SiteQuest Technologies

Advisors Website DOs and DON'Ts: Photos

2012-07-10T15:41:58Z

I have seen all sorts of advisor webisites, some that are good and others that are...well, just not good. One area that advisor websites could use help in are bio photos. This can be done for a small investment in time and money (if you bring in a professional). Why spend time on photos for your site? Images of you and your staff help to humanize your site and gives prospects and idea of the type of people they are going to be working with. They also serve as your first impression and we all know how important it is to create a great first impression. If your bio photos are a bit old and need to be redone, here are a few things to consider:

DO have professional looking and recent photo of yourself and key staff members on your site. With advances in digital photograph, prices for great professional pictures are a fraction of what they used to cost. Having professional looking images adds a level of comfort and familiarity and shows that behind your firm walls, there are real people there to assist your clients and prospective clients.

DO make your photo/image style match your audience's needs and preferences. If, for example, your clients are typically are families who are looking to save for retirement, then your images should be warm and soft such as done here. If you deal more with business professional, then maybe a more corporate look is appropriate.

DO look happy in your photos, even if you hate taken them. There is nothing worse than someone finding your site, seeing you picture and thinking, "I don't want to work with them, they look _________". You can fill in the blank. Unhappy. Angry. Weird. What ever the description, it doesn't bode well for you and they ultimately find someone else to handle their financial services needs.

DON'T take post photos that look unprofessional, grainy, or pixelated. Don't post photos that are more than three years old. Your site visitors can tell when the picture looks old and it's a real turnoff for them as it makes your site look out of date and out of touch.

DON'T take photos that would make their way onto an awkward family photo type site. What makes a photo awkward? First of all, if the poses are unnatural, that leads to awkwardness. Don't go crazy setting up poses of things you would not normally be doing. Some of the best bio photos I've seen are of people doing what they do. Talking to customers, working at their desks and so forth.

DON'T look scary, angry or grump (even if you are). Look happy, welcoming and warm. Scary looks never get the new clients.

If you get photos taken professionally and they don't look good, then they aren't and should be retaken. Don't just use them because you paid for them or you don't want to take time to re-shoot them and with digital photography, you can now see your shots as you take them and make adjustments accordingly.

Ultimately, having good images of you and your staff are critical in establishing a positive first impression on your clients and prospects.

Are You Among the "Missing" Online

2012-06-12T14:20:27Z

Are You Among the "Missing" Online

I have dozens of calls a month with a variety of compliance and marketing personnel and one of the questions I love to ask them about is in regards to advisor websites. I ask:

"How many of your advisors do not have a website?"

The answers are surprising in this day and age. When I first started doing this, I expected to hear numbers like 10% to 20%, but I consistently get answers much higher than that.

In the last week alone several well-known BD's estimated at as many as 50% to 60% did not have their own website. Those numbers would make sense to me 5 or 10 years ago when the web was still maturing. Do you remember the web in those days? Check out the web as it existed in 1996 for example. Back then you had to hire a "geek" to build your site and it could cost a lot of money and we were all experimenting back then. Many had hunches about what the net could be, but no one was really sure.

Fast forward to 2012. The technology has advanced to the point that creating a site can be done relatively quickly and for a much smaller investment money. So you would think that because the technology is better, easier and cheaper, why wouldn't more advisors jump on board?

The most recent surveys in this area show that the top three reasons given for not having a business website were:

Business currently does not need one - 41%
Lack of time - 19%
Too complex - 16%

Source: http://www.statisticbrain.com/small-business-website-statistics/

So what's the big deal in not having a website anyway? The list of benefits and reasons to have a site are long, but here are four to consider:

Get Found: When you have a website even if it's a small and simple site, you're much more likely to be found on Google, Yahoo! and Bing searches, especially if prospective clients are searching for someone local. Having a website at it's most basic level is akin to listing your business in the yellow pages years ago.
Improve Credibility: A website gives you the opportunity to tell potential clients what you are about and why you deserve their trust and confidence. In fact, many people use the internet for pre-purchase research so that they can determine for themselves whether a particular supplier or brand is worthy of their patronage, and won t take them for a ride.
Give Account Access: Give your clients a link to your website, with your logo and branding to access their online account information or document safe. This increases your credibiltiy of your processes and capabilities.
Track Your Results: Unlike other forms of advertisement where you're unsure how many people actually read, or saw your ad, the web gives you solid tracking and analytics for the traffic that hits your site. Print ads can't give level of reporting.

If you're part of that 50% to 60% that has not ventured out on the web, it's time to take the plunge. In this ever competative market, you need ever advantage and tool out there to find, convert and retain clients. Having a website is an important part of that process.

A Bit about the Author:
James Cella is President of SiteQuest Technologies, a firm that focuses on providing compliant online marketing tools for financial firms.

Calculators: Do They Help or Hurt Your Site?

2012-06-06T14:54:42Z

Calculators: Do They Help or Hurt Your Site?

I have seen a lot of websites for financial advisors from a large variety of providers and one of the commonalities I see over and over again are financial calculators. I often ask myself the question, “Do these things really help or hurt the goals an advisor should have for his or her site?”

Have you ever wondered the same thing? Have you thought about your site and what your goals are for your website?

Here’s what I think they should be:

Your site should drive a visitor to connect with you by phone, email or generate an office visit.
Your site should give you an online presence that your clients and prospects can find easily online.
Your site should be a brief introduction of who you are, what you offer and provide just enough content to drive a visitor to reach out to you for more information.
Your site should legitimize your business and services.

So how do online calculators help achieve these goals? Here’s a couple of things to consider:

Calculators Push Prospects Away

First of all, calculators have the opposite effect of driving clients or prospects to connect with you directly. For example, one of the most popular calculators found on advisor websites is called the Cost of Retirement. There are a variety of inputs regarding age, income, expected returns and so forth that a prospect can enter. Once the prospect enters their information, what do they do? Call up the advisor for an appointment? I don’t think so. Your calculators gave them what they wanted and robbed you of the opportunity to connect with them. In fact, once they get their information and stats about their retirement, they are likely to move on and probably never contact you.

One of the secrets of being an effective financial planner is understanding that planning is both an art and a science. A seasoned and educated advisor would tell you that a nine question online form does not adequately paint the full picture of how much retirement will cost. Shouldn’t the website drive prospects to contact the advisor so that the advisor can do the calculations and lend his or her own expertise?

Wouldn’t it be more effective if the prospect visited the site, learned a bit about the firm/advisor based upon the content of the site and then reached out to the advisor who then can sit down with the prospective client and map out a customized, detailed retirement plan that an online calculator could never offer as well as you can?

Calculators Provide Noise on Your Site

What’s the most important content on your site? Without a doubt it’s your bio, services, mission or philosophies statements. They set you apart from the rest. They are your value propositions and your selling points that make you stand out. Calculators provide a distraction to those messages and steal from the focus that should be on you and your firm. No one disputes that “playing” with a financial calculator is interesting, but it detracts from your core messages about you, your firm, your services and the reasons why prospects should be your client.

Calculators Are Not Accurate

I am not disputing whether the calculators actually do the math correctly or not, but how accurate are they to each individual who is pondering their retirement options. They don’t know the client, their goals, means, challenges, or whether they are risk-adverse in their investing strategies. A financial planner can learn these critical aspects about their clients, but a calculator cannot.

Calculators Are Not a Unique Service

Calculators are not a differentiator or driver for visitors to hit your site. In fact, in a Google search for financial calculators, not a single independent financial planner showed up in the top 100 results. In other words, there are plenty of free services that can provide these calculations and since the internet is clogged with so many options, your site is extremely unlikely to be the one that people use for their financial calculator needs.

A Bit about the Author:
James Cella is President of SiteQuest Technologies, a firm that focuses on providing compliant online marketing tools for financial firms.