Financial Advisor Websites | 5 questions to ask yourself

Financial Advisor Websites | 5 questions to ask yourself

The Office Audit

Back when I first started as a financial adviser, Van Kampen mutual funds was doing a big ‘value add’ push to attract more business. I’m not sure how successful their effort was for them, but one of the positive outcomes I received was an introduction to their office audit (along with a few books like “Storyselling for Financial Advisers” and “Millionaire’s Advisor“) which helped advisers understand the non verbal messages an office can communicate to clients and prospects. The typical suggestions usually consisted of things like “remove clutter,” “add pictures of family,” and “display your hobbies.” All of which were intended to instill confidence and make connections. The same is true (perhaps more so) of your website.

Here are a few questions to help you conduct an audit on your firm’s website:

  • How often to you add content?
  • Is the content written by you or someone at your firm?
  • Does your home page answer the WIFM question for prospects?
  • Is your website build to be search engine friendly?
  • How does your website look on a mobile phone or tablet?

Financial Advisor Websites Audit

an image 5 questions for ask about financial advisor websites

Pull up your website and pretend it’s one of your competitors. If you were looking at it for the first time what would it say about you and your company? Does it help someone learn anything meaningful about your firm or differentiate you from all the other advisors out there?

Write down your answers to these questions. Have your staff do the same. Unless your answers were weekly, yes, yes yes, and great, there is room for improvement. Enhancements to anyone of these areas can lead to significant improvement in the conversion of visitors (or getting more visitors) into clients.

In reality there are many factors that go into building great looking, high performing financial advisor websites, but by starting with these 5 you’ll have an advantage (assuming you do something after asking the questions) over your competition. I’d also recommend reading Storyselling for Financial Advisers and Millionaire’s Advisor, they are great books that will help you connect with clients and run your practice more efficiently.

A Fresh Coat of Paint

A Fresh Coat of Paint

A fresh coat of paint.

workshed logoWell by now the word is out, Workshed is under new ownership…and look what they did to the logo and website!

Sure, we could’ve left things as they were, worked less hours, ate a few more meals, but then would it really be ours?  We love the tradition of Workshed, the way the name evokes (for us at least) feelings of craftsmanship, service, and small town values and it was important to demonstrate our own style and perspective.

Plus the new office is in downtown Washougal (as a Camas grad Joe cannot utter the phrase go Panthers!) so for fun we brought out the orange in the logo and website.  It’s very much a work in progress, but go ahead and pull it up on your phone or tablet.  It should (assuming everything is functioning properly) automatically resize itself to fit your device.  Web nerds call this a responsive design and we think it’s crucial for businesses on the web.

Why you ask?

Just think how often you look something up on your phone.  Maybe you like long load times and pinching, zooming, and scrolling all over.  The people that track this sort of behavior say most people don’t and that it means lost revenue.   How a website looks on a mobile device is one of the questions from our “3 Question Website Review,” if you want a copy just click the button.

3 QUESTION WEBSITE REVIEW

Let us know how your site measures up to the quick review, we’d be happy to help with any changes you need.