It’s time for many planners to update their approach to their business website.

President and Founder of US Based i-Impact Group Mr. Claudio O. Pannunzio sees too many websites of financial advisers just sitting there and doing nothing.

What disturbs the communication professional and presenter is that whether a prospective client finds an adviser from a referral or Internet search, the bottom line is that a significant number of them will inevitably visit the website prior to making contact.

Pannunzio points to the KISSmetrics ‘Infographic: How Mobile is Changing Business’ industry study in the USA that found Internet searches conducted by computers, Smartphones, iPads and tablets continues to be on the rise and will grow significantly in importance. Consequently, having a well-conceived and functional website increases the odds that an adviser’s firm surfaces in Internet searches.

For this reason websites have become virtual storefronts, online business cards, and ultimately, a core element of the overall branding effort. Regardless of whether the adviser based in the North America or Australia and considering investing in a new website or planning to revamp an existing one, Pannunzio offers ten tips to be considered before undertaking the project.

Firstly, determine the objective and don’t have a website just for the sake of having one. Instead, clearly establish the chief scope of this critical tool by asking the following important questions: Will my website serve as a business-generating tool? A reference platform for my current clients? A medium to attract attention to the expertise and capabilities of my firm?

Attain an in-depth understanding of the audience, the issues and problems they’re experiencing, and then clearly articulate how they can be helped to address such concern (s).

A visitor who learns that the adviser can provide a solution to their specific problem will be immediately engaged and compelled to read on for a better insight about the practice and its services.

Before design process is commenced the message needs to be established in order to cater for the following: A clear and unequivocal positioning of the practice and what it does for its clients including the key differentiators that set it apart from its direct competitors. The message should be clear, concise and in a language that everyone can understand.

The content should endeavour to tell a story throughout the pages of the site, rather than just listing the products and services provided. Pannunzio said, “Websites overflowing with information, links and tools can put off visitors. Hire a professional writer to craft a story for the site. Ensure that all core messages are woven into the story along with expertise and capabilities. Content should be focussed, concise and feature bullet format paragraphs to facilitate easy reading.”

The use-ability factor plays a major role in a visitor’s engagement on a website. In the Western world, the majority of people tend to follow a ‘Z’ pattern while browsing a website. They start across the top from the left and end in the bottom right corner of the screen. Pannunzio recommends that advisers ask their website designer to place the most important mark of their identity – the logo – at the top of the Z pattern. Visitors’ eyes will naturally follow the path of the Z to its end where a ‘call to action’ should be strategically placed.

The growing importance of mobility cannot be stressed more highly as several market researches project that by 2014 more users will access the Internet from their phones and tablets than from a computer. If the adviser’s website is not accessible to mobile phone users, they significantly increase the odds of losing new business. The mobile version of the site must feature a limited number of pages and condensed content. Pannunzio continued, “Use a video to increase the time visitors spend on the website.

A YouOnTV study revealed that web surfers spend an average of 48 seconds on a specific website. When a site features a video that time jumps to 5:50 minutes. Scientific evidence suggests that one minute of video equals 1.8 million words. Consequently, with a single video frame an adviser can deliver the same amount of information contained in three pages of text”.

A call-to-action is something designed to induce a visitor to take action. The adviser’s goal should be to establish a connection with as many visitors as possible, so give them a reason to remember the business. Offering the opportunity of signing up for a newsletter, downloading a white paper or a free ebook, will prompt visitors to take action and voluntarily give their email address and other valuable demographics. From there the adviser can begin to develop a relationship

In the game of baseball it’s, 3 Strikes and You’re Out. The scope of a website is not only to provide good information, but to ensure that information can be accessed and consumed as swiftly as possible. On dated or poorly designed websites, information is accessible only after a string of clicks. On average, three clicks is the threshold visitors tolerate to access information.

Pannunzio concluded, “The website is an adviser’s number one marketing tool and is essential for engaging with prospective and existing clients, demonstrating expertise, educating, nurturing relationships or providing potential new customers a solution to their financial or investment problems.”

“A well designed and executed website delivers many valuable benefits for an adviser’s practice by keeping clients engaged and providing a steady stream of new business interest and opportunities”.

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Instreet launches it’s new-look website.

Boutique structured products investment manager, Instreet Investment, has launched a new- look company website.

The website is an upgraded version of its previous website, but with adviser focused content and social media functionality. It can be accessed at www.instreet.com.au.

George Lucas, managing director, Instreet says: “The revised website has been developed based on feedback from advisers, the functionality they require and the information they wanted to access online. It has a clearer and more user friendly layout with improved access to investment performance information, more reference material and better search capabilities.”

“The financial planning industry is embracing the use of technology and accessing a lot more content digitally than ever before. Use of social media by advisers to understand investments strategies and communicating with their clients is becoming more common. That is also one of the reasons why we have made our website mobile phone/tablet friendly. Being a B2B business, we also reach out clients via our Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube channels, which are easily accessed on our website. ”

The new advisor portal allows advisors to access information for their clients related to Instreet products, performance and statements online without having to call Instreet.

The website supports the positions of Instreet as an expert in the structured products sector.

“This is our core capability and we make it clear on the website. Well structured product solutions provide known outcomes, so investors can successfully manage their upside and downside in the pursuit of wealth maximisation. The

Instreet suite of structured products is designed to be relevant to both financial advisors and their clients with a quality alternative to the growth and income products produced by the major houses.”

“Over the next few months we will continue to develop a strong educational section on structured products on the website,” said Lucas.

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Late last month Google released its latest algorithm changes which affect the way that websites appear in search results.  Following their last major update by the name of Panda, this latest change is known as Penguin.

Major impact on financial websites
While previous Google updates haven’t had a huge impact on financial websites here in Australia, the Penguin update has made some dramatic changes to the top of the Google search results.

Two of the most competitive search terms in Australia both relate to the financial services industry.  The two terms, unsurprisingly, are life insurance and credit cards.

You could expect that the top positions for these ultra-competitive and highly lucrative terms would be taken by the large corporations, but instead they are both owned by small businesses offering referral and affiliate services.

Well at least they were until the big bad Penguin came along and stole their rankings along with a massive chunk of revenue.  Not only did they lose their position one rankings, but both of them fell into the abyss and are nowhere to be seen in the first few pages.

Whilst the news for these two websites was nothing short of devastating, their loss is someone else’s gain, and these latest Google changes are throwing up more opportunities for financial advisers.

What changed?
The world of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a tricky one, and most financial advisers engaging an SEO firm for their company website will be paying hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars per month without really knowing what they’re getting.

Although there are some really great SEO firms out there performing great work for their clients, many of them do little more than spamming links to your website across a range of blogs and link farms in an effort to trick Google into thinking your website is very popular.

Google are quickly catching onto this game, and the Penguin update has been the biggest effort yet by Google to penalise website owners who put more effort into tricking the search engines instead of creating great content for their visitors.

The jury is still out, but most people in the industry agree that the latest changes have benefited those with good content and penalised those who concentrated too much on SEO with little regard to website visitors.

How can you benefit?
For years I have been trying to tell financial advisers and anyone else who will listen that content is king, but unfortunately many advisers seem to think that spending money on SEO and Google advertising is a better investment than quality content.

While I have heard countless other website owners complaining about their lost Google rankings over the last couple of weeks, I have sat quietly smiling in the knowledge that many of the websites owned by my company have actually boosted their rankings over the same period.

Increased rankings lead to increased traffic, increased traffic yields increased leads, and ultimately the increased lead numbers equal more clients and more revenue.

So how can your financial planning firm benefit from the Penguin updates?  In my view the answer is simple, and all it takes is to concentrate on generating good quality content that your ideal client needs.

If you create and distribute content that your potential clients want and need, they will find that content via Google and hopefully your website will then be effective enough to convert their visit into a contact.

While your competitors are still out there pouring more money into SEO and link building to regain their lost rankings, you need to be getting great content onto your site which Google and its penguins will reward you for.

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Once your website has gained the lead, then it’s your job to convert that lead into a happy – and profitable – client. Getting prospective clients to your website is often the biggest hurdle, but in this article I’m going to skip that step and assume that the visitor has already made their way to your website.

There are many different styles of adviser websites out there, and just as many different styles of enquiry forms. I’ve delved deeply into many financial advisers’ websites; firstly as part of my compliance role when I was approving adviser websites for a large dealer group, and more recently as part of my research for both my own websites and those of the advisers I partner with.

Many adviser websites use a very basic enquiry form that simply collects contact details and perhaps some brief details about the type of service the client is looking for.  This type of enquiry form often features prominently on the front page of the website.

While I like the idea of having the enquiry form as a ‘call to action’ on the front page of the website, I do wonder about the effectiveness of such forms, and the large amount of front page real estate that is lost in making space for the enquiry form. If someone is only providing their name and contact details, they know very well that all you’re going to do with that information is use it to call them back.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but if the prospective client knows that will be the case, why wouldn’t they just call you themselves?

On the other hand you have the more complex enquiry forms.  These are generally far too large to place on the front page of the website, and will instead have their own dedicated page.  Obviously you would still be placing prominent links to this page from your front page, and every other page of your website.

I have had plenty of advisers – and so called web experts – tell me that the shorter enquiry forms are far more effective.  Their rational is that a prospective client is much more likely to complete a form that takes thirty seconds rather than one that takes ten minutes.

But I disagree.

My company owns a portfolio of websites that gather life insurance leads.  Over the years we have used short and long enquiry forms, placed in different sections of the websites, and the results have been very different.

We have found that short contact forms on the front page deliver far fewer leads than our more complex forms, and furthermore the leads from the complex forms convert into paying clients at a much higher rate.

One of our most successful websites actually features our most complex enquiry form.  Over the years we have continually added more questions to the form and made it more difficult to complete, yet the number of enquiries we receive continues to increase every month.

The form on this website is now so comprehensive that two dealer groups have accepted it as a fully completed fact finder.  That saves a huge amount of time, and also makes for an extremely good lead.  Not only do we know a lot about the client before the first phone call, but we also know how serious that person is due to the amount of time they have invested in completing our lengthy form.

You may be thinking that a lot of prospective clients will leave the form half-finished when they get tired of answering questions, but our statistics show that we have very few ‘dropouts’ with our forms.  If someone isn’t committed to filling out the form we probably don’t want the lead anyway.

I know that most web designers will keep telling advisers that short enquiry forms are better, but if you take that advice then I believe you are costing yourself business.  I have spoken to plenty of financial advisers who have spent thousands on their websites, only to receive not a single lead from it.

Now I’m not saying that a longer and more complex enquiry form will result in a flood of leads for any old website.  What I do believe is that a well designed website that ‘funnels’ visitors through to a comprehensive enquiry form will be more effective than one that expects the visitor to enter their contact details on the front page without having had a chance to read through the website.

Online strategy is all about experimentation.  If you currently use a short enquiry form on the front page of your website, try investing a few dollars in having your web designer implement a more detailed form, and use the saved space on your front page to further promote your services.  If it doesn’t work, little has been lost.  If it does work, you could have a lot to gain.

About Shane Moore…
Shane has been in the financial services industry for over a decade.  Since selling his own successful firm he has been working with other advisers to improve their online marketing efforts through the distribution of original and regular content.  For more information visit www.ShaneMoore.com.au

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