You're listening to Financial Advisor Marketing, the best show on the planet for financial advisers who want to get more clients without all the stress. You're about to get the real scoop on everything from lead generation to closing the deal. James is the founder of TheAdvisorCoach.com, where you can find an entire suite of products designed to help financial advisers grow their businesses more rapidly than ever before. Now, here is your host, James Pollard. [00:31.7]
James: All right, listen up, this week on the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast, we're going to talk about 20 Mistakes Financial Advisors Make With Their Websites. It's going to be chock full of value for all you little value seekers out there who need your fix and you listen to podcasts solely for information and not entertainment at all, because you are boring and you have no life. The reason I want to talk about this topic this week is because we have a brand-new video training over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/website. One more time, TheAdvisorCoach.com/website. The video training is titled ‘The Client - Getting Website - HOW FINANCIAL ADVISORS CAN MASTER THEIR THREE MOST IMPORTANT PAGES FOR HIGHER CONVERSIONS. Let me tell you the story of why I created this video training. [01:17.7]
So, from 2017 to 2020, I offered a website review service to financial advisors. So, it would be a service where I would look at their website. I would record my reaction live as if I were a prospective client, seeing their website for the first time. And I would keep the mind of a marketer, where I would tell them what to change, what to add, what to take away, what to improve, what they could do differently, what they should keep the same, what they're doing, right, what they're doing wrong, that sort of thing. And it would be a 10 minute long live and recorded video critique where they could see my reaction and they could see my advice. I would send it to them within 48 hours and they would implement the advice. And they really loved it. It got amazing feedback, but I noticed after doing the first couple dozen of these, that I would say the same things over and over and over again. It seemed like almost all of the financial advisors were missing a couple clear critical components on their home page, their about us page and the contact page. [02:16.3]
So, in the title of the brand-new video training over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/website, it says how financial advisors can master their three most important pages for higher conversions. Well, that's exactly what it is. It's your home page, it's your about us page and it’s your contact page, I don't want to give too much away because again, it is video training available for purchase over TheAdvisorCoach.com/website. But I will tell you that one of the biggest keys to success in making this work is you have to have them talk to each other. They have to connect in some way. And if you don't believe me, I want you to take a look at your analytics account and take a look for yourself. Assuming you don't have some blog posts that are just ranking in Google and getting you a bunch traffic or you're running ads to a specific page, your analytics will probably tell you that three of your top five most visited pages on your website are almost certainly your homepage, which is usually number one, then your about us page, and then your contact page in that order. Assuming you're an average financial advisor, because I mean, I've seen the analytics accounts of hundreds and I've seen the websites of even more. So, I kind of sorta know what I'm talking about. [03:24.1]
So, assuming that these pages are in your top five, most visited pages on your website, why wouldn't you have them work together? Also, if you're a little bit more tech savvy, if you're a low tech savvier, you probably, have something known as goals set up in your Google analytics. And if you don't know what those are, it's basically something that you want people to do. And in this case, it would probably be sending and appointment on the contact page or submitting a form on the contact page. So, check this out. When financial advisors set a goal of having a contact form filled out on their contact page, essentially, there is a journey that happens where someone is a visitor first, they just get to the website. They've never been to the website before, and then they do things along the way, before they get to the contact page. Makes sense? [04:12.5]
Typically, they will go from the home page to the about us page, to the contact page. What you want to do is structure the homepage and the about us page to increase conversions on the contact page. And that's what the client getting website will do for you. So, if you're interested, go ahead and check that out. I've said that URL so many times, you're probably laughing at me already. So, I'm not going to repeat it. If you don't know what it is, you can go back and listen. Let's get into the 20 mistakes advisors make with their websites. [04:39.3]
I'm just going to list the mistakes. I'm going to go through them. If you want to take notes, you can, if you want to pause, you can, it is your, your phone that you're listening on your speakers, your car or whatever it is. Number 1 is not having a niche. It's been a while since I've jumped on the niche bandwagon in these episodes, typically, I do it every other episode. Well, here I am back on it again. This is probably the biggest mistake. Having a niche makes virtually all marketing so much easier. The conversion rates on a niche specific website compared to a generalist site, it's downright ridiculous. Someone who is a financial advisor who has a home page that literally it says ‘Financial Advisor, serving Dentists in Chicago, Illinois’ is going to be leaps and bounds ahead of someone who is just like Financial Advisor at XYZ Wealth Management or Financial Advisor in Chicago even if you have a niche, which you want to do is you want to layer these things. If I tell you that having a niche makes everything easier and you're still like, hmmm…. I don't really know. I'm not quite convinced. Like, just try it, give it a, try, run a test with a piece of your marketing that nobody else will see. If you're scared of clients alienating, you just try it with one specific narrow vertical of your business's marketing materials that you send out and see if I'm right. Put me to the test. So that's mistake number one. [06:06.0]
Mistake number 2 is using an image slideshow on the homepage. These have been shown to wreck conversions, and they're terrible for usability. These are also called carousels. You've probably seen them where you get on somebody's home page and it's like a slideshow, it’s just a carousel kind of thing. It just, the image moves to the left and you see another image and then that image moves and you see another image and that image moves and you see another image. So just don't use them. I don't really have the time to get into all the technical reasons why, but they're just terrible. If you have a carousel or an image slide show on your home page, get rid of it and replace it with a static image or preferably a call-to-action button with that is. If you don't want to use an image at all and then use a call-to-action button. But if you do want to use an image, make sure that it's actually related to what you do and not some cheesy stock image. [06:56.2]
Number 3, failing to focus on mobile. I'll admit I've been guilty of this in the past with TheAdvisorCoach.com and fixing it made a big difference. I still don't have the greatest mobile site. I'm not claiming that I do, but it is way better and it's way better than most businesses. So, I am a living testament that creating content specifically for mobile and optimizing a website for mobile can make a huge difference. And a lot of people, they get stressed out and they get intimidated by optimizing the website for mobile. And I will tell you that a lot of it boils down to simplicity. If you can keep your website clean, organized, clutter-free, we're going to talk about that with a lot of white space, a lot of just texts that you can easily modify, and you can bold if you want to. There aren't many fancy HTML things like different pieces of script and the image slideshows like we just talked about. Those are terrible on mobile. If you just keep things simple, you probably going to have a good site on mobile. And if you try to complicate things, your site is probably going to look terrible on mobile. So that's number three. [08:00.9]
Number 4 is not having a favicon, if you don't know what that is, it's the little icon on the left side of your tab. If you're on Google it's and you look at your tab, the G. If you're on Google drive, it's the little blue box with the white light stripes, the lines of texts, the icon. And if you're on LinkedIn, it's the LinkedIn logo, it's on the left side of the tab. So, if people go to your website and they see the WordPress W when they load your site, they're going to bounce. Or if they see the, the, a Weebly W if they see some stock, favicon, they're going to leave. You want to have your own favicon like if you go to TheAdvisorCoach.com and you look to the left of the text in the tab, you will see that our logo is right there. And that makes a difference because when people get to your site and they see that your logo is there, they see that it's an inherent trust symbol. They take you a little bit more seriously. [08:50.4]
Number 5 is being too cluttered. And as a group, financial advisors are especially guilty of this. They think they have to include everything and the kitchen sink on their own pages. They put everything in there, like here's what we do. And here's why she's trusts me. And they were doing this. And we also did this, and here's some client appreciation events, and then take a look at our clients over here. And then this is our team member. There’s just so much information. That's all just thrown out there on the homepage. If there's too much, again, people are going to bounce. You need to have a path for people to follow. And I don't know about you, but I'm not running my website to dramatically increase the time on page, although that helps. I don't know about you, but I'm not running my website to win a popularity contest, although that can help. And I'm not running my website as a chair, although being charitable can help. I am running a, the website in order to get clients, to get customers, to get new business, to make money. And if that's you, then you need to have a path to get people in front of you who have the position to give you money. It's that, I don't want to say it's simple, but it's pretty much that simple. Don't have a bunch of stuff where people can get distracted and go off the page and just not get to a point where they become a client. [10:01.8]
And that's led directly to mistake number 6, which is having terrible calls to action. People over-complicate this, they, they either there's like a spectrum, right? And on one side of the spectrum, you have people who have the contact forum say something like submit. It's like everybody starts off with submit, submit the contact and then you have people who say, yes, I absolutely want to get the free download, send it directly to my inbox. And it's just a long call to action that is just completely unnecessary. In The Client Getting Website over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/website I reveal my formula for creating call to action buttons and texts that just gets clicks and gets the job done. [10:44.1]
Number 7 is missing contact information. I am a stickler for this. One of the biggest mistakes I saw over and over and over and over again, when I was doing reviews for financial advisors, the 10-minute website critiques is they wouldn't have all of the contact information. And I would ask them, Hey, do you want people to call you? They're like, yeah, I would love people to call me. I like having inbound leads and people calling at my office. Well why don't you have your phone number? It seems so obvious. And people like, yeah, I'd love to have people email me. Well, where is your freaking email address? Is that how you expect people to email you? I had a zoom call with a financial advisor who had essentially hired me to give him some help with a very specific topic. And that's why people hire me. I don't do a lot of one-on-one consultations because quite frankly, I just don't want to. But if somebody has a specific burning problem that if solved can add another zero to their business, it's nothing for them to pay me a couple thousand dollars to work with them and solve the problem. Right? So, we, I worked with this advisor solved the problem. He was very happy. I was happy. It was a great little engagement, right? It wasn't that long, but it was effective. And I wanted to send him a thank you card. So, I went to his website thinking that I would just find his address, his mailing address on his website, somewhere. WRONG! I couldn't find the address anywhere. And I wanted to send this guy a thank you note. That is the communication method I would have liked to use with this person, but I couldn't do it because I couldn't find his address. Isn't that crazy? That should never happen. So, if someone wants to send you a letter, for any reason, I'm not even talking about your prospective clients or your clients, maybe it's somebody who you work with, or somebody you networked with, a strategic Alliance, a potential strategic Alliance. Maybe that person wants to send you an actual card. Maybe that person was sent you a holiday card, a birthday card or something, and can't find your address on your website. That's a problem. If you want people to email you, but they can't find your email address anywhere else, that's also a problem. If you want people to call you and they can't find your phone number, that's also a problem. So, I've hammered that point enough. Let's move on. [12:43.8]
Mistake number 8 is having silly, unnatural professional photos. You have seen them, it's where the advisor like, he's like, oh, he's up against a wall, he's got his arms crossed and his head is turned to the side and he's kind of smirking. And he's, it's called in the modeling world, it's called squinching. It's where you squint your eyes and like you pinch your eyes a little bit. It's called squinching. So, the advisor is sitting there like squinting, and nobody does that in real life. And someone has convinced this person that that's a good photo to have on the website, it's just downright goofy. And if you look at TheAdvisorCoach.com, you'll see that I actually, I used to have my LinkedIn photo on there. I took that off. I didn't replace it with a video, but I have a video added on to the site that's actually doing pretty well. And when I, I did an episode, not too long ago, about five things that Barron's top 100 financial advisors do or independent financial advisors do with the websites, and one of the things was that they use real photos of them and real videos of them. And I was quite surprised at how many more of the Barron's top 100 independent financial advisors use video when compared to everybody else. So, it's very interesting and it's something to think about that they are more likely to use video rather than photos. And with these silly, unnatural professional photos, there's also like the team, the group photo, where everybody's standing in front of the building with the clothes they would never wear in real life and standing in ways they would never stand in real life and they’re looking at the camera like. Everybody goes through that phase, I guess, where they think it's a good idea and then they learn the hard way that it's not, or maybe they never do because they never change it and they never get better results. But I'm telling you here right now that having those silly unprofessional photos or unnatural professional photos is not a good idea. [14:30.8]
Hey, financial advisors – if you’d like even more help building your business, I invite you to subscribe to James’ monthly paper-and-ink newsletter, The James Pollard Inner Circle.
When you join today, you’ll get more than one thousand dollars’ worth of bonuses, including exclusive interviews that aren’t available anywhere else.
Head on over to TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching to learn more. [14:53.3]
Number 9, mistake 9 is believing that a pretty website is a good thing. Now full disclaimer, if in an ideal world, you would have a good-looking website built with direct response principles. The problem though, in reality, again, we're living in the real world, not the ideal world is that it's very, very, very hard to have both. And financial advisors for the most part are neither natural born marketers or even professional marketers. Like if you put in the time that I have sure you can be the marketer, right? They're also not website designers. Most of the time they hire a website company. There are two big ones that serve financial advisors, specifically there's WordPress, there's Weebly, there's Wix. They, those are drag and drop template builders or builders with templates, I should say. So, they use some of these services. And in order to design a website, sometimes they'll hire freelancers. If you go to TheAdvisorCoach.com/website, to get The Client - Getting Website, you'll read a story about a guy named Chris, that I helped. And Chris actually paid somebody $125 per hour. It was a freelancer to help him work with his website. And I don't want to say it was a waste, but it was pretty close to a waste because the person who was designing the pretty website doesn't know about how to take someone from a visitor to a client. It is not a fashion show. Again, I'm not running a fashion show. I am running a business that is in business in order to collect money from people and give value to them much more value than they give money-wise. But that is the point of a business, is not just to look amazing. And financial advisors will get so caught up in having a pretty website that the pretty website often recks the direct response part of turning a visitor into a client. And you would be surprised at how often the ugly website works better than the pretty one. And I'll leave it at that. [16:48.5]
But moving on number 10, the 10th mistake, focusing on branding instead of proven direct response principles. I put this right after number nine, because they are incredibly closely related. I talked a lot about branding versus direct response in the July, 2021 inner circle newsletter. I believe to summarize financial advisors get caught up in this branding idea. They think that what they need to do is build a brand to get their name out there, that you don't really want to put too much emphasis on that. Because a lot of times with branding, you can't track your results. You can't measure what works, and if you can't measure what works, you can't improve what works there. There are these companies out there, and these people, these experts, these gurus, whatever that will tell you, oh, just trust us. Stick with us for a couple months. You don't need to have these resources, just trust it’ll come. Excuse me, WTF are you talking about? Like, WHAT THE FREAK are you talking about? When you have someone like me who is essentially born and raised in the direct marketing world, I can send an email and within 24 hours, we will have metrics, numbers! WOW! You can actually prove that the stuff works. WHOA, rather than trying to build a brand and waiting six months to a year in order to even kind of, sort of figure out that it doesn't work. And by then, the person has a bunch of your money and you see where this is going. In the direct marketing world, you can literally send out a direct mail piece. You get results within a week. You see whether the, the direct mail piece totally bombed, flopped didn't work well or did incredibly well. You get to see and you get to improve. And guess what? When you send out a direct mail piece, you can send headline number one and headline number two, you can send 500 pieces of one number one and 500 pieces, number two, and you can see which one worked better. And guess what if number two work better than number one you can roll that out to 5,000 people and save money along the way, because you didn't just mail 5,000 from the get go. So really think about that. And people are telling you, oh, just trust us. It's going to work. You don't need to try it. Call this why you need to track your marketing. Marketing is about branding. It's about getting your name out there; you don't need to track this stuff. Run away, run a thousand feet in the opposite direction, as fast as you possibly can. [19:01.1]
Number 11, focusing on SEO instead of the language perspective clients you use to describe their problems. I will say I love SEO. The Adviser Coach actually kicks a lot of butt in the search engines. And there are a lot of companies that would like to be where we are, but sorry, you know. But with financial advisors, it's very difficult for them to rank for terms like Roth IRA, wealth management. Sure, you can rank for something like financial advisor, Greenwood, Indiana, because like only 10 to 20 people per month search that or financial advisor, Wichita, Kansas. Okay. Sure. Congratulations, you get a golf clap if you rank for that term, but I'm talking about ranking for things that people actually search for that actually has a, some semblance of volume. Okay. These financial terms and credit cards and budgeting and car payments, house payments, mortgages, Roth, IRAs, IRA, traditional IRAs. HSAs like, these are terms that are going to be incredibly difficult for you to rank and the risk reward just isn't there for me as a marketer recommending solutions to financial advisors. If you would like to have a strategy where in your free time, you beef up the SEO of your website, that's awesome. And it's something I wholeheartedly recommend to do in addition to everything you're doing already. But your focus, as far as getting your business off the ground, like if you're not making, if you're not making, I would say like $500,000 per year, I wouldn't even worry about it. Like the SEO part. Like if you're someone who is making less than $100,000 per year as a financial advisor, and you think you're an expert on this and you think you're hot stuff, I hate to break it to you, but you're not like you're really not. And you can go from $100,000 to 500 and in a million and beyond by using the real language that your prospective clients use to describe their problems. That is the tip that is the take away. If someone comes to you and describes their savings situation a specific way, and that's not what the search engines tells, you tells you to say, that's not the Google auto-suggest that's okay. Use the language that your people use, your target market uses, and you will be better served. [21:06.9]
Number 12 is having a sidebar with a bunch of social media buttons. I will tell you, when I started doing the website reviews and stuff in 2017, I used to see this a lot. Because this was a phase that I think a lot of people went through where they would take the sidebar and as you scroll down, they, they used to be dig and Google plus and all these old, old social media platforms and old websites that people would have on the side of the website. And as you scroll down, the sidebar would stay there. I don't see that as much anymore, but if you still have that, get rid of it. [21:36.6]
Number 13, only having a contact form and nothing else on the contact page. This is a huge mistake. If you believe that your contact page is only about getting people to reach out to you or to fill out a form or something like that, I guarantee you that you're leaving money on the table. I 100% for sure guarantee it, no questions asked you can improve your contact page, if all you have on there as a contact form. That is a big mistake. I would say aside from having a niche, this is the biggest mistake. So, this is the number two biggest mistake that people make with their websites. [22:07.8]
Number 14 is using an unclear font. This is getting like, nitty-gritty getting into the details. If you're using, I don't want to say Comic Sans, cause I've never seen a financial adviser on ironically use con Comic Sans. But if you're using something like that, that doesn't really speak to who you are as a professional, and then you want to change it. When I say unclear, I mean that the heading, the subheading and the body text are in three completely like really different fonts and it just looks weird. I have seen that. And I know I just got off my high horse about having a pretty website and then focusing on direct response principles and how the ugly website works better than the pretty website. But when it comes to fonts, people get confused. They, they, I, God, I don't even really know how to explain it. So, in the website marketing world, there's something called a false bottom. It's where there's a lot of website or a lot of white space as people scroll down and they get the encounter, all this white space and they think, oh, it's the bottom of the page. But in reality, it's not the bottom of the page. When you have a bunch of different fonts, people tend to have that same reaction where they're just not very, they're not very clear that they don't understand it very well. And if someone is on your website for the very first time, that is not the reaction you want that person to have. [23:25.3]
Number 15 is not leveraging the power of contrast. I talk about this in The Client - Getting Website. Contrast is your friend. You can use black and white, red and green, blue and orange. If you're using the same colors everywhere on your website, you're making a mistake. If you're using the same style, the same, well, the same colors is primarily what I'm talking about. The color is very important. And if you go to TheAdvisorCoach.com and you just look at my own homepage, you'll notice that the buttons are a different color and there's a reason for that. I talk about that in The Client - Getting Website, I'm not going to give that information away here for free on a podcast. I'm just not. [24:01.0]
Number 16, forcing readers to scroll for important information. If you have important information, something that people want to, you want them to know about, keep it above the fold, do not make people scroll for that information. Put it at the top. If you have a service like Opt-in monster, where you can put a scrolling bar on your website with the most important information, then do that. Sometimes if I'm running a deadline offer where I say, oh, for the next four days, this is discounted or I'm having a special bonus or something, and you get to that page. You will see that I have a scrolling bar at the bottom. And I put that there, no matter where you go, you will see that information. So, I don't know, forced my readers to scroll for that important information and neither should you. So, if there's something that you want more than anything else, like, let's just say, subscribe through an email list, put that at the top. So, people don't have to scroll. You can make your judgment call later because you're we find out that the less qualified people are the one opting in at the top, but you can make that judgment call later. You can figure out if that's what you want to do, or if you want to stick with it. But if you just want the data and you want the conversion to happen, whatever the conversion means for you, forcing people to scroll in order to get to it, it will hurt your conversions. [25:14.7]
Number 17 is using other people's content. So, if you're you, if you're getting your website content from any library of any kind where you're just copying and pasting, or just inserting it on your website, you have my condolences. We talked about in the last episode that if you're doing what everyone else is doing, you're going to get the results that everyone else is getting. This is not rocket science. You cannot just copy and paste your way to website success. You have to think independently, you have to do something different from what everyone else is doing. [25:48.5]
Number 18 is including a financial calculator of any kind. This was a phase as well back in like 2017, 2018, 2019. People love to put these calculators on the website. And these are typically sold by web design companies, theses neat little ad-ons. Do not use them unless you have a specific proven plan for getting more conversions with them. Otherwise, it's just a distraction. [26:11.6]
Number 19 is failing too, make buttons and links drop dead, obvious. There were a couple of websites that I saw where the links, where as I was scrolling through and just doing my review, my mouse would get on top of a couple of words and then I would realize it was a link. It wasn't blue, it wasn't underlined, it was just regular texts like all the other texts on the website. There's nothing there told me that it was a link. If you have that on your site, that is a huge mistake. The buttons should also be very, very dropped dead. Totally obvious that it's a button. Don't try to get cute with it. Don't try to make some little object that you would never think is a button, don't try to make that a button, make it look like a button. If it's a button, it's like, if it, what if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. That's how people think when doing websites. If it looks like a button and it clicks like a button, that's probably a button that I should click it. And if you want more clicks, that's what you gotta do. [27:05.9]
And number 20, the last mistake is not knowing exactly what perspective clients want when visiting a financial advisor’s website. So most financial advisors don't realize that studies have been done. Like this, this research is already out there already exist. And the studies outline in precise detail, exactly what investors want to see when searching for financial advisors on line, that you don't have to guess. You don't have to reinvent the wheel when I was doing website reviews, so this information, actual studies knowing exactly what investors want. This did not exist back in like 2017, 2018. So, I would just use my anecdotal evidence. I would use what I've seen. I would use my experience from certain split tests and I would tell financial advisors what to put on their, about us pages. And it turns out I was dead on, like it was scary how accurate I was. Now, I'm not saying that to toot my own horn. I'm just saying that there's now third-party research that backs up everything that I said in these website reviews. And I reveal it over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/website. [28:15.5]
It turns out there are actually six things and there are six things I give them to you in order of what people want when they're searching or want to find when they're searching for a financial advisor. This is important because you're playing against multiple advisors all across the internet. And if someone visits your website and only sees two out of these six things, then they go to another financial advisor website and they see all six of those things. Well, guess what? You just lost a prospective client. And these six things, it's the biggest secret to an incredible about us page, which is one of the pillar pages. Remember, it's your home page, your about us page and a contact page. But if you can get the about us page right, and you can know exactly what perspective clients want to see when visiting your website, then you will win. [29:02.0]
So, I hope this podcast has been helpful to you. I hope you enjoy it. If you did then share it with a friend, share it on social media, tag me on LinkedIn, if you want to. So, if you're not connected with me on LinkedIn, make sure you search James Pollard, the advisor coach, and connect with me on LinkedIn. And I will catch you next week. Thank you so much for listening. [29:19.9]
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