How Your Website Can Turn Visitors into Financial Advisory Clients

Financial advisors strive to provide excellent service to their clients while attracting new clients to grow AUM. While financial advisors are certified and educated to provide superior financial services, many may benefit from more marketing training.

Without formal marketing training, how can a wealth manager change their website from a brochure to a new business generator? This article includes practical, real-world tactics and examples. These ideas can help you attract more site visitors and help establish trust and connection. They can also help you capture website leads to build your prospect and new client pipeline.

The Best Financial Advisor Websites Attract Ideal Prospects and Build Trust

A great website is an ideal financial advisor prospecting tool. It delivers value to new site visitors, builds trust, and ultimately motivates them to give you their email address or request a meeting.

Attracting Prospects to Your Financial Services Website

Websites can attract new visitors through search engines like Google and Bing, social media, referrals from other websites, and direct links from emails, among others. We suggest leveraging the power of content to attract users in two ways — search engine optimization (SEO) and social media. By adding new articles and insights to your website written for your preferred target client, more of them may find your site and discover your brand organically. You can also leverage that content to build brand awareness through social media.

Build Financial Advisor Trust

Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs) face an uphill battle in gaining trust. An August 2022 Investors Business Daily Survey found that consumers’ trust rating is lower for wealth managers than for all but one of the financial services categories covered. Text on a web page can gain only so much of a prospect’s trust.

Fortunately, your firm can have a trust-generating star that no others do. You!

Your photos, videos, and rich content can let prospects see and hear your expertise anonymously while they research. Used well, they can add social proof for your services and your site, highlighting community involvement. A well-written and compliant client testimonial can help qualified prospects understand your value.

Capture Financial Advisor Website Leads

Capturing leads on your site is critical to driving ROI from your marketing efforts. Your site visitor may find you to be a perfect match. Yet still, they continue their journey, never to return.

The key is to give prospects a good reason to share their information with you (name, email address, phone number). The timing may not be suitable for a given prospect, but if they connect with your content and you make it easy for them to sign up for more information, you can be top of mind when the time is right.

Attract financial advisor website leads with SEO, blogs, and social media

We’re limiting our suggestions to those that don’t require digital marketing expertise yet can deliver stunning results.

Financial advisor website Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is a complex discipline. However, search engines can do a great job of matching a user’s search intent with the right website. Logically, the website that best provides the experience the searcher seeks ranks higher. A site or blog post that provides the best post-click expertise for a potential financial advisory client can perform well without SEO planning.

Ideally, your website is in the first-page result for a user searching for an advisor with your unique expertise, certifications, fee model, and location. We recommend that your home page includes this critical information that users will use in their online searches.

Unique expertise and affinities:

• Client affinities, such as expertise working with teachers, former military, and attorneys
• Life stage focus, such as preparing to pay for college while retiring, or post-divorce planning
• Advisor affinities, such as board memberships, sponsorships, clubs,

Certifications and titles: CFA, CFP, ChFC, CIC, CIMA, CPA, and Fiduciary.

Business and Fee Model: Fee-only vs. commissions, fiduciary, independent vs. broker, or bank-affiliated.

Location: City, state, zip, and neighborhood name.

You can search right now to see if your site appears:

• [Business Model] + [unique affinity] + [Location] + [Certification]
• [Fee only] + [Fiduciary] + [Retirement Planning] + [NYC}

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Quick Hits

These may be technical for some Financial Planners. Your website admin should be able to implement these changes relatively quickly.

SEO Tactic #1: Update your home page banner, as search engines prioritize this text block heavily.

SEO Tactic #2:

For a website admin, this is a straightforward and high-impact update. Update your home page’s metadata, precisely the <title> tag. The change may be simple if you use one of the leading website tools, and it is one of the most important signals for search engines to index websites.

• Create a 50 to 60-character <title> phrase with key differentiation. Examples:
  • Fee-only fiduciary | College and estate planning | 10017
  • CFP Serving the Pre-retirement needs of lawyers | 33315

Financial Advisor Website Blogs

Your blog posts can convey your expertise, perspective, and personality. Ultimately, each post is another opportunity to gain more trust and move closer to developing a new client relationship. The steps are simple, yet it takes discipline to get the job done.

• Step 1: Select topics. These can include:
  • Financial concerns: tax planning, investment planning, wealth preservation
  • Financial products: ETFs, bonds, insurance, complex strategies
  • Life events: windfalls and inheritance, employee stock grants
  • Lifestyle and Community: recap of a local event, charitable giving

If you’re stuck on a topic, find an interesting article, and add your perspectives.

Pick topics you’re passionate about, ones that align with your practice's strengths. Focus on the reasons that your current clients hired you. They’ll be easier to write. And when it comes to blogging, more short posts are better than a few long ones. Be consistent.

• Step 2: Plan. Write. Review.

In our recent post, “Financial Advisor Marketing Messaging for Your Ideal Prospects,” we covered messaging in detail.

Getting started can be the hardest part of the exercise. Get started, write your intro paragraph, and the topic may roll off your fingertips effortlessly.

Review your article at least twice before posting. Please read it to yourself out loud and make sure it makes sense. Next, review your grammar with online tools.

• Step 3: Post and reap the SEO benefits.

Each new post can generate new traffic from prospects seeking advice on your areas of most substantial expertise.

Review your post’s metadata <title> for SEO. As you did for your home page, you can optimize your blog <title>. It should be like the blog title, highlighting the question answered or the problem solved. Answer the question for the reader – why should they care about this article?

Site visitors who land on this page may be seeking advice. Position yourself as the advisor that can help them.

Financial Advisor Website Social Media Promotion

You can promote your blog content through numerous channels. The more channels, the better, as trust and familiarity can grow with each new online interaction. LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all have broad adoption.

Promote your blogs via social media to generate lasting impressions and attract new visitors. You can promote it twice in the first and every 4^th week after that. As the number of blog posts increases, you’ll find yourself promoting 2 or 3 blogs weekly. These posts are like a dragnet, potentially catching a new handful of prospects with each post and deepening trust with more prospects and clients with each like and share.

• Step 1: Promote each blog on social media sites such as: LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook
  • Lead with a provocative question: Are you eligible for college financial aid?
  • Tag individuals you’d especially like to see the post.
  • Hashtags are your friend. They can help prospects discover your content.
• Step 2: Create a conversation if you can
  • Reply to comments. Use them as an opportunity to engage. Note: other viewers may see these interactions, so a reply may have a larger audience than you expect.
  • You can even send notes to people who ‘liked’ your post.

Social media benefits build slowly over time as more people can like and share more content. So, be patient. Be consistent. It can take time, but the content will live on and can continue to work for you for weeks, months, and even years after you post it.

Check out an earlier blog for more detail on social media for financial advisors.

Earn trust with financial advisor photos, videos, and social proof

In our recent financial advisor marketing strategy blog post, we shared that, according to a Twitter business blog, tweets with video get 10x more engagement than those without video. And engagement generates valuable social proof. Plus, your prospective clients can gain more trust if they can see who you are, and even better if they can see you speak.

Engage financial advisor website visitors with photos and videos

Photos

We suggest that your site includes at least two to four photos.

Home Page	Team / About Advisor Page
Independent Advisor photo  in the top banner section or first section	Independent advisor photo One professional photo  Consider adding a photo showing Advisor is active in the community, neighborhood, or a hobby.
Advisory Group photo One photo in the top banner or first section Either the entire team -or- the top few leaders	Advisory Group photos One full-team photo in the top banner  -or- the first section Plus, one photo for each team member

Video Planning

Today’s smartphones have the capability to produce high-quality video, so you already have the necessary equipment.

Before creating video content, plan for content, hosting, and display/distribution.

• Hosting Options: You can select from a variety of video hosting options.
• Distribution Options: Formatting requirements for your social channels, for example: LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram.
• Content Use Considerations: Craft videos in 30 to 90-second clips for social media.

Video Content from Blog Posts

For every new blog post, shoot brief video clips of you discussing the blog topics:

• Pick ‘sub-topics’ that can be 30-45 seconds or approximately 100 to 150 words
• Use your phone or PC to record
• Post the video to one of the popular video platforms
• Embed the video on your website if optional and easy for a web admin
• Post video to all social channels

Typical recording formats include:

• Spoken at the desk, using your phone or webcam to record
• Spoken as walking around
• Presented as slides in the video of a webinar
• Single slides with the full text and a voice-over

Generate Social Proof for Your Financial Advisory Practice

Every interaction with your social posts generates social proof for your existing customers and prospects. When a follower “likes” or “shares” your post, their followers and your followers may see it. These impressions build over time, so you could be the first person they call when the prospect has an urgent need.

Start Converting More Website Visitors into Financial Advisory Clients Today

We suggest an hour to review your website, plan, and start writing.

First, review your site content to identify quick hit opportunities:

• Does your home page hero include information for both visitors and search engines?
• Does your site have team member photos?
• Does your website appear in search engine results for [Expertise] + [Certifications] + [Location]?

Second, make easy updates that can generate fast improvements in search results.

Third, pick a blog topic to answer essential questions for your target audience. Ideally, the subject will focus on one of the core areas of expertise in your home page hero section at the very top.

Fourth, pick one blog portion and convert it into a brief video – 100 to 150 words max. You can use it on social media to encourage people to link to the article, and you’re likely to gain better engagement.

Then let your expertise and personality shine so you can generate more referral sources and leads.

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