There are thousands of fellow IFAs out there, and thousands of websites.  Even in your locality, there may be dozens of other advisers, many with websites, offering  what appears on first impression to be a virtually identical service to the one provided by you.  However, you know your service is not identical to the rest, it is unique, and I’m sure you are proud of the ways in which it is unique.

Likewise, there are also lots of IFA websites that may on first impression appear to be virtually identical in what they say.  However, this may well be because these site are virtually identical! You know your service is unique, but to what extent does your website portray that fact?  The answer may well be, “not really to any great extent at all actually”. Are you proud of the individual way your business is portrayed via your website?  If not, then it’s definitely time for a rethink.

Being part of PracticeWEB has given us the opportunity to expand our custom design website offer – creating custom designed sites for IFAs who really want to drive home their own uniqueness and individual personality.  I believe this is a huge opportunity. From the moment a site visitor looks at your homepage, they should be able to ‘get it’ right from the outset.  But what is ‘it’ exactly?  And that is the secret of the process that delivers a website and messaging unique to your business.  If your homepage can focus on how your services help clients and how you are different, then you’re off to the best start.

For example, if you are certain and confident about your USP, make sure this is as prominent as it possibly can be.  Can it be incorporated in your strap line?  Is it mentioned in the first sentence of your homepage text?  Can it be incorporated in your title tag and/or visible keywords?

It’s best to assume that anyone searching the net for a financial adviser will probably be looking not just at your website, but also a handful of other IFA websites in your area. So, make sure you weigh up the local competition – regularly look at their websites, and get trusted friends or associates to evaluate your website and other local IFAs’ websites objectively.  If your site doesn’t make the grade, either in how it looks or in what you’ve said, then it’s time to review what USPs you can identify about your own business and create a plan of action that incorporates this into the design, structure and messaging of your website.

And if that all sounds a bit too much like hard work, strangely enough I know of a good company that can help you with that too! Check out our website for more tips and guidance on creating a powerful online presence for your firm.

Visitors to your site will initially be attracted (or otherwise) by the general look and feel of your site, but immediately after that the chances are they’ll start reading what you have written as your Home Page text. It’s this aspect we’re looking at today.

Many IFA websites that we view have what can politely be described as poor quality home page text.  Some text is clearly produced as part of a templated offering, other text is too quirky, some is too verbose, much just sounds dull and uninspiring, and a surprising number have no home page text at all.

Here are our top tips for creating web copy that ensures you are engaging correctly with potential new clients:

1. Web visitors typically scan a page for a maximum of 20-30 seconds.  So use short, snappy paragraphs, bullet points and problem-raising questions.
2. Your site visitors need to understand almost instantly a) who you are, b) what you do and c) how you can help them.
3. Who is the home page about – is it about you or about your potential new client?  Generally speaking, the more it can be about your site visitor rather than yourself, the better.

Example: “We are experts in pensions and retirement planning” is a statement focused on you, the IFA.  However, “Are you confused about your retirement options?  If so, help is at hand” is client focused.

4. Make it clear why prospective clients should use you rather than anyone else.
5. Make it clear what happens next – give a specific ‘call to action’.
6. It’s important that your site is found on search engines, so your home page text should include the keywords and phrases that are embedded in your site.
7. Your home page should be brief and to the point; your own background or company history. The About Us page is where people can read more detail.

If after all this, you are still stuck what to write, get help!  Professional copywriters will be only too happy to write your home page text for you – it’s worth the extra cost because it’s so important to get it right.

So, why not take a fresh look at your home page text to ensure that the first impression it gives visitors is welcoming, positive, interesting, informative, professional and inviting.

For more information or help, give us a call on 01453 521855 or see our website
www.ifa-systems.co.uk

There are five elements to a good staff profile; which of these elements do you provide for your website visitors?

Name: As mentioned previously, a roughly a third of IFA websites do not even provide names of staff, let alone staff profiles.  Statistics from the websites of our clients consistently show that the most commonly looked at area of a website apart from (obviously) the Home Page is the About Us page and ‘Meet the Team’ pages.  Clear proof that people are looking not just at how your business can provide a service, but which individuals will actually be providing that service.

Biography:  When writing your biography, always try not just to give business-related information, but personal info too. What you do in your spare time, how many kids you’ve got, which charities you support, which belovéd football team has you tearing your hair out in exasperation, etc – all this helps to build rapport before you’ve even met your new client.  An element of humour helps too, although try not to be too quirky as this could backfire on you.

Qualifications: Most of your clients won’t know an MSFA from a FCII, but if you’ve passed the exams, let the world know you have!

Individual contact details: It’s always helpful to provide individual email and phone details for each member of staff, where appropriate.

Photo: Phil Calvert says in his 2007 eBook Wake-Up Your Website, “Many people recoil in horror at the idea of including a photo of themselves on their website or business card, but I highly recommend it.” Phil goes on to say, “Make it a good one. Whilst I’m sure you’ve got some very nice pictures of you on a beach or cooking a barbeque last summer, unless they are recent and of a very high standard, keep them off your website. Having said that, if you are willing to employ a professional photographer to take some pictures of you, that is fine.  The key is professionalism.”

Incidentally, are all your personnel included on the website staff list, or just the key staff?  Even if you have dozens of employees, try to make sure as many as possible are included.  Clients will want to know about you, but they will probably be just as interested to see who answers the phone or makes the coffee!

One final point: how easy is it to update you staff list?  Make sure that this is something you can do easily yourself, rather than having to get your web designer to make potentially costly and time-consuming changes every time.

If you want details about how our Staff List Editor feature works, give us a call!

“Is this sales pitch credible?” you are effectively asking yourself. So you read what others have said to try to increase the credibility of the original info. Who gave it five stars, and why? Is it complicated to use? Is this product right for me?

Your website is no different. Many of your site visitors will not just want to read what you say about yourself and the service you provide, but will also want to read what others have to say about you. And that’s where a testimonials page is invaluable. By the time a website visitor has got to your testimonials page, they will probably have already formed an initial opinion of your firm (subconsciously or otherwise) via the look and feel of the introductory pages of your website and your opening text.

Testimonials are the confirmation of that opinion, the icing on the cake. They are impartial comments – ‘user reviews’ in other words – without sales-speak, that help to gain trust and credibility in you and your advice services. Most IFAs I speak to say they get most of their new clients by personal recommendation. A testimonials page is just a collection of personal recommendations, and in that respect, you would have thought that having a page of recommendations on a website would be invaluable. However, the irony is that most websites don’t have a testimonials page! You could argue that a collection of recommendations from unknown people is worthless compared with one personal recommendation from a friend or relative. However, consider the Amazon scenario again; in the internet age, consumers are generally happy to get a number of recommendations from unknown people if collectively they help endorse their own initial thoughts and feelings.

Sean McPheat in his book ‘eselling’ says, “Word-of-mouth advertising and selling still does occur but most of the activity has shifted to the internet. In fact to expect even verbal referrals from friends and clients, you need to have an active online presence as anyone who hears of you is almost certain…to look you up and learn more about you before even thinking about placing a call’. It’s a logical step to expect those who have received a recommendation about your services to want to see who else has recommended you. Look at the initial Amazon scenario again, and consider whether you would go ahead with an important decision to purchase if you were unsure about the product, unless first you’d had the chance to read what others think about it too. More and more so, the answer is ‘probably not’.

A couple of words of caution; there are too many websites around that say, “Sorry, we do not currently have any testimonials available”, thus defeating the whole object of having this feature in the first place and in fact making the site worse than if the facility wasn’t there at all. In other words, if your website had got a testimonials page, make sure you use it! Also, if you put a testimonial from a client on your site, be expected to produce the original evidence of this if requested, and of course make sure you have the permission of the testimonial provider first. Many IFAs say that the testimonials they put on their sites are one of the most important ways of promoting themselves effectively. Perhaps it’s time for you to consider doing the same?

So why change your content at all?  The obvious main reason to check and update your website content is to make sure that your site is up current and compliant – far too many websites suffer by having out of date areas, particularly:

• newsletters and news items
• staff lists
• disclosure documents
• client testimonials
• financial information and calculators based on previous tax years

As an extreme example, it is still possible to find mentions on one or two websites of a firm being regulated by the Personal Investment Authority (remember them??), making these IFAs look both very non-compliant and very foolish in an instant.  In fact, you could make a valid argument that it is better to have no website at all than having an out-of-date website.  As people become ever more knowledgeable in their use of the internet to search for services and products, then also they are much more adept at spotting dated information.  There is only one chance to make a first impression, as the saying goes, and with obsolete information that chance could well be lost – there are plenty of other IFAs that a prospect could turn to if the content of your site is giving the impression that you’ve been left behind.

The other reason to consider updating your content concerns your Google rankings.  A search engine loves a website where the content changes; it indicates that the site deserves a higher ranking than a site where nothing ever changes, and as a result unchanging websites will gradually fall in the search engine rankings.

So, whoever your website is with, it’s worth doing two things.

Firstly, ask yourself the following questions:

• Which pages of your site can you update without cost?
• When was the last time you changed your site content?
• Who within your firm has responsibility for your website, and do they have the time and motivation to dedicate time to keeping the site up to date and compliant?

Secondly, make sure your website is not getting left behind by updating your content now!

However, sandwiched between the two extremes of pro-blog and anti-blog are another group of IFAs; let’s describe them for now as ‘blog-cautious’.  These advisers do not want the regularity, structure and time-consuming commitment of a 500-words-a-week blog, but are still nevertheless keen to display items of news on their website on an occasional ad hoc basis; news that is specific to their firm that will interest and inform their clients.

So here’s an alternative suggestion for anyone in this group:  within many of our websites we provide ‘Our News’, where an IFA can add topical items to the news section of his or her website.  Many of these items are not quite right for Twitter (it needs more than 140 characters to tell the story) but also not quite right for a blog (maybe too brief and informal to be article material).  However, without exception they all fit very comfortably into the ‘Our News’ category.

Content within Our News is entirely the choice of the IFA, but could potentially include:

• details of a new member of staff
• recent exam successes
• local sponsorship
• question and answer sessions on topical themes
• discounted offers
• details of an office address change
• press coverage
• your thoughts on the Money Advice Service adverts (if those thoughts are repeatable…)
• staff members getting married/giving birth, etc
• members of staff participating in a charity events
• launch announcements for social media pages such as Facebook and Twitter
• Christmas/bank holiday opening hours
• reminders about tax year deadlines
• frequently asked questions
• your thoughts on the current financial markets
• interviews with key staff members
• what the office dog has been up to this week

Once news items of this nature are added, they can then broadcast via email notifications to those who have registered on the site.  It’s also possible for the broadcasts to be segmented, eg, market analysis information just to your investment clients, ensuring the content is relevant for each recipient.

Also, if you are on Twitter, you can tweet about each Our News article, include a URL link, and thus encourage further visitors to your website.

Regularly updating your clients with useful info helps demonstrate that you’ve not forgotten them.  Posting ‘soft facts’ about life within your company helps to show that you care enough about your clients to keep them informed, even about what might be regarded as the smaller things in life.

So how does your company shape up, and what information do you provide on your website to make it easy for clients and prospects to contact you?  Does your website give details of your staff, for example, or does it come across as a faceless organisation? Do site visitors easily find what they are looking for, or is there a chance that they end up going elsewhere in frustration?

We’ve done a survey of IFA websites and come up with some eye-opening results. Of those IFA websites surveyed:

• 78% did not have a contact email address on the home page of their website.
• 23% had no contact email address at all on their site, just a relatively long-winded enquiry form instead.
• 37% did not have a phone number listed on the home page of their website.
• 4% had no contact phone number at all on their site.
• 37% had no names or details of staff members.

Sample Of 150 IFA Websites

Clearly, sample surveys will have a certain degree of error, but having done other surveys of IFA websites in the past, these figures back up our previous findings.

Many advisers tell us how they provide a personal, friendly, face-to-face service to clients, and yet over a third of all IFA websites contain no actual information about the IFA or any other staff members.  For those prospects looking around your website for evidence of a personal, friendly, face-to-face service (“just give me a name of someone I can talk to!”), how many will give up in frustration at finding no such evidence, and head for another firm instead?  There’ll be more on the subject of staff details in a future article.

Although most of the sites we surveyed displayed email and phone numbers, a good number of these were tucked away within the site, behind tiny buttons that could only be found by scrolling down, and in no way immediately visible.

So why not review your website; getting a fresh pair of eyes to look at it might work well, or ask your clients how easy it is to find relevant information, and make sure that you are easily and clearly providing all the necessary information for your site visitors.

Charlie Brooker wrote in The Guardian recently, “If your home is anything like mine, it contains several rarely explored crannies stashed full of archaic chargers, defunct cables, and freshly antiquated gizmos whose sole useful function in 2011 is to make 2005 feel like 1926, simply by looking big and dull and impossibly lumpen. Everyone’s opened a drawer and been startled by the unexpected discovery of an old mobile phone that now resembles an outsized pantomime prop. To think you used to be impressed by this clunky breezeblock. You were like a caveman gawping at a yo-yo.”

I was recently forwarded a link to an online copy of a bestselling book ’101 Ways to Promote Your Website’, by Susan Sweeney.  Delighted at being sent a free book, I started reading.  Only then did I realise that this wasn’t the latest version of the book, but an earlier edition, published in April 2006.  Hence the reason it was free.  I probably should have guessed.

Although this book was merely 1800 days old, give or take a day or two, in parts it was like reading ancient history.  Most poignantly, it contained not one word about social media. In April 2006 Twitter and Facebook were mere toddlers, at the very start of their own exponential rise to prominence, and had no place in the marketing strategy of anyone outside the immediate social circles of Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey.

Not only has there been rapid progress in technology, in communication and social media, there have also been advancements in website fashion and the ways of marketing a website – if you are an IFA who has not progressed with your internet presence in the last five years, either in the way it looks, in what you say or in how your promote your site, you are almost guaranteed to be stuck in the online equivalent of the dark ages.  Internet users are by-and-large a savvy lot these days, and most will recognise instantly the difference between a modern site and one that looks tired and clunky and unstylish.  That crucial first impression is more important than ever, and with many financial advisers’ websites, that first impression is unhappily negative.  That’s if their site gets found in the first place…

Just as you wouldn’t continue to use an unfashionably old and cumbersome mobile phone in front of your clients, don’t find yourself left behind with an unfashionably old and cumbersome website.   In summary, if your website style and/or content and/or marketing strategy is a more than a couple of years old, it’s time to re-assess, rejuvenate and revamp!

I give myself about an hour, and in that time I have usually found half a dozen IFA copyright infringers. It’s a surprising and annoyingly high number that get discovered – several dozen over the years, with some even copying the phrase from our individually worded privacy statement, thus; “your information may also be accessed by IFA Systems Ltd for the purpose of website maintenance”. This usually causes a wry smile; IFAs not only copying, but also not bothering to read what they have copied, merrily pinching a sentence that makes no sense at all within their website.

This all may sound like an uncharitable grumble, but it’s not, honestly! It’s merely being used as an example of how easy it is to get caught out if you are tempted to copy and paste something for your website that you don’t have the right to use. Virtually all IFAs we contact as a follow up to being discovered confess that it was their web designer who produced the content, as if by magic, and they asked no questions as to its source.

Copyright infringement can of course ultimately result in legal action being taken, so it’s always important you make the effort to establish exactly where the content of your website came from, and whether it is legally yours to use. Putting all the copyright shenanigans to one side, make sure you’ve made time to provide your own text for the important pages. Not just the obvious ones like the Home and About Us pages, but particularly for the areas of your site that describe how your advice service works, how you are paid, your approach to TCF and client privacy.

Unless your website content comes from a reputable and original source, the best solution will generally be for you to write your own unique text. This will of course help in showing how your services stand out from the crowd, and having original content will also significantly help your Google rankings.

I spent a few minutes on Twitter the other day looking at comments under the hashtag ‘the most annoying tweeters’.  Most comments under #themostannoyingtweeters were refreshingly blunt, several were amusingly unrepeatable, but the comments gave a useful first-hand perspective of how to behave and how not to behave when entering the Twittersphere.

Are you an annoyance on Twitter?  According to other Tweeters, you are annoying if you:

• tell  everyone what you had for breakfast, lunch and dinner, (especially via photos)
• re-Tweet others’ comments more than you actually tweet yourself.
• still have the Twitter egg as your profile picture
• only ever try to sell something
• only ever tweet that you added or favourited a video on YouTube.
• ask everyone to follow you
• tweet so much you mess up your followers’ timelines
• always repeat the same tweets in hopes of getting some responses.
• use far too many exclamation marks far too often!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• only have seven followers and yet tweet constantly.
• hold conversations on Twitter (‘can’t you just text each other?’)
• don’t tweet at all

The fact that I was able to find so many points of view from so many different people on this subject in such a short space of time is one of the most compelling reasons to embrace Twitter.  Of course, if you want to find some specific information on the internet, there’s always Google and there’s always Wikipedia.  But for immediate reactions and for scanning the views of large numbers of people, Twitter is currently unbeatable.  And with only 140 characters for each post, it doesn’t take forever to have a quick scan of what a cross-section of other people are saying on a given subject.

The mechanics of joining up and contributing is relatively straightforward. However, what you need to do before joining is be clear in your mind why you are joining Twitter, what you want to get out of it, what you will put into it, and how you intend to make it benefit you and your business.  A quick search on Twitter quickly reveals that many IFAs have signed up without a long term plan (or even a short-term plan).

Knowing your strategy in advance, learning adopt a positive open mind on the subject, and accepting that you will not usually gain any benefit without contributing first, will undoubtedly help you start life on Twitter.