How to Overcome a Financial Advisor’s Worst Nightmare
You’re giving a motivational presentation to your staff. You are wooing potential business partners. Yet you find all your Powerpoint presentation pages in the wrong order. You panic. In fact, your entire presentation is just full of words from a Chinese menu.
This scene can certainly wake you up in the middle of the night. But it’s far from a financial advisor’s worst nightmare.
An even more terrible scenario is getting back to your desk from a presentation, only to realize that you don’t have any clients left.
This is a real scenario that far too many financial advisors have to face every day. It’s the unfortunate reality for businesses that fail to maintain a proper online presence. Just take a look at all the brick-and-mortar stores that have failed to change with the times.
You may be a traditional financial firm with traditional values, but you’re probably starting to notice that more and more of your prospects and potential clients are not so traditional.
They like smartphones, wearables, voice assistants and self-driving cars. They want to do all their business online through a mobile app. If you’re not there to meet them halfway, they’ll surf over to the next practice that can give them what they want.
Today’s customers want outstanding customer service, their way, and they want it now. For an increasing number of financial clients, this means being able to interact with their financial advisor’s digital presence whenever they wish from wherever they are. If they don’t get it, don’t expect a strongly worded telegram or a picket line outside your building. Expect tumbleweeds.
Why do financial advisors need a web presence?
Since more and more people are using the web to do business, you need to be online to keep up with their demands and stay ahead of your competitors. A well-maintained online presence will help your business in many ways.
Let’s take a closer look at how a great website can help your practice grow.
Improve Discoverability
With an effective web presence, you’ll spend less time looking for new clients, because new prospects are always calling or filling your inbox with inquiries. By keeping your website current, and employing tried and tested digital marketing strategies, you’ll have no problem attracting new clients who’ve come across your brand through online searches and social media platforms.
According to Google, more than three-quarters of people who search for a business via a mobile device visit that business within a day. More than a quarter of visits results in a successful transaction.
If people can’t find you and you’re not even showing up on searches for “financial advisors near me” – you are losing lots of potential new business every day.
Establishing Trust and Gaining People’s Confidence
A well-designed website is a sign that your business means business. Your website is the first thing people will check to find out more about what you do, who you are, and how you do business.
When two financial advisors have similar websites and offer the same set of services, the one that has an up-to-date blog and downloadable content is going to generate more inquiries and have better conversions.
A site that hasn’t been updated for months will look like a store with dusty shop windows and dimly lit shop lights.
“It could be open, but… Let’s try this other store first; the one with the welcome sign and people inside.”
Improve Customer Service
If you only offer customer service by phone during regular business hours, you are missing out on a huge chunk of the market who are looking for more availability from their financial advisors.
In our experience, many prefer to communicate via text, instant message, Skype, or email. Your job is to know exactly what your customers want, and go the extra mile to make sure they’re happy. In many cases, you should know what they need even before they do.
With a solid Internet presence, you can chat with clients and potential clients in real-time using different communications platforms. You should have a social media presence on every platform whether it be Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn, so that clients and prospects can easily reach out to you and get their questions answered.
We can even help you set up a chatbot on your site, so you don’t have to allocate additional resources for simple customer service tasks. Chatbots give your website visitors and clients the impression that you’re always available and can always be reached no matter what time it is.
How to Wake Up From the Nightmare of a Tired Internet Presence
If you think of your website merely as an online business card or brochure, you’re not maximizing its true potential.
The Internet is much more than a simple digitized version of static print marketing. In fact, your website visitors, prospects and clients expect to see more than this.
Here are some additional tips that can help you maintain a better web presence.
Optimize Your Branding
All aspects of your digital presence, whether it’s your website or social media profiles, should have consistent branding. Everything from your emails, brochures, downloadable content, videos, pictures, letterheads, as well as other printed and digital marketing collaterals should all feature this same branding. This helps build brand awareness and reinforces your brand’s identity in people’s minds.
It goes without saying that your branding strategy, which includes your visual identity and your messaging, should be professionally designed and well thought out. A cheap template or DIY solution just won’t have the same impact on your target audience.
Make Your Contact Info Easily Available
Your contact page should have all the details about your business. Make sure it has an updated phone number, a customer service email address, and your office addresses as well.
You should also claim your Google My Business page and update all the information on your profile. This should increase your visibility in local searches and give people the ability to rate your practice.
Add links to your social media pages on your website so that people can follow you and regularly see your posts and updates.
Consider adding a contact form so that it’s easier for people to reach you for quotes, advice, or any additional information they may need.
Perform an SEO Audit
An SEO audit will identify areas you can improve on so you can have better visibility and show up higher in search results pages. You may have lots of great content, but if the page and the website itself is not optimized, people won’t be able to see it when they search for similar topics and keywords.
After performing an audit, you can develop a new SEO strategy that can significantly boost your website traffic and increase awareness for your brand.
When you employ SEO best practices you can deliver a better user experience to your visitors, which has a positive effect on your brand image. Your pages will load up faster. You’ll be more visible in local searches. And you’ll also have a better overall content strategy.
Optimize Conversions
A good website can attract lots of visitors. A great website, however, can also convert those visitors into clients.
You can use analytics to see how visitors end up on your website, which pages they visit, how much time they spend on a page, and which pages they go to afterward. All this data can be used to create supercharged pages that will give your visitors exactly what they’re looking for and compel them to take immediate action.
Final Words
A professionally designed and well-maintained website is the foundation of all your digital marketing efforts. It’s very cost-effective considering all the new clients and business growth it can provide.
Keep in mind, you can’t expect much growth just from random site traffic. You also have to have a solid SEO and marketing strategy so that you can effectively target markets who are more likely to convert.
Make no mistake, revamping an outdated website isn’t an easy task. But once your tech is up to date, and after adopting a solid digital strategy, it will do most of the legwork for you – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all-year-round.
We have the skills and experience to help you develop and maintain the best financial advisory website for your exact needs. We understand the financial industry and digital marketing inside out.
If you want to grow or streamline your business the smart way, give us a call at (216) 894 5193, email Dan Stark at dan@altastreet.com, or use our online form.