David Lucs, a project manager here at Advisor Products, has worked with scores of advisors over the past two years to help build their websites.
David cares deeply about our clients and wants Advisor Products to be great. He’s great.
In talking with him recently about the challenges of his job, he told me that one of the most difficult areas advisors struggle with is organizing the marketing content on their sites.
So David and I wrote this post together about how advisors can organize their website marketing copy. We’ll collaborate again soon on some other areas that can help you in building your site.
Home Page Text. Two or three short paragraphs on your home page should present your services, ideal clients, and why people should trust you to manage their money. Add a link in the text where people can get more in-depth information about your services.
Detailing Your Services. Use the “Services” page to define your services in detail. Start with a one-paragraph summary about your firm’s overall client experience and all its services. Follow that information with a paragraph about each of your specific services.
·Use bold text lead-in text to make it easy for a reader to skim and find the service in which he or she is most interested.
· Add links so a prospect can drill down to more specific information about each service.
· Workflow diagrams that accompany descriptions about your services are vital. Use a tool like SlickPlan to create a graphic depicting your process for personalizing portfolios, for example.
·Composites of target clients. If you target college professors, doctors, or senior management in a particular company or sector, for instance, write brief cases study about the problems faced by each target client and how you solved them.
Your Team. Visitors want to know about you and your staff. A “Team” page with photos satisfies our natural curiosity and engages visitors. Moreover, sharing your team’s professional qualifications and talents establishes your credibility. Avoid jargon and don’t expect visitors to be familiar with the alphabet soup of financial services professional designations. Say that you’re a CFP® licensee or have a Series 24 and explain in a sentence what you did to earn those credentials. Provide an email address at the end of your bio, along with any social networking credentials as a way for people to follow you on twitter or a link to your blog.
Resources. Link to forms, questionnaires, and other materials clients often need. If you write a blog, you obviously want to link to it. At Advisor Products, we provide a constant stream of FINRA-reviewed educational articles and videos about wealth management. These resources inspire ideas about new ways you can serve clients and draw them into conversations. Having this content on your sites shows prospects the issues you can help them with.
Compliance. Of course, all of what we’re saying here should be vetted by your compliance officer. Some compliance officers discourage the use of case studies or composites, and any marketing copy on your site is subject to rules governing advertising material.
People are not going to entrust you with their money based solely on your website. But people are likely to use your website to determine whether to meet with you and engage you. Unless your site is well organized and contains thoughtful content, you may never get that opportunity.