7 Reasons Why Most Financial Advisor Websites Are Terrible
The goal of a financial advisor’s website is to turn visitors into clients. Unfortunately, most websites don’t get the job done.
Want to know why? By no means is this a comprehensive list, but these are a few reasons your financial advisor website might be ineffective. 7 Reasons Most Financial Advisor Websites Don't Convert Well...I used to do website reviews for financial advisors, and I learned a whole lot about what makes a website successful. By judging websites through the lens of a prospect and a marketer, I’ve helped countless advisors turn their websites from no man's land into a gold rush.
Now, I can pass that wisdom to you — here are seven reasons your website doesn’t yield the results you want. 💡 If you want personalized feedback about how to improve your website, you can book a website review with me here. I will record a 10-minute video reviewing your site and send it to you within 48 hours. 1. You Don't Capture Leads.This is a big mistake, and it’s one I see most often. If a visitor comes to your website but isn’t ready to do business with you at that moment — which describes most financial advisor leads — you need to have some sort of capture form. Otherwise, by the time there’s a need, your lead will have long forgotten about you.
I’ve never understood why advisors put so much money and effort into marketing their site but don’t even try to capture leads — it’s crazy to me. Plus, the best part is the people who are interested enough to fill out a lead-capture form automatically go from cold to warm in your sales funnel. If you want to nurture a connection with someone who’s interested but isn’t ready to hire you just yet, get their email address to have a way to communicate with them in the future. The best advice I can give you is to have a good lead magnet — a free thing you give away in exchange for an email address —and ask for as few details as possible in the beginning. A lot of financial advisor websites have these long, drawn-out capture forms that ask for name, email, phone number and more — as a rule of thumb, each additional piece of information you ask for will decrease your conversion rates. I could go on for days about this stuff, but here are some key qualities of a good lead magnet: 👉 It’s relevant to your target market. You can use your lead magnet to target a particular group, geographic area, age bracket or other demographics. The best part is you can segment your email list and have a drip campaign that’s based around the category of your list. For example, if your lead magnet is relevant to physicians, you can have a drip campaign geared toward physicians — which will optimize every part of your online marketing campaign, from conversion ratios to email open rates. 👉 It gives real value. Don’t just say, “Subscribe to my newsletter!” Instead, give people something valuable that’ll help your ideal client achieve a certain goal. If you can help them achieve results, they’ll trust you that much more. Also, the value has to be blatantly obvious in order to capture as many leads as possible. 👉 It naturally and logically leads to engaging with you more deeply. You can usually do this by including your phone number, a brief bio and other contact information at the very end. If someone finds you interesting enough to read your lead magnet all the way to the end, this is the prime moment for them to get formally introduced to you. P.S. If you ask for a phone number, your conversions will decrease, because your prospects will fear you’ll call and pitch them. ALSO READ: 4 Reasons Why Buying Leads Is Like Burning Money 
2. Your Contact Information Isn't Super-Accessible.When dealing with website usability, you need to assume people are lazy. Make the most important parts of your site super easy to access. If you make people look for more than two seconds, they’ll bounce.
If someone wants to find your contact information, they’re likely to look in two places:
With that said, I’ve run countless tests and heat maps that all tell me the very top of your website is the most viewed area, which makes sense. In addition to the above two places, I recommend you put pertinent contact information above the fold and at the top of every single page on your website. You want to make things as easy as possible for a visitor, and accessible information eliminates the need to look for and click “Contact us.” 💡 Look at it this way: Your lead capture will get people who are slightly interested, while the more motivated people will have your contact information staring them in the face. This is one of the things I noticed when I analyzed Barron's Top 100 Independent Financial Advisor websites to see what they had in common. You can read that article here... I Analyzed The Websites Of Barron's Top 100 Independent Financial Advisors: Here's What They Do Differently 3. It's Too Cluttered.Many of the financial advisor websites I see have a lack of focus. There’s so much information crammed on the page that it’s hard for me to figure out their goals and target market.
One reason this happens is that financial advisors will purchase website templates and just fill in the blanks. Sure, that’s better than not having a website, but most templates aren’t suitable for the content advisors want to publish. Try to keep things simple, and don’t be afraid to spread your content around your website — you don’t have to stuff and clutter all of it onto your home page. I know you think you need to get every last piece of information across to visitors, but if they feel overwhelmed, they’ll leave. Here’s a quick test to see if your website is simple and easy to understand: Get someone who’s never seen your website before, show it to them for 10 seconds, then close the page. Ask them, “What was the goal of my website? What would be your logical next step?” If they can’t tell you, your website lacks focus. 4. There's No Differentiation.To the general consumer, all financial advisors are the same. Sadly, most financial advisor websites tend to have the same look and feel, too.
I’m a huge proponent of differentiating yourself in the marketplace, and the same goes for your website. Once you have a target market, it becomes much easier to build your website. You’ll have access to keywords that impact that market, and you’ll find it easier to outline a visitor’s next steps. Besides that, your lead magnet practically writes itself. Your website needs to have a way to convince visitors that you’re unique, so show them why you’re worth listening to or reading about — without a compelling reason to take your logical next steps, people will never work with you. 
Most financial advisor websites look like clones of each other.
5. People Don't Know It Exists.Let’s say you’ve spent thousands of dollars and countless hours working on your website. You now have something that flows logically, loads fast, is fully optimized, has tons of resources and includes an awesome lead magnet to boot — what good is it if you never attract any visitors in the first place?
There are so many ways to get your website out into the world:
6. It Isn't Mobile Friendly.For website marketing, you want to get people on your website, and you want them to stay. That means if you don’t optimize your website for mobile, users on mobile devices aren’t likely to stay — the text will look too small, and your site will be hard to navigate.
By the way, if you want to implement SEO as part of your overall marketing strategy, Google will punish you if you don’t optimize your site for mobile, which might negatively impact your rankings in the search engine. Get this: 80% of all internet users use a smartphone, and more than half of all web traffic comes from a mobile device. Personally, I don’t really like to surf the web on a mobile device; I actually prefer to use a desktop daily, but if you want to keep up with the times, you need to heed reality. Besides doing the technical stuff, like making your site responsive and mobile-friendly, consider adding more visual media — mobile users tend to consume a disproportionately high amount of short videos and images. Plus, be especially aware of the mobile version of your site if you attempt to drive traffic from social media networks. After all, people use 91% of mobile internet access for social activities. An unresponsive site basically negates your content marketing efforts and wastes your marketing dollars. If you want to maximize your reach, you need a site designed to catch social media click-throughs seamlessly. 
7. Your Website Is BORING!Most financial advisor websites are simply boring. They don’t have any personality, intrigue, or interest. Put another way, they’re flat.
Having superb content helps out a lot in this department. Content marketers have a distinct advantage here because by posting regular content, they can let their personality shine through – just like I’m doing right now. Helping people understand who you are and showing them what you’re like is much better than telling them what you do. Focus on what you can do to keep your audience interested. Ask yourself, “Can my website stand out in a crowd?” If not, you might be more boring than you think. Of course, this doesn’t mean adding twelve different colorful graphics or six loud auto-play videos…. Remember how I said you want to keep your site simple? There’s a fine balance at work here. Here are a few other hints that your website is boring:
5 Ways To Improve Your Financial Advisor Website...Luckily for you and listeners of my Financial Advisor Marketing podcast, I broke down how to level-up your website in an episode titled, “5 Ways Financial Advisors Can Improve Their Websites.”
You can listen to the full episode below, but show highlights include: 💡 Why your website does not have to look good — and how ugly websites can outperform pretty ones from the world’s best designers. [3:15] 💡 How much of your contact information to put on your website to generate the maximum amount of clients. [5:45] 💡 The most important words to put on your website (nobody can copy this because they’re specific to you). [11:40] 💡 Why most “About me” pages say nothing about their owner, especially when they list your education and certifications. [17:15] If you take these five tips and apply them to your website, you’ll see way better results than you see now. 1. Focus On Conversions > Looks.Ideally, your financial advisor website will look good and convert more leads, but don’t put all your energy into beautifying it.
I've noticed many advisors are concerned about having their website look pretty, but the truth is a lot of those good-looking websites with slideshows plus tons of high-resolution images and video don’t convert very well. Keep this in mind: An appealing website ≠ an effective one that leads to conversions — and you always want to focus on conversions. So, if you hire a website designer who only builds out the aesthetics of your website, that’ll likely cost you some conversions. After all, why else do you have a website? Whether you hire an expert or build your own site on Weebly, Squarespace or Wix, the key is to incorporate marketing elements that boost appointment setting conversions. Your online presence isn’t a brochure, an ad or a lookbook for all your trendy headshots and photoshoots — what matters is how you get a prospect to set an appointment with you so you can help them. That’s it. 2. Share (The Right) Contact Information.Earlier, I told you where to put your contact information on your website — now, let’s talk about which information to share, and why you want to share as much as possible.
It absolutely grinds my gears to see financial advisors only list an email address. Yes, some prospects will gladly use the limited information you provide, but what about the people who want to call you and get started right away? How do you expect them to reach you if all you share is an email? Folks, don’t shortchange yourself and your business. Provide a variety of visible contact information throughout your website so prospects can reach you in ways they’d prefer — if not, you might as well leave piles of cash on the table. Prospects may want to call or email you, contact you through social media or even write you a handwritten note. To make it easier for them to reach you, include your:
3. Be Clear About What You Do And Who You Serve.To improve your financial advisor website, understand ambiguity won’t do you any favors. On your homepage, make it immediately clear what you do and who you serve — that way website visitors know what you offer as soon as their page loads.
The last thing you want to do is make your leads scroll up and down your website and jump from page to page trying to figure out what the heck you do. Here’s why: People are generally impatient, and especially online. They want to know immediately if your service or product can benefit them and if you’re worth their investment; so, if you only market wealth management services on your vaguely titled website (i.e., wealthmanagement.com), you’re making it way too easy for leads to fall through the cracks. The key is to be specific. If you only target nurses, for example, you’d better visibly include your specialty on your homepage in a place visitors can see ASAP. The goal is to attract your audience, so nurses visiting your website for the first time should be able to realize you cater to them right away. If you can do that, setting appointments and converting gets much easier — and I should know, because I practice what I preach: The second you land on my website, you know immediately I target financial advisors. Plus, my URL tells you what I do (The Advisor Coach - do you have a clue?), just like the name of my podcast. 4. Leverage Your Best Content.If you have pieces of content that consistently work well, continue to leverage them for your website — don’t waste your time trying to reinvent the wheel.
There’s nothing wrong with writing blogs or hosting webinars and podcasts to beef up your content, but these strategies don’t benefit every financial advisor, and you can’t create content assuming they do. Don’t commit to writing weekly or bi-weekly blogs with no rhyme or reason. Instead, be strategic about the content you share: Log into your analytics account and figure out which blog posts bring you the most traffic. After you learn about your top-performing content, amplify it. You could also create more content that's related to your most popular blogs, podcast episodes, emails and more. This sounds easy enough, but I see this far too often. Advisors write blogs about college, retirement planning, Roth IRAs and a range of other topics — when I check out their website with my own analytical tools, I can see the Roth IRA articles receive tons of traffic, but they continue to market their services without prioritizing that piece of content and more like it. All you have to do is use your website’s analytics to find out what your audience actually cares to read about. If your article “5 Retirement Mistakes Nurses Make and How to Avoid Them” gets 75% of the traffic to your website, that’s a green light to make more content to help nurses with their retirement. My best pieces of content involve financial advisors and marketing. So, guess what? I create videos, blogs, newsletters, podcast episodes and more related to financial advisor marketing. I still talk about other important topics like practice management, hiring and productivity. But my website analytics tell me people want to know more about marketing, lead generation and prospecting, so that’s what I intentionally amplify. ALSO READ: 10 Awesome Content Marketing Tips For Financial Advisors 5. Talk About Yourself.Show your human side, financial advisors. Your leads and prospects want to know who you are before they hand you their hard-earned money, so talk about yourself and your life to form a deeper connection.
You don’t even have to get too personal. What are your interests? Which sports teams do you support? If you live in the heart of Baltimore and most of your clients are Ravens fans, include that you’re a proud Ravens fan! Why not? It builds a connection with prospects, plus you can use it as an icebreaker. I love to see “About me” pages on financial advisor websites, but don’t use that spot to rewrite your resume. The alphabet soup behind your name is a great indicator of your credibility, but who are you? Besides sharing your alma mater, every certification you hold and background about your business, also talk about your community, family and pets, how you support your local small businesses, and any information that’ll make it easier to connect with you. You also want to talk about your niche. It should already be clear on your website’s homepage, but you can use your biography to share more about your volunteering opportunities within that niche, or highlight your appearance in trade magazines. However you can humanize yourself and make it clear you’re the right financial advisor for their needs, don’t hold back. And I’ll be honest — this is a tip even I should take advantage of more. |