A lot of the conversation revolved around pricing and service offerings, and we all shared ideas around what we were doing in this area. The changes set to occur in our industry provide us with a good chance to take a step back and analyse what it is that we currently do for our clients and look at ways we can improve in the future.

One of the main concerns of the financial planners in Australia is the increased competition that will come from industry funds and fund managers, both of whom will seek to provide limited advice to their members. This will place a lot of pressure back onto financial planners to justify the value that they bring to their client relationships.

In my opinion, these changes provide a great opportunity for progressive financial planners to differentiate their businesses.

Unfortunately, if you ask most financial planners, they think they already are differentiating their businesses.

By this I mean that most financial planners feel that their point of differentiation is providing tailored advice or tailored service to their clients. The problem with this approach is that almost every financial planner says that this is their point of difference.

Do you see the problem?

They all think they’re doing / saying something different from their competitors but they’re actually not.

How can you stand out from the crowd?

The benefits of differentiation

The more I study service businesses like financial planning, the more I believe in the need to differentiate.

When you’re perceived as being the same as everyone else, your service becomes a commodity. And buyers make purchasing decisions for commodities largely based on price.

If you’re able to provide something that is different from everyone else, things change. Your customer now sees you as having something different. And because you’re different from everyone else, it’s more difficult to compare based on price – it’s not an apples versus apples comparison, it’s more like apples and oranges!

The other benefit of differentiation for financial planners is that it makes it harder for an existing client to go elsewhere. If you’re providing something completely different that they perceive as valuable, they’re not going to go anywhere else if you’re the only place that can provide what they want.

What does it look like?

I can’t say do ______ and you’ll be different because how you’ll differentiate your business is unique to you.

Things you need to consider include:

• Do you (or your staff) have unique skills or abilities?
• Is there a particular niche that you can focus on?
• Is there a certain area of advice that you’re good at?
• What are the outcomes that your clients want? What can you do to deliver these outcomes?
• Can you re-package something you already do in order to make it unique?

These are a few suggestions to get you started.

I believe that in the future differentiation will be a key strategy for financial planners to focus on. It will be a way we can stand out from the crowd and deliver something that is of great value to those who need it.

What do you think? How do you differentiate your services? What can you do differently?

Did you know that there’s an increasing number of people turning to the internet to find financial advice?

Some people prefer to use the internet to do their research, and they’re becoming more comfortable using the web to find professional advisers. Many of these people are looking for help and guidance with their financial planning and are looking for trusted advisers.

There’s Two Ways That People Get To Your Website

To keep things simple, there are two ways that people get to your website:

1. You find them and tell them to go there, or
2. They find your site themselves.

Let’s break this down a bit further.

You Find Them

When I first set up the website for my financial planning business, this was my initial strategy (until my eyes were opened to the other opportunity).

I promoted my website to my existing clients. Firstly I mentioned it in our client letters, made sure our web address was on all our stationery, and I sent out links to the website to all the clients we had email addresses for.

As a second part to this strategy, we also encouraged clients to forward our emails, articles etc to their friends, so their friends could click through and discover our website.

For a few months last year, I also used some Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising with Google. When people searched for particular terms, our ads would appear alongside the search results and they could click through. We only ever got charged for the clicks, not the number of times the ads appeared. I’ll talk more about PPC in a future article.

Helping People Find Your Site Themselves

Whilst it’s useful to be sending out email newsletters and encouraging people to click through to your site, there is another option.

Everyday there are hundreds of people in your city searching for the services that you provide.

The problem is, that they’re usually typing a range of search terms into Google. You need to know which words are the ones to target.

When you know the main keywords that potential clients are searching for, you’re able to add content to your site that is relevant to those search terms. If you do things well and provide quality content that people read, Google will make sure your site shows up well in the search results.

This is part of an internet marketing term called ‘Search Engine Optimisation’, or SEO for short.

And if you get the SEO right, you can begin ranking for a number of search terms that are relevant to your niche.

Here’s an example.

I just did some searches in the Google Keyword Tool for financial planners and financial advisors in Chicago. Here’s the results.

On average, every month, 210 people search for financial advisors in Chicago, and 140 search for financial planners in Chicago. That’s a total of 350 searches a month – over 10 per day.

Imaging if out of these 350 people you could get 10% of them to visit your website. What if one or two of them became clients? Would that help your business?

Let’s look at another search.

This search is for a couple of broader search terms – ‘Retirement planning’ and ’401k plan’.

Because the search is for a broader term, and hasn’t got a city mentioned, there are more results. Looking at the screenshot you can see that every month, there’s an average of 18,100 people world-wide searching for ‘Retirement Planning’ and 4,400 searching for ’401k plan’.

Some of these people will be in your geographic area.  Google changes the search results depending on the location of the person doing the search. I live in Australia, so if I search for ‘retirement planning’ I get a number of Australian domains in the top 10 search results. In the US, I’d expect you’ll see no Australian domains in your results, and would possibly see some local businesses.

Do the search for your local area and see what comes up. And maybe get a friend in a different state to do the same search and email you the screen shot so you can see what differences there are.

Keyword Research

Knowing which keywords to target is very important.

There are a couple of criteria that I use:

1. The keywords must be relevant to my business
2. The people using the keywords must be looking for advice, not tire-kickers, so avoid keywords with words like ‘free’ in them.
3. I must have a relatively good chance of ranking well in Google for the chosen keywords. Ranking well means in the top 10 search results with a long term goal of being in the top 1 or 2.

I use a tool called ‘Market Samurai’ which helps me determine the best keywords for my niches. It uses data from Google to help you find an initial set of keywords, but then does a lot of analysis on the top 10 search results for each keyword so you can evaluate your chances of success.

The keywords your business targets may be different from another financial planning business. We all have different value propositions, so it makes sense to target different words.

How We Can Help

We can talk with you about the SEO of your website, and give you ideas on how to improve it. As part of this consulting we’ll work with you to build a shortlist of keywords that you can target.

Use the Contact Form to send me a message. And if you haven’t done so already, subscribe to our newsletter and receive your free copy of The Financial Planner’s Website Checklist.

Leave a comment below – do you know what keywords you’re targeting? Do you have more questions about how Google works?

Image from AZRainMan

I was at a small gathering of advisers last week and we spent quite a bit of time talking about our businesses and targets for the rest of 2011. What struck me was that many of the advisers had a tough time setting any meaningful goals for themselves or for their business, and those that did set goals found it hard to tell us how they were going to achieve them.

In a future article I’ll look at how to set and achieve goals – for now I’ll look at some common targets for financial planning businesses.

Number of New Clients and New Client Meetings

A lot of planning businesses have to get new clients in order to grow. All of my peers are still actively chasing new clients for their business. Some of the measures we talked about were to record:

• Number of new clients who make a first appointment.
• Source of these new clients (referral etc).
• Number who request a financial plan.
• How many new prospects actually execute the plan and become clients?
• Revenue per new client (both upfront and ongoing).

From these figures you can quickly work out, on average, how many new people you need to see every week / fortnight / month to achieve your income goals. You’re also able to see which referral sources produce the best quality new clients.

Activity Goals

There are certain activities that successful financial advisers do regularly as part of their marketing.

Whilst cold calling can be frowned upon, the majority of advisers that I know use the phone to pro actively set up new appointments. In a lot of cases they’re calling existing clients with the intent to get them in for a review meeting. Sometimes they’re asking for referrals from their clients. Other times they’re speaking with centres of influence to generate more client referrals.

I know some advisers who target certain businesses and cold call – some use a telemarketer.

Importantly, this is an activity that you can control. Good financial advisers know how many calls they need to make each day to set up a certain amount of appointments. And, ultimately, most advisers generate revenue from sitting in front of clients.

To track this, I like to use a piece of paper and put a tick for each phone call I make.

Financial Plans Prepared

Here in Australia, the legislators like to call financial plans ‘Statements of Advice’, or SoA for short. I still like to call them financial plans because that’s what my clients call them!

Do give our clients personalised financial advice, we need to write a financial plan. So one measure I like to track is the number of financial plans we prepare each week.  From this figure we can make some assumptions about future levels of production and revenue.

Ongoing Service Programs

Like a lot of advisers, I’m moving a lot of my clients over to an ongoing service program with a set monthly retainer. This helps to increase the recurring revenue of the business, and keeps our cash flow more stable, whilst also enabling us to deliver ongoing service to clients in a commercial and profitable manner.

I track the number of new clients that take up the ongoing service program, as well as the number of existing clients who choose to subscribe to it.

Do You Need Targets?

I’m a firm believer in having targets for your business. Setting targets helps you decide on the important things to measure, and keeps you focussed on the things you need to do in order to produce revenue and keep your clients happy.

The advisers I was with last week all agreed that it was best to stick to a few important targets rather than have too many. Popular measures we talked about were the number of appointments, number of financial plans produced, and the number of calls we had to make.

What do you think about having targets? Are they necessary?

I’ve only covered a few here. What other targets have you found helpful in your financial planning business?

What is RSS?

RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. But that probably doesn’t explain what it is or what it does.

Most blogs ( and many non-blogs) have RSS feeds set up. In fact you may actually be subscribing to some of these feeds without realising it.

An RSS feed is a way of feeding information or content to a subscriber. On this blog I have an RSS feed in place.  Every time I write a new blog article, it gets added to the RSS feed.  If you click here, you’ll view the RSS feed for this website.

Many people elect to subscribe to an RSS feed.  You can use a service like Google Reader, or even Outlook to view the feeds.

Every time I write a new blog post, it updates the feed and you’ll see it appear in your reader as a new article.  So within your reader you could subscribe to a whole range of RSS feeds and at a glance see which ones have new content. So instead of having to visit each website to see if there’s anything new on it to read, you can save yourself time by using an RSS reader.

Uses for RSS feeds

The problem is that currently, not many people know what RSS feeds are, or know how to subscribe to them. Unless you’re a computer geek, it may seem a bit hard.

So that’s why there are easier ways to package up the RSS feed to make it more user friendly.

On this site, I offer the chance to subscribe by email. I use an online service called Aweber to manage the email newsletter. Aweber links to my blog’s RSS feed and downloads any new articles into an automated email. I can then login to Aweber, review the email and send it to my subscribers.

So every time I write a new article, I can easily email it to my subscribers. And the RSS feed makes this process much easier.

Another use for RSS feeds is via social media like Twitter or Facebook. Every time I publish a new post, an automated tweet is posted to Twitter with a link to the new post. How does this happen? Via the RSS feed.  I’ll write an article explaining how I do this later this month.

Another great use for RSS feeds that I hinted at earlier in this article is to aggregate your reading. I use Google Reader to bring together all the feeds I subscribe to. I have my feeds categorised – Financial Planning in one section, Blogging feeds in another etc. So I don’t have to visit multiple websites – all the new articles are there in front of me.  Think of the time you’ll save if all this new content was streamed directly to one place instead of you having to search for it.

It’s also possible to set up RSS feeds based on certain keywords. Say you want to know every time your business is mentioned on the internet.  You can set up an RSS feed to facilitate this.

Wrap Up

So an RSS feed is a great way to get information delivered to your computer. Think of it like an email, but from a blog or a website.

Whilst a lot of your clients may not be confident in subscribing to an RSS feed, the feed itself can be used to deliver content to an email list – most people are happy to subscribe to something like this.

So RSS feeds can greatly simplify your online life – both for your personal reading and research and also to help your business deliver great content to your clients.

Are there things you’d like me to explain further? Something not clear? Leave a comment below.

And don’t forget to subscribe to my email list to see my RSS feed in action!

photo credit: dullhunk

In this article we’ll look at the different options and explain why it’s best (and easy) to own your site.

Imagine this scenario.

You’ve got a website for your financial planning business that you’re happy with. It’s a basic site that you set up a few years ago.  It didn’t cost much to do, and you pay an annual licence fee to the website provider that covers the cost of hosting the site and their maintenance.

But now you want to make some changes. You’ve learnt about Search Engine Optimization and want to change some of the content to help your site rank better in the search engines. You want to add a blog so you can communicate in a different manner with your clients.  You also want to add an email signup form so you can capture email addresses of your prospects.

But for whatever reason, you don’t want to use your original web designer to do this new work. So you look for a new designer to do this new work.

But during this process you learn that you don’t actually own the content of your website. Your designer does.

When you look at the original contract you signed for the site, you discover that your original designer owns the site design, photos and all the files. To make things worse, your original designer registered your domain name in their name, so technically they also own that.

Does this sound too far-fetched? It does happen in real life, and it could happen to you.

So what’s the answer? Simple. Make sure you own your site.

When you’re setting up or re-designing a website you’ll probably talk with a few designers to get a feel for how much it will cost and to get some ideas on what to do.  It’s at this stage that you discuss who will own what.

Discuss who will own the designs and the templates. If your designer wants to own them, is it possible for you to pay a bit more to purchase them as well?

Things to consider include:

• Domain name. This should be owned by you and registered in your name (or the name of the business entity).
• Domain hosting. Your website is hosted on the web by a hosting company. In many cases your web hosting has been set up by your designer.  This is ok as long as you’re able to transfer hosts when you need to, and have access to your files.
• FTP access. Without getting too technical, FTP access allows you to get access to all the files that make up your web site.  You can download them, add to them etc.  You should have details of your username and password.
• Ownership of the design. In many cases your web designer will spend a bit of time on the design of your site. This is one of the main reasons you employ a good designer.  But who should own the result they come up with – you or them? It’s their creative work, but you’re paying them.  A good win-win is for you to own the content, but provide a link back to their site.
• The break up. What happens if you want to part ways with your existing web designer? Can you still continue to use their designs? Can you move to a new host?

There’s a range of things to consider when it comes to setting up a web site.

In our opinion, you should own the content of your site. We can arrange hosting and domain registration, but this is always done in your name so you have control over it. If you ever want to go elsewhere, you can.

There’s a trade-off in the different models.

In a rental model, you may pay less initially for your website. But you don’t own it.

In the ownership model, you’ll probably pay a bit more initially. But you’ll own the end result.

Which do you prefer? Personally I prefer the ownership model, but I can see why for some people the rental model may be preferable.

Leave a comment below and let me know what you think.

photo credit: Editor B

Frustrated with your financial planning website? Image from Evil Erin

Think for a minute about your favourite website?

What do you like about it? How often do you visit it?

Usually when I ask financial advisers this question, their favourite site is one that is updated regularly, so they visit it regularly. It could be a site about news, sport, financial things or it could even be a community site like an online forum or social media like Facebook. The common thread is fresh content – a reason to keep coming back.

So how does your financial planning website compare?

The sad reality is that very few financial planning websites are updated regularly. I’ve seen some where the most recent client newsletter on their site is at least a year old. What message does this send to your clients?

A financial planning website that is updated regularly provides the visitor with the impression that your firm is up to date.

And that’s probably (hopefully) something that is important to you.

So, how often do you update your website?

And the second question is – How easy is it to update your website yourself?

A lot of advisers have websites built using tools like Front Page or Dreamweaver. They have great looking websites, but if they want to make any changes, they need to get their designers involved and get them to do it.  This can take time, and costs money.

Another option is to use a program like Adobe Contribute where you can access your website and make changes to the text in pages and even add new pages. Contribute allows you to access your website templates so you create new pages based on the templates of pages that are already there.

So Contribute could be a good option, as it allows you to make changes as often as you need to.

Introducing WordPress

The option I prefer is using an open source platform called WordPress.  WordPress enables you to quickly create a good looking website using a range of pre-built templates. You can easily add new pages and change the look of the site.

In addition (and importantly) WordPress has a community of developers who provide a range of plugins to enhance the program. Some of these plugins give you more control over the Search Engine Optimization of your site (so you can rank better in Google), others make it easier to incorporate email sign up boxes (like the one I use here).

WordPress is primarily a blogging platform, so if you’re looking to start a blog as part of your site, this program makes it easy.

This site runs on WordPress. WordPress itself is free. I use a theme called Headway which does cost money (under $100). Headway allows me to customise the look of my site easily.

The best thing about WordPress is that it’s so easy to use. There’s no special program to load onto your computer. You just login to your site over the web, and make changes, add pages and content using your web browser.

So you could be away from your office but still be able to update content – I’ve done this before when I’ve been interstate on business trips.

And did I mention that WordPress is free.

In my opinion, WordPress provides a simple solution for a lot of websites where the business wants to add content regularly.

Contact us today to learn more about how you may be able to use WordPress in your financial planning website.

In both instances the planners had existing web sites, and a good relationship with their web designers.

In instances like these there are a few ways we can work together – you, your web designer and us – to get the best outcome.

What web designers are usually good at

Most web designers I’ve met are very talented and creative people who are good at designing websites. They can also help with your branding and the look of the site – what fonts to use, what colours suit etc.

Many web designers are much better at that stuff than I am! In fact in a lot of cases I outsource the design work to a designer as I know they’ll produce a good result in much less time.

What they don’t do so well…

Whilst they’re good at designing a site and getting it set up, many web designers (not all) aren’t so good at the ongoing strategy work that’s required.

For instance, when I initially set up the web site for my financial planning business, my designer did a great job of capturing the look I was after. However, he didn’t offer much help with regards to how I could get prospects to find my site, or how I could obtain their contact details etc.

You may not need that level of help if you have a website that has a never-ending supply of new visitors. However if you’re like the rest of us, you probably need a bit of help.

What’s a Web Strategy?

A web strategy is all about integrating the various online elements of your business into the overall marketing plan you have for your entire business.

We look at your existing web site and ways you can use it to obtain more clients.

In a simplistic sense we look at:

1. How you can get more prospects to find you online, and
2. How you can convert them from warm leads into great clients.

As part of this process we’ll give you ideas on how to revamp your existing web site. But we don’t want to take over from your designers if you’re happy with them. We can give you ideas, and liaise with your designers to come up with the desired result.

And if you don’t have an existing relationship with a web designer, or you’re unhappy with the one you’ve got, we can help there by either doing the work ourselves, or outsourcing it.

But even if you have a great looking site, there’s usually things to do to improve it.

• Do you have an option to obtain email addresses (like we do in the sidebar)?
• Do you know what keywords you should be targeting?
• Do you use Google analytics to track visitors to your site?
• Do you post regularly to Twitter or Facebook?
• Do you know how to use article directories to generate more traffic?
• Do you use video to promote your services?
• Are you using online advertising?

This is just a small sample of the things you need to be considering.

The internet is changing the way we do business.

Having a web site isn’t enough – everyone has one these days.

You need to have a strategy that allows you to leverage your online presence so you can obtain new clients.

And this is how we help. Contact us today for a free initial conversation where we can find out more about your plans for the web.

photo credit: lumaxart

And you launch it.

And for a few days, it gets a bit of traffic – mainly because you’ve sent out an email to existing clients, (and friends and family).

But after a while, you notice there’s not much traffic at all coming to it.

Welcome to reality! You can have the best website in the world, but without traffic, it means nothing.

Over the next few months we’ll post some articles on how you can get more traffic to your site. For now, here’s a summary.

Two ways to get traffic

There’s two ways to get traffic to your site:

1. You tell people about your site.
2. They find your site themselves.

Let’s look at these in more detail.

You tell people about your site

This is the traditional way financial planners have promoted their websites. This strategy involves you telling others about your site and getting them motivated to go to your site.

Ways to do this include:

• Placing your web address on business cards, letterhead etc.
• Using an email signature that promotes your site.
• Advertising – either online or offline.
• Emailing your existing clients and either they visit your site or they forward the email to their friends who click on the link to your site.
• Using social media like Facebook or Twitter to promote your site.

There’s other ways to do this – I’ve only listed a few above. The main point is that you’re the one doing the promoting.

They find your site themselves

Consider this – every day there are people who are searching for your services but they don’t know you exist.

How do people find a financial planner? Word of mouth is still a popular method, but even with a referral, potential prospects are likely to visit your website before they call you to get a better idea of who you are.

These days, more and more people are turning to the internet to get financial planning advice.

And they’re looking for businesses like yours.

Ways people can find you include:

• Doing a Google search for financial advisers in your local area.
• Searching Google using other keywords, such as retirement planning’.
• Seeing your business listed in the Google local search listing (contact me to find out more about how to get your business featured here).
• Seeing your advertisement alongside the search results when they use a search engine.
• They see your business mentioned on Facebook or Twitter.

There’s a lot of ways people can hear about you.

Imagine if every month in your local area 500 people searched Google for a financial adviser.  What if you could reach just 1% of that number – 5 people. If two of them became new clients, would that be helpful for your business growth?

But you need to do some work with your website to get it in the right positions on the search engines.

Do something different today!

Very few financial planners understand about how they can set up their sites to obtain a better listing in the search engines.

It is possible to get your site to the number one position for certain keywords. And this opens the door to more new clients because now they can find you.

We help financial planners who are interested in learning about how search engine optimization of their website can help them find new clients.

Contact us today to find out more about how we can help.

Do you have questions about this article? Please leave a comment below.

photo credit: jurvetson

What does your website say about your business?

Does it show your visitors that you’re up to date with the latest trends? Or does it show them that your website is not a big priority for your business?

There’s a myth when it comes to websites that says that you must have a fancy looking site. This is wrong. I’ve seen plenty of good looking sites that have very little content. Whilst they look great, there’s no reason to return. On the other hand, I see lots of average looking sites that contain great information. In my opinion, these will always triumph over a fancy design.

So, what are some essentials for your financial planning website?

Make it easy to navigate.

I was looking at a site today, that was very hard to navigate. It was difficult to work out where to go to on the site, and it was hard to get back to the homepage.

On your financial planning website, make sure you have a range of navigation options across either the top of the page or the left hand side of your page. Make these titles large so you can read them and make sure they are descriptive enough so that the visitor knows whether they are relevant to them.

At the end of every article, why not place links to other similar articles? This gives the reader a logical place to go to next. If you use WordPress, there are plugins that will automatically do this for you.

And always make it easy for the visitor to get back to your home page.

Is it easy to read?

Who will be reading your website? Are they old, or young?

Make sure that the important text on your website is easy to read. We suggest dark text over a light coloured background, and a text size of around 12-14 points.

And make sure the words display well on the page. You don’t want people to have to scroll  across the page to read your full text.  And ensure the important words are above the fold i.e easy to read without having to scroll down the page.

And try and avoid text that sits over pictures – it can be hard to read.

Does it speak my language?

Too many financial planning websites use jargon that may make sense to the person who wrote it, but mean nothing to the average reader.

A website may be the first point of contact a potential client has with your business. Can you show them that you speak their language?

No focus, no message

I’ve seen websites that started off well (and look great), but don’t seem focused. They talk about a lot of things, without actually providing any information. Make sure you have pages that explain how you help clients, and think about providing client testimonials that prove you can do what you say you will.

Keep it current

This is my last point, but perhaps the most important one.

Keep your website current.

There’s nothing worse than looking at someone’s site and the most recent newsletter they have is from 2008!

Show your clients that you’re up to date.

With the web solutions that we recommend to advisors, you’re able to update your content quickly and efficiently from your computer, making it a simple thing to keep your site looking fresh.

Content beats pretty designs

People are less fussed about the design of your site as they are with the content. What is your website like? What could you improve?

Leave a comment below and let me know what you think.
photo credit: Mamonello