MID-YEAR REVIEW | Why Your Website is Never Done
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Financial services firms often think their website is done and practically perfect as is. However, your website is never really done. Is it creating the volume and quality of leads you expect? Are prospects and clients regularly coming back to your site?
If you don’t get leads from your website, digital marketing, and social media, or if you get too few, you have a problem.
With the year nearly half complete, now is an excellent time for a mid-year website review. This article explores why you shouldn’t consider your website a finished product—and how to continually improve it.
Content
The content on your website is not something to set and forget. Content impacts lead generation, as does how you digitally distribute your ideas.
New and timely content gives people a reason to return to your site. Fresh and informative material, regularly posted, will improve your SEO, meaning the likelihood that investors will find you when they search online.
When the market dips or dives, some asset managers head for cover and refrain from communication. A few of our clients say they don’t contact investors because their investment strategies depend on the strength of the individual businesses they own, not on market forces. However, market malaise is precisely the time to communicate reassurance via your website, social media, email, and, heaven forbid, a phone call.
By regulation, if you publish performance data on your website—quarterly returns, portfolio composition, assets under management, and number of clients—you’ll need to update that data regularly. Some firms set up automatic data feeds, others do it manually, and many simply avoid posting data that requires updating.
How to test website content effectiveness. The number of quality leads and conversations your website creates is the ultimate arbiter of your website’s success or lack thereof.
Testing the effectiveness of your content is, of course, critical. However, many asset managers not only fail the test—they fail to do any testing.
Managers must test headlines, sub-heads, evergreen content, marketing campaigns, thought leadership posts, lead generation landing pages and forms, design elements like layout and imagery, and much more. You can do A/B testing, where you create two variations of headlines, text sections, images, buttons, or whatnot, and see which performs better.
Which marketing effort generates more leads and sales? How much does it cost to acquire a new investor? Two popular CRM platforms with benchmark attribution answers are HubSpot and Salesforce.
Asset managers have tons of metrics to weigh the impact of website content. Audience metrics show how engaged visitors are with your website, how much time they spend on a specific page, visitor bounce rate, and pages per session. Conversion criteria show the percentage of visitors who download free offers, complete landing page forms, or sign up for newsletters.
SEO metrics tell you the number of visitors who click to your website from Google (organic search), how your content ranks for keywords (keyword rankings), and how many external websites link to your site (backlinks).
Competition
Don’t expect your competitors’ websites to remain unchanged. Your strategic priorities, social media and digital marketing, messaging, products, and services may shift over time. If so, you must edit your website to reflect the new you.
How to gain a competitive edge with your website. You don’t need to guess how well your site is doing versus the competition. The most popular assessors provide competitive insight into website traffic, organic search rankings, keyword rankings, backlinks, domain strength, content performance, audience demographics, and more. Consider Ahrefs, BuzzSumo, Moz, Semrush, SpyFu, and many others.
Compliance
Have you ever known the SEC, FINRA, SEC, and the CBOE to reduce compliance requirements for marketing content? The default is to add more disclosure to protect investor interest.
Which means you need to know what the regulators are doing. A fairly recent requirement interpretation is ADA compliance, in which asset manager websites must be easily accessible and understandable for people with sight or hearing disabilities.
How to keep on top of compliance. Monitoring strategies include subscribing to SEC and FINRA email updates, reading their social media, and getting alerts from your legal team, industry associations, and Google. Engaging with peers on LinkedIn or Facebook groups can help, too.
Design
The look of your website—its design—should not be static, either.
Fashion-forward design trends in website development will certainly differ today from tomorrow. For now, however, minimalist design is the trend. This means clean, undecorated layouts, lots of white space, limited colors, and simple typography.
Expect to see more websites you can prompt with your voice, a dark mode (a black or gray background with white type) for reduced eye strain, and visual elements and interactivity inspired by gaming.
Significant design changes for asset manager websites might be best done about every two years or so. Other alterations, such as updating the look of your charts, testimonials, or literature section, can be done more frequently.
How to measure the design impact of your website. Technology can help measure how well people think about your website. UserTesting and Maze provide useability testing about layouts and overall customer behavior.
Sometimes, however, the best approach is to ask current clients and prospects. Some firms have a client advisory board that provides broad feedback, which could include website effectiveness.
Search
Google regularly changes its search engine algorithms. In 2024, Google made several confirmed “core.” updates plus improvements to combat spam. They make several major updates yearly, and every new wrinkle may impact your SEO page rankings. Which means you may go from the first page to invisible overnight.
How do you know when you’ve disappeared from search? In real estate, the mantra is location, location, location. In search, the keyword is monitor, monitor, monitor. Make sure you regularly check and update your website data in the same manner as you keep two eyes on compliance updates.
Security
Website security is always an issue. Cybersecurity threats, data breaches, ransomware incidents, and identity stealth will continue as long as there’s money to be made in an ungentlemanly manner.
What to do about website security threats. Security does not have to be a constant worry. Most firms have, or should have, a plan to defend against the bad actors. Buzzwords include zero trust architecture, AI-generated threat protection, and API security gateways.
Technology
New technologies constantly impact how firms develop, amend, and maintain their websites. The latest tools in architecture, design, and testing have and will continue to speed website advances.
How AI is impacting website enhancements. AI, of course, is the most noteworthy technology website development trend. Asset managers must learn to make their websites faster, more efficient, and more personal with artificial intelligence. AI-powered technology can create content, for better and for worse. Similarly, technology-powered chatbots have made communication with prospects more impactful and available whatever the time.
User Behavior
Investor user behavior changes, too.
More people, approximately two-thirds, now prefer to use their smartphone rather than a laptop. Wealth managers must optimize for mobile—adapt how their website looks, navigates, and downloads on smaller screens.
What to do when investors change their website behavior. Younger millennials and Gen Z investors, while they may have less investable assets, often gather information differently than their elders who have more money. The more youthful generations may have shorter attention spans and prefer interactive calculators, and snackable, short-form information.
Heatmaps are a cool tool to measure user behavior. Heatmaps show where visitors click, scroll, and spend time, by tracking a visitor’s mouse movements. The warmer the color the greater the visitor’s attention. Among others, Crazy Egg, Hotjar, and Mouseflow are oft-used tools.
Your Website is Never Done (Reprise)
Your website is not a static brochure. Like the Sagrada Chapel in Barcelona, Spain, your site is never done, always under construction, continually in need of improvement. Asset managers have no end of online tools to identify where and how their websites can be made better.
With the year half done, and your website never done, now may be the time for a mid-year review.
Is your website in need of a refresh? Schedule a complimentary 60-minute strategy session today.
Frank Serebrin is the Content Marketing Director for Sondhelm Partners. He leads strategic and creative content and marketing services for our asset management and wealth management clients.
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