Many financial advisors are misusing one of their most powerful client acquisition tools. While websites are the industry’s most popular marketing investment, over two-thirds of advisors find their websites ineffective for generating leads. In fact, 38% say theirs never generates leads.1
But every advisor could drive significant new revenue from their website – they just need the right strategy.
This article lays out what that strategy entails and how you can leverage it to grow your AUM or attract new advisors to your RIA. Based on our experience helping firms generate $2.2 billion AUM in new pipeline, we explore the handful of factors that truly make a difference – and make your website stand out to your ideal clients.
What Makes a Financial Advisor Website Effective?
A strong website is the foundation of your online presence, and almost every prospect you generate through digital marketing visits it at some point. It is also the area of your digital ecosystem you can exert the most control over – and, therefore, requires careful curation and design.
The ideal website would achieve three core goals:
- Build Your Brand: Every aspect of your website should reflect a coherent and distinctive brand identity. From the tone of your copy to the imagery you select, visitors should be able to immediately recognize this is your company – not just “some advisory firm”.
- Establish Authority: Your website should signal respectability and showcase your trustworthiness, ensuring any prospect who visits it immediately recognizes that you are a reliable professional.
- Drive Leads: Your website should not just advertise your services but actually convert visitors into leads and new clients. This can manifest in multiple ways - from visitors booking a consultation to prospects submitting their email to download your Tax Planning guide and then later being nurtured with an email marketing campaign.
But each of these will be influenced by a wide range of factors – from the visual design and user experience to your site architecture. The best way to optimize these elements is not to follow generic “best practices,” but instead gear everything toward your ideal clients.
How to Pinpoint Your Website’s Target Audience
Your website exists to fulfill the goals we’ve outlined – and it can only do that in relation to a specific audience. This all stems from your value proposition, which can be developed through three steps:
- Identify Your Clients: You must know exactly who your ideal clients are. Note that this does not have to be representative of who you currently serve; your marketing can be a way of reaching a new, more appealing audience. But the crucial point is to have deep insight into the target audience – often in the form of official “personas.”. What are their demographics? What is their family situation? What are their financial anxieties? What is the range of their net worth? How do they think about financial advice?
- Clarify Your Purpose: You must have a strong sense of who you are as an advisor or firm. Too many advisors speak about their services in generalizsed or jargon-heavy terms that confuse their clients. A good test here is elevator pitching: can you clearly and effectively convey the services you offer and how they help your clients in a single sentence?
- Assess Your Value: You must bridge the gap between the audience you target and the services you offer. Why exactly should they trust you? What do you offer that other advisors don’t? How can you demonstrate the value you provide?
Once these factors are in place, you are ready to start optimizing your website.
3 Ways to Drive More Advisory Leads from Your Website
Our experience working with financial advisors and RIAs suggests three aspects of your website will be crucial to attracting new clients:
1. Messaging Optimization: The Core Story of Your Advisor Website
The most basic role of your website is to convey your core messaging in a clear and impactful way. While there are important factors that are not directly related to messaging – such as search engine optimization - the key considerations when looking at your website’s copy and content are the information it communicates and how that information is communicated.
Focus on optimizing the following three elements of your messaging:
- Personality: Ensure your website gives visitors a strong sense of your firm’s personality and values. Many advisors are afraid to use language that could appear unprofessional, but this can give your website a cold or off-putting feel. Instead, try to use an authentic and natural voice. For example, simply using quotes from senior leadership instantly conveys a sense that there are human beings behind your business.
- Clarity: Make it immediately clear exactly who you serve, what you do for them, and why it matters. There are two factors to consider here:
- Language: Jargon has its place, but it should be easy for any visitor to quickly understand whether you can help them - and not demand they expend energy making sense of technical language or industry-insider references.
- Site Structure: At a minimum, you should have a full page dedicated to your services, and ideally, this would include an individuala separate page for each individual service.
- Differentiation: Lean into the factors that make you stand out from your competitors – and give prospects a reason to remember you. Don’t be afraid to point at specific industry practices (though never actual firms) that you stand against or state your values boldly. But always be specific: make claims that are concrete,provable and relevant to your target audience while avoiding generic or cliche messages.
2. Aesthetic Elements: The “Look and Feel” of a Strong Advisor Website
Choosing a financial advisor is an emotional decision—rooted in trust and perceived professionalism. While some of that trustworthiness is influenced by the explicit messages you send, it is also subconsciously transmitted through aesthetic factors like your website’s attractive your website looksvisual appeal and layout or how easy it is to use.
There are three areas you need to nail in terms of your website’s design elements:
- Imagery: Select the right photography and videos to convey your brand identity. While this should include some images of your team, it should also reflect the audience. Clients should be able to seem themselves in your design, with images that capture the demographic factors established within your core audience personas.
- Consistency: Every design element should feel like part of an overarching brand identity. Some firms use a brand book to maintain this level of consistency, but it can also be achieved through careful curation and attention to detail. The question is simple: will any images, colors, or fonts strike visitors as somehow “off”?
- User Experience: Ensure your site is easy to navigate and visitors can find what they need immediately. Important factors to consider here include the layout of your site and your site load time. While these are not directly related to your performance as an advisor, prospects will unconsciously associate the site’s usability with your quality as a professional. Why trust you with their money if they can’t even trust your website to load?
3. Marketing Optimization: The CRO Elements of an Advisor Website
Your website can attract and engage your ideal clients – but it will only become an effective lead generation machine when it is optimized to convert those clients. Many advisors can produce substantial improvements simply by thinking about their website as a marketing tool, rather than purely a source of information.
There are three factors that can be optimized to dramatically improve your odds of converting visitors into leads – and ultimately, new clients:
- Credibility Signals: Use credibility signals – such as performance statistics, AUM, client testimonials, or complaint reviews. This is a powerful way to build trust and represents some of the most fertile “low-hanging fruit” for advisors. For example, just 7% of advisors currently use client testimonials in their marketing collateral – despite the SEC’s final amendments to the Investment Advisers Marketing Rule allowing them to do so with far greater ease.2
- Marketing Content: Deploy plenty of high-quality marketing content to showcase your expertise and drive organic traffic to your website. Advisors are particularly successful with “gated content” - assets like eGuides and checklists that visitors will share their contact details to access. These should be carefully tailored to appeal to your specific audience, helping both increase your odds of ranking highly on search engines and delivering enough value to convince prospects to give up their email.
- CTAs: Ensure there are multiple call- to- action (CTA) buttons across your site, prompting visitors to sign -up to receive your newsletter or book a consultation. You should also streamline the process to require them to complete the action, making your contact form short and simple – maximizing the volume of visitors who will complete a submission.
Turn Your Website into a Lead Generation Machine with ProperExpression
Most advisors have a website – but very few are getting true value from it. ProperExpression has helped numerous RIA and wealth management firms fix that problem and generate more inbound traffic through targeted optimizations and overarching marketing support.
Want to book a no-strings-attached call to explore your website performance - and explore how it could be improved?