Twenty years into the digital age advisory firms are still making rookie mistakes when it comes to their web presence—and the biggest mistake is thinking it doesn’t matter all that much, marketing specialists say.
“Even if someone is a referral, they’re going to search for you to validate what they’ve heard,” said Cynthia Casarez, Capital Group’s senior manager in charge of search marketing. “In fact, 87% of consumers used Google to evaluate local businesses in 2022.”
In a webinar hosted by Los Angeles-based investment firm Capital Group, FSC Wealth Advisors President James Comblo and Casarez discussed what’s changed and what hasn’t about building an effective digital pathway to an advisor’s door.
Ultimately the keys to success that helped FSC go from $80 million to $250 million, Comblo said, can be summed up in three words: site, search and social.
In that order.
“You want to start with the website, because you can do so many things with it,” Comblo said. “I don’t know if you go on social that people will DM you and ask you to work with them. The goal of all that is to get them to your website, where you can then convert them from prospect to client.”
It's About The Client
A website that shows a firm’s experience and expertise, as demonstrated through an understanding of a prospective client’s pain points, hits all the essentials: what the firm is about, who works there and the kinds of clients who are welcomed. And engagement, which is served through content, is one of the best ways to show expertise, whether it’s blogs, podcasts or video, he said.
“Right around 2015, I was looking at our website and I said, ‘This is terrible. Nobody will come to this website and say I want to work with these people,’” Comblo recounted. “So we redesigned the website, but the mistake we made was we made it all about us.”
FSC had focused on what the firm was about and the talents of the advisors, but that wasn’t enough to deliver new clients to the door, he said.
“So we redesigned it again, to incorporate more of the person coming to the website and how we could help them,” he said.
That improved the client flow, but it was a third iteration completed last year that really did the trick.
“Now it’s all about the client. There is stuff about us, but the main page of our site is all about you, you’re the hero in this story that we’re trying to tell, and really we want to act as the guide that’s just going to help you go down that path,” he said.
And every page has a button to schedule a call.
“The original version had one button on the Contact Us page,” he said. “Now there’s a call to action after every section.”
Lucrative Keywords And Phrases
Once a firm’s website has been modernized, it’s time to ratchet up how clients might find the firm using search engines, Casarez said.
“The top five search results will garner 70% of the clicks,” she said. “This means it’s really important to rank as high as possible.”
Every keyword search, she said, shows the client’s intent, whether they’re looking for a product or service, an answer to a specific question, or the location of a specific firm. For advisors to use organic search as an effective firm prospecting tool they’ll want to make sure they’re creating content that addresses these three categories, she added.
For example, at a bare minimum, a referred client will search for an advisor using the advisor’s name, the firm name and town the firm is located in.
“These will be the initial keywords you’ll want to optimize for your site, so you’re making it easier for searches to find either your website or your detailed business profile,” she said.
Another way to zero in on effective keywords is to focus on the questions clients might be asking. A client near retirement, for example, might search for information with the query “Should I take Social Security at 62?”
Typing that phrase into the Google search bar, a prospective client will see Google offer variations on that phrasing, such as “Social Security retirement age chart,” she said.
“These related suggestions from Google can help you build out your keyword strategy by targeting these keywords and topics in your content on the website,” Casarez said.
That said, advisors shouldn’t put all their effort behind the most popular keywords or base their strategy solely on search volume, which is the number of times a word is searched for in a month. “Financial advisor” is so popular it would be impossible for a firm to rank high enough in the search return to be seen by a prospective client.
“This is where a local search strategy could really come into play,” she said. “Searching for ‘financial advisor for corporate retirees in Tacoma’ is a less popular term, but it’s much more targeted and much more likely to drive qualified leads to your site.”
Comblo agreed.
“I didn’t want to target a keyword that had 12,000 or 50,000 hits per month because I know, at my company’s size and the amount of money we have to put toward these keywords, we can’t dominate that keyword,” he said.
Instead, FSC has looked for keywords that attract less than 2,000 hits per month and recreated the most common searching sentences with that word within its website copy, a technique Casarez praised, saying these keywords or phrases should be in a website’s headlines and subheads, as well as in the meta titles and meta descriptions.
“These are the two elements that are going to show up in the search results when people are searching for you,” Casarez said. “It’s really going to inform them on what you offer, and will get them to click through to your site and visit.”
Firms should also link to outside authorities, like the Social Security Administration, as well as interlink between different content pieces on the same topic within the firm’s site. This increases a site’s visibility to a search engine.
To be most effective with searches, they said, firms should claim their business profile on Google, which can help a firm show up in local listings and place in the “maps pack,” which is the small selection of area business that Google will display at the top of a search return. A firm should do the same on Bing.
Budgeting For Social Can Pay Off
For all the controversies around social media, they still remain huge platforms that can build relationships. LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter (hashtags #financialadvisor and #fintwit) are very popular with financial services, she said.
“Instagram and TikTok may not be as popular in financial services, but they still remain great avenues for reaching a younger audience, especially Gen Z,” she said.
Comblo said he does a mix of personal posts, blog promotion and connecting with other people in the financial community to make his social efforts effective.
“I just want everybody to know who I am and who I serve,” he said. “That message has to be married to our company page as well.”
Comblo said he uses social advertising not just for the firm, but for webinars that are a primary drivers of new client business.
“Currently we’re running three different ad sets. And one ad set is three different pictures with three different writing underneath each picture,” he said. “So that’s nine ads that are running simultaneously to get in front of people and to try to get them into a webinar where we can tell them about something they may not be aware of and show them how we could help.”
The budget for this, he said, is about $4,500 a month—$500 in ads per webinar (four a month) and $2,500 spent with a marketer to tweak the ads.
“Don’t be afraid to spend a little money,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot of advisors say this doesn’t work, but we’re getting 100 to 120 people registered for every webinar we do.”
From there, Comblo said usually at least 40 actually attend the webinar, and then roughly 20% of those people book what the firm calls a “right fit” call, which is a roughly 20-minute conversation. For every five people who go through that call, typically one becomes a client.
“When we started this journey, my company was at about $80 million or $90 million in AUM total,” he said. “We’re right under $250 million today. The webinars that we put on can sometimes uncover $10 million, $15 million, $20 million in perspective assets with people who may become clients down the road.”