Upgrade your website or drive away business

Ask website designers about the state of most financial adviser sites today and they grimace.
“The majority of sites we see out there from advisers are very outdated and they poorly reflect the firm and the adviser,” said Loic Jeanjean, director of sales and marketing for AdvisorWebsites, a design firm. “If I was a prospect, I would never give them a call.”
Even though it’s rare today that anyone sits down with a financial adviser before Googling them, most advisers don’t give websites the regular attention they need to stay current, he said.
Outmoded sites are probably even hurting an adviser’s business.
The 2014 InvestmentNews Financial Performance Study of Advisory Firms found that the only marketing activity that top performing firms engage in more frequently than other firms was updating and upgrading their websites.
Wealthy clients and prospects today are Internet savvy and used to receiving sophisticated financial information online, so materials that fall short of that are off-putting.
With the speed at which web technology is developing, advisers should be revamping their sites at least every three years or so, Mr. Jeanjean said. Some of the improvements can be quick fixes, such as changing the images or even fonts.
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“A site that’s 10-years-old though, will need drastic changes,” he said. “You can’t apply a Band-Aid on something that’s totally broken.”
Adviser websites today tend to be very static and could use an injection of more dynamic features, said Victor Gaxiola, customer advocacy manager for Hearsay Social Inc.
The most important change advisers should be considering with their sites is to make sure they work on mobile devices, incorporating responsive design that optimizes images and content for different devices, he said.
“The next stage is social integration,” Mr. Gaxiola said.
He isn’t just talking about adding a button for a visitor to link to an adviser’s LinkedIn page or Twitter feed.
More advanced sites are incorporating the Twitter feed right into the website and automatically posting content that is added to the website to the adviser’s social media platforms, he said.
“The idea is to create a more dynamic piece with the social platforms,” Mr. Gaxiola said.
Experts pointed to the websites of two firms as examples of presenting an effective online presence: IHT Wealth Management, for it’s clean lines and large images, and oXYGen Financial, because it allows visitors to easily navigate the site with a long scroll down feature. It also has many links to individual pages so it’s best optimized for search engines.