Taking Your Place in Cyberspace

In the financial services industry, the Internet is well accepted as a valuable research, contact and purchasing tool. That’s why it’s  surprising to learn how many agents and advisors overlook the power and potential of Internet and online marketing in their fiercely competitive quest to grow their businesses in an increasingly challenging market environment.

The Internet is unrivaled in providing an effective, low-cost way for financial representatives to enhance their visibility and realize a significant return on their marketing investment. What’s more, Internet marketing approaches are flexible and customizable — providing a level playing field for firms of any size.

Creating an Effective Web Presence
In the financial services industry, a Web site has become as important as a business card — you can’t establish yourself as a legitimate businessperson without one. In addition, since prospective clients routinely use the Internet to do their due diligence on an agent or advisor, the design and content of your Web site represent an excellent opportunity to make a good first impression.

In the early days of the Internet, financial representatives proudly placed their corporate brochures on their sites and thought they were hot stuff. Now we see just how naïve these early attempts at “Internet marketing” really were. Experience has shown that designing a successful financial Web site requires special skills and insights. We now know that it takes only a few seconds for first-time Web site visitors to subconsciously “grade” its value and relevance and make the decision either to explore the site  or flee. You have very little time to grab a prospect’s attention and interest them in learning how you can help enhance their financial wellbeing.

It is not enough for a financial services site simply to look good and provide visitors with generic articles, calculators and quote request forms. On truly effective Web sites, all copy and design elements focus on engaging prospects, addressing their needs and concerns, and making it easy for them to find the information they need.

Writing for Web sites presents special challenges. Research shows that 80 percent of users do not read Web pages “word for word,” but instead scan pages, focusing on specific keywords, informative subheadings, well-presented data and short, bulleted lists. Furthermore, Web design involves more than selecting colors and photos; an effective design focuses a visitor’s attention on the most relevant “starting point” and arranges blocks of information and commands to convey the intended messages logically. It uses images and color to highlight—rather compete with—the content, as well as to help to clarify the page layout, attract visitors’ attention and maintain their interest.

Leveraging the Power of Search Engines
Even the best-designed Web site will fail in its mission to attract new business if no one can find it in the clutter of the World Wide Web. Research reveals that 85 percent of all new Web traffic comes from search engines and 81 percent of search-generated traffic comes from the first three pages of results: however, with the vast amount of content available on the Web, virtually any search yields hundreds of pages of results. You can overcome this obstacle by taking positive steps to ensure that your site consistently appears in the first few pages of search results on the major search engines.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the term used to describe techniques that can help boost a site’s search engine rankings. Effective SEO addresses the dozens of variables (e.g., linguistics, site design, usability, amount of content and linking patterns) that search engines use to compute a site’s “relevance” (or importance) and assign rankings.

Internet search activity is driven by keywords, the words and short phrases users enter to find the information that they need. Therefore, the optimization process begins with focused research to select keywords that will attract qualified traffic to the site. Keywords should be specific and relevant to the content on the subject page. Words that are too general can cause a site to appear in searches that have little, if any, relevance to its content.

Search engines “crawl” sites periodically to determine their relevance based on keyword selection. To determine how a given page should rank in the search engine’s databases, the search engine robots, or spiders, read only certain areas of the page and evaluate the page’s links. Therefore, each page should be “optimized” by making special efforts to clearly identify its relevance using coding to focus attention on carefully crafted titles and descriptions, body text and images.

It Pays to Advertise
Search engines also sell Pay-per-Click (PPC) advertising that guarantees favorable placement in the search results for specified keywords. Research into the effectiveness of PPC advertising reports that the percentage of Web surfers who click on a search engine listing (the “click-through rate”) of financial industry Web sites is four times greater for paid search listings than for organic search listings. This success typically is attributed to PPC’s targeted copy, highly visible placement, attractive appearance and ability to engage Web surfers through targeted advertising copy. These campaigns can be set up very quickly, and it is extremely easy to update and change messaging and test different creative approaches.

Adapting to Ongoing Change
The Internet has changed the financial services industry profoundly. By revolutionizing the way people communicate, get information and do business, it has also changed how clients and prospects interact with their financial advisors. Therefore, it is essential that financial representatives leverage the power of the Internet and online marketing tools if they are to compete effectively in today’s highly competitive financial marketplace.

Jay Nagdeman is president of Suasion Resources, a financial services marketing firm. This article is adapted from his new book, The Professional’s Guide to Financial Services Marketing: Bite-Sized Insights for Creating Effective Approaches (Wiley Publishing), a compendium of ideas and techniques for creating effective financial services marketing initiatives in our new market environment.