Almost all financial firms want to generate more website traffic and enquiries from their visitors. Yet the same issue tends to come up again and again.
People just aren’t converting! (I.e. filling out the form, requesting a consultation etc.).
It’s an important issue to resolve, but the solution isn’t always an easy pill for financial firms to swallow. Yet swallow it we must if we’re to get the results we all want from our marketing.
Below, we’ll be sharing some thoughts on how to start addressing this issue in your financial marketing. For assistance and advice regarding your own campaign, get in touch to arrange a free, no-commitment consultation call with a member of our team.
Put yourself in the prospect’s shoes
Many financial planners are quite happy with their branding and website. Perhaps you bought your logo “on the cheap” years ago, and it’s served you well up to this point. Your website might be a simple, template-based solution which acts as a simple “online shop window”, and so you might not think you need “anything fancier” than that.
Not too long ago, this approach worked quite well for financial planners. After all, many of their clients were older people who didn’t use the internet as much, and they would typically arrive on the books through a personal referral rather than via an online form on a website.
That has now changed, especially in the wake of coronavirus in 2020 which has forced older people to adopt video calling and similar online solutions. After being forced to try these solutions, they have found that the previously-thought “technological barrier” is, in fact, quite surmountable. Almost all age groups and demographics in the UK now use the internet to validate and make purchases.
Imagine you are your ideal target client. Your friend suggests finding a financial planner to help with some questions you have about your pension and investments, and mentions a firm in the local area they had some contact with years ago. What do you do then?
Almost everyone then does some research online. What’s this company’s web presence like? Do they have a good website, and what impression does it give out? Are they actively pushing out thought leadership on their blog and social channels, and are there any reviews or case studies from their clients which I can use to gauge their credibility and ability to help me?
If you are a financial planner with an underdeveloped brand and website presence, then you are erecting unnecessary barriers to people who are at this point in their customer journey. In short, you could be driving all the traffic in the world to your website, but if it doesn’t inspire confidence then people are simply going to bounce away.
Check your brand reach
There could be another explanation for your lack of online enquiries, of course: you lack any traffic! You may even have a beautiful, bespoke brand and website to show them, but if no one sees these assets then you cannot hope to generate meaningful engagement from them.
There’s an easy way to investigate this, and it’s to simply check your Google Analytics data. Take a look at your website traffic for the month, past quarter and entire year. Is anyone visiting the site and, if so, are the volumes increasing, decreasing or broadly holding steady? How many new users are arriving on the site, on average, and which sources are they coming from (e.g. Google search)?
It’s also important to check the quality of the traffic you’re getting. Are people arriving and spending a decent amount of time on your web pages, or do they leave fairly quickly (suggesting they are not finding what they’re looking for)? Are people coming from the right parts of the world? If you’re targeting people in the UK but mainly getting traffic from India, for instance, then that could mean something might be wrong!
Check your customer journey
One final, crucial piece of the puzzle about how to generate more enquiries concerns your visitors’ fears, their customer journey and your expectations from them. To illustrate, picture the following:
Suppose you are your ideal target client. You have £700,000 ready to invest, and you’re wondering what to do with it. Perhaps a financial adviser could help you? Or, maybe they’ll just be after your money. After all, some of them have a bad reputation. Even if an adviser could help, moreover, how do you choose the right one for you? All of these questions are swirling around your mind as you start to do some research online.
You come across one adviser’s website, but it looks old and you cannot find much information about their team. The call to action is to subscribe to their newsletter, but you can’t see the benefit of doing that. There’s no thought leadership on the website which you’d want to hear more about, and you get enough annoying emails in your inbox as it is!
Another website holds more promise, however. The website is well-designed and easy to use, full of helpful resources which do not require your contact details in order to access them. You can find out lots about the team, with useful biographies and photographs to put names to faces. You make a note to come back to this firm later, when you’ve looked around a bit more.
Days later, you see a Facebook ad from the Director of this firm, offering a free 20-minute webinar on “How to Develop an Investor Mind-Set” (no registration required). You decide to take a look, and are impressed with the content and presentation. The director seems relatable, likeable and knowledgeable. You think he can help you, and maybe you’d feel comfortable starting a conversation with him about your investments. The call to action at the end of the webinar is an invitation to join his newsletter, where he shares content which is only available to his subscribers. Alternatively, you can book a free consultation. You decide on the former for now. Yet after weeks of seeing more great email-based content like you did from the webinar, you’re ready to book that meeting.
Plenty of prospects are in this kind of position in their customer journey, yet financial planners miss out on getting the lead because they go straight for the “hard sell” – without doing the hard work at the beginning to build up trust with the prospect. If you’re ready to start developing that kind of customer journey with an experienced financial agency, then we’d love to hear from you!