lead Pilot is the industry’s first-ever AI-powered all-in-one solution for content creation and distribution. With Lead Pilot, advisors are able to launch robust content campaigns from a streamlined, easy-to-use dashboard. Team members can collaborate and share content pieces, upload original content, and customize content from the media library. It not only includes blogs but also video and infographic content. Once it is added, the content can be easily scheduled to be sent out via email or social media with branded landing pages.
6. Personalize It With Employee Bios
Potential customers want to know who they’re going to be working with, so be sure to include a biography page. Aside from your homepage, the “About Us” or “Bio” pages are some of the most visited pages on your site. Why you ask? People want to know who they can trust and who will be handling their finances. So many similar services are offered by other firms, so show how your people make you stand out! Personalize and humanize the brand, so visitors will feel more like they “know” them when they meet with them for the first time.
Talk about the education, experience, motivation and the story behind the employees at your firm. When you are going to be working with someone and their money for many years to come, you want to get the full story behind them right off the bat! Clients want to know that they can trust who they are working with and showing off some of their skills along with nice headshots can really help with this.
Twenty Over Ten client, Avid Advisory and Investment Group has a strong bio section that not only includes headshots of the team and allows prospects to learn more about them, but there is a short video about the employees, as well.
7. Integrate Google Analytics
Google Analytics works by tracking tags, which are small pieces of code that are embedded in your website. So, when a user lands on your website, this code becomes active and starts collecting data about how the visitor interacts on your website. Google can then take this data and display it in easy-to-read charts for you. It will allow you to see what is working on your site, the demographics of your site visitors and much much more!
SOME OF THE THINGS THAT GOOGLE ANALYTICS CAN TELL YOU ABOUT YOUR WEBSITE ARE:
- How much traffic is coming to your website
- Where your traffic is coming from
- What visitors are doing once they are on the site
- Which blog posts are the most popular
- Where your site visitors located in the world
8. Be Mobile-Friendly and Responsive
We know having a mobile-friendly site is incredibly important, especially since mobile traffic has accounted for 50 percent of the website traffic worldwide for three years now. All of our sites are built with a mobile-first approach. When developing our frameworks, our designers held priority on a seamless experience regardless of the device a user was viewing the website on. Through our platform, advisors can choose the framework that best fits their business and all respond to desktop, mobile phone, tablet – any device users may be on.
In the below example you can see that Twenty Over Ten’s client, Asset Strategies, has a responsive website that looks great across all devices regardless of the one that is being used.
9. Have a Clear Call-To-Action
A call-to-action is such a huge part of your website and it’s crucial that you give your visitors a next step to take. With this, actions that someone can take on your site add even more value to your digital marketing efforts. Your CTA will differ depending on how your website is set up, but some examples include:
- Sign up for a newsletter
- Schedule a meeting
- Download a white paper
- Sign up for an event
- View a video
We love the originality of the CTA on Fulcrum Financial Group’s homepage that says “Discover How We Ignite Change,” leading prospects to find out more about the firm.
Since many people that have clicked on your website are not quite ready to choose a firm yet, it’s a good idea to provide them with a CTA so that can sign up for a blog or newsletter. If you do this, then you can keep in touch with them and show your value and that you are already committed to them so that when they are ready for help with their finances, they will remember your firm positively and be much more likely to choose your firm as their advisor!
What Your Website Should NOT Include:
Now that we have gone over what you SHOULD do on your advisor site, be sure to stay far away from doing these three things on your website!
1. Have a Clunky Navigation System
Having smooth website architecture is so important for bringing visitors to the website and potentially turning them into clients. If the transition is easy then it will increase the user experience and make them much more likely to become clients. If a website is hard to navigate
In addition to the above, when your UX is strong, your search engine rankings will increase, which is obviously crucial to driving traffic to your site. If your website navigation is easy to browse, then ultimately visitors will spend more time on your website. In addition to making sure your website is easy to browse, be sure that you are producing content that is informational and will show that you are a thought leader in the financial industry. In addition to the above, a simple website architecture helps search engines crawl your website better.
At Twenty Over Ten, we suggest no more than 15 pages total in order to keep your website simple. Even if you do have more than that, the architecture of your site should be set so that any page can be reached in 3-4 clicks at the max.
2. Be Too Long
Always remember to keep it short and sweet! Less is more when it comes to the content of your website, as we know people don’t spend long amounts of time on your site.
55% of your visitors only spend 15 seconds on your website. TIME MAGAZINE
That is not a lot of time to make a great first impression, so you want to ensure your visitors are not spending too long poring through pages on your site. Put the important information upfront and don’t bury the important information.
3. Use Cheesy Stock Photography
In blogs past. we have discussed the importance of having images on your advisor website. However, don’t just throw any stock photograph up there and expect it to perform favorably. You have to be sure to choose the RIGHT type of photo for your website. There are so many professional, free stock photo websites that you can use to customize your website.
Sure, you can use stock photos sometimes, but we think that using real photos that show off your brand and personalize your company is the best route to take. Do try to avoid stock photos that include people, but instead, include photos of your team to add personality to your website. Putting a face to your brand name will create a better first impression online.
Related: The Six Biggest Marketing Opportunities for Financial Advisors in 2021