Unlocking the art of Digital Marketing in Financial Services.

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What financial services firms will learn from this guide

10 Key take-aways

1. How to build a successful presence online in a highly competitive digital space.
2. Create a coordinated digital marketing plan for future business growth.
3. Increase traffic to your firm's website and improve marketing ROI.
4. Target prospective clients with the right message, at the right time, via the right digital channel.
5. Improve prospective client conversion rates to generate higher fee and retainer incomes.
6. Win further client loyalty and turn them into raving fans that become lead generators.
7. Track and measure your digital marketing results to create more new business opportunities.
8. Reach a more profitable target audience and generate pre-qualified quality leads that convert.
9. Discover the leading digital marketing tools needed to provide clients and prospective clients with a great experience.
10. Using digital marketing methods to enhance client retention and protect future revenue streams.

Unlocking the art of Digital Marketing in Financial Services

How to create a successful online presence for the future

In this guide, we provide comprehensive and up-to-date information that explains how financial advice firms can create a successful online presence for the future. Firms have traditionally been reliant on personal recommendations and referrals to acquire new clients.

However, the digital age has changed the landscape dramatically, and firms must now adapt their marketing strategies to stay ahead of the competition. Increasingly, digital technologies and clients' expectations have changed faster than many firms. We look at how to fix that.

As the world and consumers move online, client demographics begin to change and become more demanding – financial advice firms need to adapt and evolve to stay relevant and keep up with the competition in a very crowded digital space.

Shift towards digital marketing faced by many firms of all sizes

Digitalisation is a challenge faced by many firms of all sizes that have long relied on traditional marketing methods to reach their target audiences. However, increasingly there is a shift towards digital marketing, as more people are using the internet to search for financial advice and services.

At the epicentre of a coordinated digital marketing plan is the need to have a website presence that is fit for purpose and one that allows firms to bridge the gap between the process of marketing and advice, creating an engaging, seamless journey that gets audiences into action, and more.

Increased reach, lower costs and greater flexibility are key

Your website needs to showcase your firm's capabilities and expertise, and provide prospective clients and visitors with valuable information about your firm's services and proposition. It should also enable your firm to generate enough of the right quality leads and build brand awareness to your target audience.

Digital marketing offers several advantages over traditional marketing, including increased reach, lower costs and greater flexibility. Additionally, it will allow your firm to target your ideal prospective client demographic more precisely and track the campaigns' results more effectively. Advice firms that have made the investment are reaping the rewards.

Create an effective and commercially profitable online presence

By embracing digital marketing, financial advice firms can stay ahead of the competition and better serve the needs of their clients. It is therefore essential for firms to invest in a high-quality website as part of a coordinated digital marketing plan that accurately reflects their brand, communicates their key messages and is set-up to achieve business goals.

This guide covers all of the key elements required to create an effective and commercially profitable online presence to allow your firm to reach a wider audience with your message and branding, build trust and credibility with prospective and existing clients, and to differentiate yourself from the competition.

Struggling to attract the right levels of quality visitor traffic to your website?

If your firm has struggled to attract the right level of quality visitor traffic to your website, you're not alone. Having a website is no longer a nice-to-have – it is essential.

"89% of prospective financial services clients switched to a competitor's website due to a bad user experience." — Source: Webfx

Contents

Digital marketing.

• 07. Sales Funnel
• 09. 4 Stages of the Sales Funnel
• 10. How to Create a Sales Funnel
• 12. Traffic Strategy
• 13. Content Marketing
• 14. Content Creation
• 15. Topic Expertise
• 16. Blogging
• 18. Editorial Content Calendars
• 21. Financial Calculators

Website design.

• 23. Website Design or Redesign
• 26. Micro Websites
• 28. Landing Pages

Search engine optimisation (SEO).

• 31. On-Page SEO
• 33. Technical SEO
• 34. Local SEO
• 37. Social Media Marketing Campaigns
• 41. Email Marketing Campaigns
• 43. Email List Building
• 44. How to Create a Great Lead Magnet
• 47. Email Marketing Best Practices

Other digital marketing traffic driving forces.

• 51. Video Marketing
• 54. Website Audit
• 56. Quality Backlinks
• 58. Internal Linking
• 60. A/B Testing
• 62. Click-Through Rate (CTR) Optimisation
• 64. Content Repurposing

Digital marketing.

"68% of all financial advice firm interactions start with an online search."

Source: Google

Sales funnel

Simplify the prospective client's journey

In this guide, we provide comprehensive and up-to-date information that explains how financial advice firms can create a successful online presence for the future. Firms have traditionally relied on personal recommendations and referrals to acquire new clients.

What are the sales funnel sections?

The funnel adheres to three main sections: the top, middle and bottom. Each one of the sales funnels sections should attract relevant prospective clients and then filter them down to the goal of converting them to becoming fee-paying clients.

Top of the funnel: When a prospective client first becomes aware of your brand, service or product offering. Brand awareness is the 'extent to which your brand is recognised by each prospective client and is associated with a particular service or product.' While advisers will educate prospective clients about your services or products, at this stage, you are providing content to boost brand awareness through different digital marketing channels. Top of the digital marketing funnel helps capture prospective clients who aren't prepared to pay for advice today but might be at a later point in time.

Middle of the funnel: Your prospective client now becomes a marketing qualified lead. At this stage, they understand their problem and are looking for a solution. They will look to discover more information about your services and the benefits of becoming a client of your firm. If they do determine you're the right fit for their needs, they will then proceed to the next stage. Remarketing is a useful tactic at this stage of the funnel. It targets prospective clients who previously visited your website and pushes them to continue to engage with your firm until ultimately they became a client, or drop out of the funnel.

Bottom of the funnel: Both your marketing and adviser teams should work together to secure a prospective client's interest and make sure their engagement remains high enough to commit to becoming a client. When they become a client, this doesn't mean your engagement with them should be over. Staying engaged with each client after they exit the bottom of the funnel is what turns one-off policy holders into repeat retainer-based clients. By converting existing clients into advocates for your brand, they are more likely to become raving fans and recommend your firm to others.

Sales Funnel Stages

"59% of financial services firms' marketing budgets in 2023 will be put towards digital marketing channels."

Source: HubSpot

Funnel Stages:

• Awareness
• Interest
• Decision
• Action

4 stages of the sales funnel

Each stage requires you to take a different approach

Each prospective client will pass through four stages within the sales funnel, from when they first learn about your firm's service or product until they convert to a client (or don't convert). The four stages are representative of their mindset, and each stage requires you to take a different approach with your digital marketing messaging. You can remember the four stages using the acronym AIDA.

1. Awareness
2. Interest
3. Decision
4. Action

1. Awareness

The first stage of the sales funnel is awareness. This is when the prospective client first becomes aware of your firm, service or product. They might develop this awareness from encountering your advertising, learning about your brand on social media or hearing feedback from an existing client, friends or family. Or, a prospect might have found out about your firm by doing a Google search that brought up your website, seeing one of your ads or reading a blog post.

At this stage you need to start an engagement process using various outbound marketing and communication channels to build awareness about how your firm could help them achieve their requirements, lifestyle or financial planning goals.

2. Interest

The second stage of the sales funnel is interest. At this point, by nurturing the relationship, the prospective client should start to learn about your firm, your brand, and your services and products, and they will have decided to evaluate them based on their level of interest.

At this stage, you should be engaging with them via targeted and relevant compliant content that informs and educates, but does not overtly sell to them. The key is not to become too pushy with your approach during this stage, or you run the risk of the prospect leaving this stage of the funnel. The content provided should demonstrate your expertise and professionalism and help the prospect make an informed decision.

3. Decision

The third stage of the sales funnel is decision. The prospective client is ready to seek your advice but may also be considering your competitors. This is when they will be comparing fees and other factors, to help them find the best adviser and firm for their requirements.

At this stage, the key is to differentiate your service or product offering from the competition so they move forward and choose your firm. Providing a corporate brochure, relevant guide, factsheet, overview of your firm's client service proposition, or phone conversations, these will all help the prospect client make a decision in your favour.

4. Action

The final stage of the sales funnel is action. The prospect becomes a client by paying a fee or retainer for your service or product (or they decide to appoint another financial advice firm). If they become a client, they are now part of your firm's ecosystem.

Although the stage of the advice process is complete, the engagement process never ends. Your goal is to focus on client retention so that clients continue to pay for ongoing or future advice. Your approach to digital and content marketing will build further client loyalty. For example, email a post-meeting digital marketing pack – include your firm's personal finance magazine and corporate brochure (if not previously sent), and invite them to sign-up for your firm's regular client magazine sent straight to their inbox (or other relevant marketing communications). This is also the point where your firm must provide a high-quality client experience throughout all client touchpoints to drive client or brand engagement further.

How to create a sales funnel

55% of advertising is digital

Source: Winterberry Group

1. Define your goals

It is easier to work on your sales funnel if there is a clear vision for your firm. Have you set target fee income or revenue objectives, and by when? How much assets under management do you want to acquire, and by when? Do you want to enter a new market or sector? What and when? Do you want to target a specific area of advice, for example, Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria? Once you have figured out your primary firm's goal, you can begin to plan out the rest of your sales funnel strategy.

2. Outline your prospective client personas

Prospective client personas are fictional, generalised representations of your ideal clients. Creating an analysis of who you think your clients will be will help you generate relevant content, product development and frame future engagements. These personas will help you tailor your sales, marketing and advice strategies to the needs and desires of a specific group of people.

3. Analyse your client's behaviour

Client behaviour analysis is a review of how clients interact with your firm. Clients are separated into each persona based on their common characteristics; then, you observe them along the client journey to record how they engage with your firm. Organise your research around questions such as: What problems are your clients trying to solve? What engagement channels do they use?

4. Create marketing collateral

The next step is to create a place where prospective clients can research and obtain your advice. Marketing collateral describes a compilation of different media types and improves the awareness of your service and product offerings.

Collateral can include paid adverts, websites, landing pages, sales emails, PDFs, downloadable guides and case studies. Marketing collateral should run parallel to your firm's primary advertising and contain a call-to-action, a line of text or image which urges your prospective clients to take action. Your content should outline the details of your services while compiling reasons why your clients are making the right choice by choosing your firm.

What content should you use for a sales funnel?

Now you have the foundational framework for your sales funnel, the next step is to create content. It's essential to create content with relevant keywords for your prospective client personas as well as considering which tactics and channels are best for each step.

Top of the funnel

Content should connect a prospective client to your firm, and help them feel confident in choosing you. According to Hubspot, 68% of prospective clients feel more positive about a financial advice firm after consuming content from them. One way to draw in attention is to use your knowledge from researching your audience to create tailored, high-quality content that will answer their problem.

This can involve:

• Corporate brochure
• Blog posts
• Financial and Lifestyle Magazine
• Digital newsletter
• Digital guide
• Digital factsheet
• Market commentary
• Infographic
• Video

You want to show a prospective client, why they should enlist your advisory services and what makes your firm different from competitors.

"68% of financial advice firms have never created a digital marketing sales funnel."

Source: Google

Middle of the funnel

Next, it's time to build and nurture a relationship with the prospective client, creating content that emphasises that you can provide solutions to their needs. According to Google, firms with a refined middle-of-the-funnel engagement and lead management strategy see a four to ten times higher response rate than generic email blasts and outreach.

The middle of the funnel may well be the most important stage, as a prospective client is likely to remove a firm from the running if they don't appear suitable, and will turn to a competitor.

The most effective types of content in the middle stage comprise:

• Client testimonials
• Webinars
• Blog posts
• Financial and Lifestyle Magazine
• Digital newsletter
• Digital guide
• Digital factsheet

Now that you have your prospective client's attention, your effort shifts to keeping it. Engagement is all about keeping them actively considering your services and products. The content you create for this stage has to be high-quality, relevant and consistent. But don't overwhelm them with too many touchpoints. It's about striking a balance.

Bottom of the funnel

The bottom of the funnel is when it's necessary to reaffirm why the prospective client should convert to becoming a fee-paying client through action-oriented content. This type of content needs a clear message and be tailored to their unique problem.

This can involve:

• Arranging a complimentary meeting
• Arranging a Zoom call
• Invitation to attend a seminar
• Promotional offer

Creating a varied and robust content library will ensure you have the resources to attract the right client personas and move them through the sales funnel.

Traffic strategy

Digital Marketing.

Holistic traffic strategy to fill your sales funnel

To drive awareness and fill your sales funnel there needs to be a holistic traffic strategy in place. While driving traffic is easy in concept, it takes consistent effort to master.

Top 4 ways to drive traffic into your firm's sales pipeline funnel

1. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns and paid social media advertising that focuses on where your audience congregates.
2. Search engine optimisation (SEO) that helps you rank higher on search engine results.
3. Guest posting on major publications or industry websites to build credibility.
4. Outbound email campaigns that starts a conversation.

The options for driving traffic are plentiful, but that doesn't mean you should use each one. Your audience is unique and will respond to a unique blend of approaches. It's important to find the right digital marketing mix.

"The number 1 search result in Google gets approximately 32% of all clicks." Source: Moz

PPC returns £2 for every £1 spent, resulting in a 200% ROI

Content marketing

Digital Marketing.

Drive profitable prospective client engagement and action

In today's age, clients expect high-quality, consistent content from financial services professionals. Content marketing is a strategic approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent compliant targeted content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable prospective client engagement and action.

Reaching new prospective clients can be time-consuming and complex. But by aligning the content you publish with their interests, you naturally attract inbound traffic that you can convert, close and nurture over time. Effective content marketing relies on a solid foundation of prospective client personas that guide your strategy, as well as tightly defined buyer's journeys that inform your content calendar.

Right mix of targeted publications

A content calendar (also known as an 'editorial calendar') is a written schedule of when and where you plan to publish upcoming content. Content calendars typically include upcoming pieces, planned promotional activities, partnerships and updates to existing content.

Once you have these in place, you can hand-pick the right mix of targeted publications, blogging, guides, infographics, case studies and more to drive website traffic, build awareness and generate higher-quality leads at each stage of the buyer's journey, resulting in a prospective sales pipeline with highly qualified leads.

"Financial advice firms say content marketing has increased client engagement by 72%." Source: Salesforce

Content creation

Digital Marketing.

Create content that will naturally attract visitors to your website

As a financial advice firm you will need to come up relevant compliant financial content that will attract the right visitors to your website. Once you know your audience, you can create content that will naturally attract them to your website.

5 steps to creating the right content for prospective client persona:

• Identify your client persona: Find out about your target market. Understand everything from their job title, income and lifestyle through to their pain points.
• Conduct Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) research: Learn what your target audience is searching for on search engines so you can provide the most relevant content. It's the process of taking steps to help your website or piece of content rank higher on Google and the other search engines.
• Write an editorial content draft: Begin by drafting editorial content that answers your prospective client's questions. Use interesting hooks, for example, 'How to reduce Inheritance Tax' or 'How to build a bigger tax-efficient retirement income', to make your content stand out.
• Publish: Publish each piece of content on your website blog. Use SEO tools to optimise your content.
• Promote: Promote each blog post on social media and via email marketing campaigns to generate higher traffic visitor volumes. The more traffic your content post generates, the higher it will rank in search engines.

"51% of content consumption from prospective financial services clients is derived from organic search." Source: Moz

Topic expertise

Digital Marketing.

Increase the organic traffic to your site via search engines

Ranking higher in Google and the other search engines will increase the organic traffic to your site. Organic traffic relates to those visitors that land on your website from unpaid sources; this is essentially free traffic. Organic sources include search engines like Google, Yahoo or Microsoft Bing.

The pillar and topic cluster model is a tried and tested method for increasing your organic traffic. Google favours websites known to be experts on the subject matter they're showcasing. A pillar page broadly covers key aspects of a topic relevant to your firm (e.g., a service or product – retirement and investment advice), while topic clusters are subcategories that cover in-depth keywords related to that topic – tax relief, pensions freedoms, diversification, etc.).

Better reflect how people make queries

To be seen as an expert, create a pillar page, which is essentially a longer blog post that broadly covers all aspects of a topic, typically 2,000 words or more. Next, write 'topic cluster content', or supporting blog posts, targeting long tail keywords that show you've covered a topic exhaustively, typically 400 words.

A long tail keyword is a phrase that is generally made from five words or more. Since these keywords are more specific than generic terms, they allow you to target niche demographics. These keywords are also less competitive than generic ones because they are designed to reflect better how people make queries. For example, 'How to take your pension early in a tax-efficient way and continue to work.'

Focusing on long-term traffic will help your website rank higher on search engines.

"Google has over 89% of the search market share." Source: Search Engine Journal

Blogging

Digital Marketing.

Build your firm's brand and connect with more prospective clients

Blog content specifically targeting prospective clients looking for answers to personal finance questions can be a great way to build your firm's brand and connect with them. By sharing your insights and expertise on a variety of financial topics, you can position yourself as a trusted source of information.

But think about how many pages there are on your website. Probably not more than 20 or 30? And think about how often you update those pages. Probably not that often? Blogging is a great way to solve both of those problems.

Search engine results page (SERP)

Every time you create and publish a blog post article, it's one more indexed page on your website, which means one more opportunity for you to show up on the search engine results page (SERP) and drive traffic to your website in organic search.

Blogging also helps your firm get discovered via social media. Every time you create a new article, you're creating content that people can share on social networks – Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook – which helps expose your firm to a new audience that may not know you exist. Blog content can also feed your social media presence.

Strengthening your social media reach

This means you're strengthening your social media reach with blog content and driving new website visitors to your blog via your social channels, so blogging should become an integral part for all of your social media platforms.

While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to blogging, there are a few key elements that all successful blogs should share. They need to provide relevant compliant content that speaks to the needs of your audience. Also, they must be regularly updated with new content to keep readers coming back, which is one more cue to Google and other search engines that your website is active.

Lead-generating call-to-action to every blog post

Now that you have traffic coming to your site through your blog, you have an opportunity to convert that website traffic into leads. Like every blog post you write is another indexed page, each post is a new opportunity to generate new leads.

This is straightforward: Just add a lead-generating call-to-action to every blog post. Often, a call-to-action will result in an offer like free digital publications – magazines and guides, fact sheets, webinars or any content asset for which someone would be willing to exchange their information.

"77% of personal finance consumers read blogs and 18% progress on to take further action." Source: Moz

Editorial content calendars

Digital Marketing.

Essential to execute integrated digital marketing campaigns

An editorial content calendar is not only where you keep track of, coordinate and share your upcoming editorial content; it is essential to execute integrated digital marketing campaigns.

Keeping an editorial calendar ensures that you're releasing your content at the best possible moment and that each member of your firm is aligned around the release dates. Your calendar doesn't need to be too complicated – it might be a shared Excel or Numbers sheet, a dynamic scheduler or even a simple dry-erase board.

The most important requirements are that your team have access, and that it gives you a wide view – to truly detect patterns and enforce content themes, that you'll want to look at, as you release this editorial over at least the next few months, if not the entire year.

4 principal benefits of creating an editorial content calendar are:

1. Publishing regularly and on time

It's vitally important that you publish regularly and on time if you aim to build an online following. Both existing clients and prospective clients expect you to deliver when you say you will, and the existence of a structured schedule for your content marketing makes it possible for you to plan your content ahead of time. If your firm is holding a promotion or event in two months' time, for example, you can devote one blog post per week, an email marketing campaign and social posts to the event in the run-up period.

On your editorial calendar, write your ideas into slots as they occur to you. Create each post a week before it is due for publication, to give yourself time to review it before publishing, or to do extra research and add information based on ideas that come to you while you're writing. If your company has an approval process, following your calendar will help you produce each piece of content with enough time for the responsible people to review and sign it off before it goes live.

2. See the bigger picture

Creating an editorial content calendar that runs for a month, a quarter or even a year gives you the advantage of a 'birds-eye' perspective of your online communications. It enables you to plan for running features, such as the components of a series of posts on a specific topic, and schedule content themes based on the time of year, such as a post-Budget Summary or Year-End Tax Planning Tips.

It also enables you to maintain consistency of your core messages across a variety of topics without overlapping subjects to avoid duplication and highlight discrepancies.

3. Plenty of time to find ideas

With a comprehensive editorial content calendar you can take an idea, look for the best time to showcase it and write it down for future use. Then you can research it and mull over it for a while before producing it, source input and comments from others. If your content production process involves several stakeholders, identifying suitable topics in advance improves your chances of getting consensus on the ideas, too.

4. Synchronisation with other sources

This applies to advertising as well as guest contributors; planning ahead using an editorial calendar enables your advertising to achieve synergies with your content. As for guest contributors, your editorial calendar will help you to manage multiple contributors, give them each specific dates and comfortable lead times, and avoid sourcing duplicating topics.

"74% of financial advice firms indicate that content marketing is increasing their marketing teams' lead quality and quantity."

Source: HubSpot

"16% of personal finance consumers said they have used a financial calculator prior to contacting a financial advice firm."

Source: HubSpot

Financial calculators

Digital Marketing.

Add value to a visitor's website experience and increase brand credibility

Who doesn't have a smart phone these days? Studies show that there are now more people using their phones on a daily basis than desktop computers. So you need to use this to your advantage! Allow your users to harness the full experience of your financial calculators within the palm of their hands using a mobile first approach to your website.

What's mobile first? It's a standard of development where the content is created for phone screens first and foremost, and then optimising for larger screens second. This approach ensures the best experience for mobile users. According to HubSpot, 80% of the top-ranked websites are mobile-friendly.

Generate more organic traffic and improve rankings

This is important because your financial calculators can be used to perform various consumer-facing calculations while they are on the move. There are many different types of financial calculators, each designed for a specific purpose. For example, a school fees planning or equity release calculator could be used to show what would be required based on a particular term and growth rate to achieve a required objective.

Well-designed financial calculators that are also SEO-optimised can be your secret weapon to generate more organic traffic and improve rankings for key terms. Google loves interactive tools. Calculator pages can drive valuable inbound traffic to your website from search engines.

Don't overlook the power of financial calculators

Email capture is another big part. If you are concerned someone will use a calculator and then bounce, you can secure the results behind an email data capture field which you can then follow up with the prospective client.

So don't overlook the power of financial calculators on your website, that can be used by both existing clients and prospective clients to make informed financial decisions, and are an essential way for your firm to add value to a visitor's website experience, increasing further brand credibility and value.

Website design.

"75% of financial services consumers admit to making judgments on a firm's credibility based on their website design."

Source: Moz

Website design or redesign

Website Design.

From a usability and user experience (UX) perspective, simplicity is the key

Whether designing or redesigning a website for your firm, a well-designed website is essential for any financial advice firm that wants to be successful online. A good design makes a site more attractive to prospective clients and helps ensure that visitors can easily find the information and content they are looking for. If a site is difficult to navigate, users will likely give up and move on to another site.

While the appearance of your website is certainly important, most people aren't coming to your site to evaluate how slick the design is. They want to complete some action, or to find some specific piece of information.

Therefore, unnecessary design elements (i.e., those which serve no functional purpose) will only overwhelm and make it more difficult for visitors to accomplish what they're trying to accomplish. From a usability and User Experience (UX) perspective, simplicity is the key.

Lead visitors to complete a desired action

Closely tied to the principle of simplicity, visual hierarchy means arranging and organising website elements so that visitors naturally gravitate toward the most important elements first. Remember, when it comes to optimising for usability and UX, the goal is to lead visitors to complete a desired action, but in a way that feels natural and enjoyable.

Planning out intuitive navigation on your site is crucial to help visitors find what they're looking for. Ideally, a visitor should land on your site and not have to think extensively about where to click next. Moving from point A to point B should be as frictionless as possible. So keep the structure of your primary navigation simple (and near the top of your page) and include navigation in the footer of your site.

Your design should follow the principles of mobile-first

Don't make users dig too deep. Try making a basic wireframe map of all your site pages arranged like a pyramid: Your homepage is at the top, and each linked page from the previous forms the next layer. In most cases, it's best to keep your map no more than three levels deep.

Making sure your design follows the principles of mobile-first

Making sure your design follows the principles of mobile-first will ensure that you deliver the right UX to the right screen. With such limited space available on a mobile phone screen, designing for that makes far more sense for the UX. You need to prioritise the elements of the website that are most important to create a strong base to work from.

Provide a great experience across different devices

To provide a genuinely great UX, your website should be compatible with the many devices your visitors use, known as a 'responsive' design. This means investing in a highly flexible website structure.

On a responsive site, the content is automatically resized and reshuffled to fit the dimensions of whichever device a visitor happens to be using. Ultimately, it's more important to provide a great experience across different devices than look identical across those devices.

Users need to be able to quickly and easily find the information

Alongside mobile-friendliness, it's essential to test your website's browser compatibility. In all likelihood, you've only viewed your site on one web browser, be it Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox or something else. Open your pages on each of these browsers and evaluate how your elements appear. Ideally, there won't be much difference in presentation, but you can't know for sure until you see for yourself.

The usability and UX hinge on the preferences of the end-users. After all, if you're not designing for your existing clients or prospective clients, who are you designing for? Users can quickly and easily find the information they need if they are provided with a well-executed design.

More professional and trustworthy than a site with a poor design

This will ultimately lead to increased traffic levels, as users are more likely to return to your site if it is easy to use. In addition, if well designed, your website will attract new users, as it will appear more professional and trustworthy than a site with a poor design.

As a result, website design can have a significant impact on the amount of traffic that your site receives and its overall success based on your website goals.

Micro websites

Website Design.

Powerful tools for great targeted marketing opportunities

Unlike regular websites, micro websites tend to be simplistic and easier to navigate and are powerful tools for great targeted marketing opportunities. For example, you can use them to highlight a specific campaign or target a specific prospective client persona.

This could be to target someone looking for ways to utilise their Defined Pension Scheme benefits once they reach age 55 (57 from 2028), or want information about how to invest to generate an income during rising inflation.

Complement an existing site or serve as a standalone site

Micro websites can also be used to tell a short story, experiment with new branded content types or spread to a new geographical region. With a seminar coming up, a firm might launch a microsite to spread awareness and promote sign-ups.

Whatever the reason, the goal of a micro website is to engage visitors with a specific message, generate interest and draw them to your firm's offerings. Highly optimised for a few exact phrases and keywords, they are often used to complement an existing website or serve as a standalone site for a specific marketing initiative.

An assortment of keyword-rich domain names

Every micro website is its own website; therefore, it has its own one of a kind URL. With a unique website address that one can easily remember, prospective clients can find your firm's service or product offerings faster and more easily. This is an advantage in search engine optimisation (SEO).

Your micro website can also feature an assortment of keyword-rich domain names highly valued by Google, Yahoo and other top search engines. Other regular websites can never have more than one to two keywords in their domain name. This facet increases your content's ranking importance and thus also helps in SEO.

Higher and faster conversion rate success

Compared to your firm's main website, your micro website provides a more focused and clearer presentation of your specific service or product. This gives prospective clients a clearer and faster experience and understanding about your proposition. No distractions from other services or products equals higher and faster conversion rate success.

If you're launching into a new target market a micro website can help in this respect. It's an effective branding tool or strategy to give your new service or product its very own website, even if it's just a page or two. Many larger financial institutions utilise micro websites for some if not all of their smaller brands, which have their very own mini site that's visually appealing for its target market.

Goldman Sachs Group launch the brand Marcus

A good example is Goldman Sachs Group, the leading global investment banking, securities and investment management firm. When they launched the brand Marcus to help people achieve financial wellbeing, they set up a separate micro website to target and engage with a specific prospective client persona they wanted to reach out to.

So a well-placed micro website can drive hundreds, even thousands, of online users and prospective clients to look and search for your featured service or product offering. And contrary to what you may think, building and maintaining micro websites may be more affordable than you think.

"75% of consumers say they judge a company's credibility based on its website design."

Source: Kinesis

"46% of financial consumers reported 'lack of message' as the main reason they leave websites."

Source: Moz

Landing pages

Website Design.

Standalone web page for a marketing or advertising campaign

Landing pages

"Addressing prospective clients' concerns on landing pages can increase conversion rates by 80%."

Source: HubSpot

A landing page is a crucial part of any effective digital marketing campaign for a financial advice firm. It leads prospective clients to a specific service, product or offering and encourages them to take action. In digital marketing, a landing page is a standalone web page, created specifically for a marketing or advertising campaign. It's where a visitor 'lands' after they click on a link in an email, or advert from Google, Bing, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or similar places on the web.

Lowering your cost of acquiring a lead or client acquisition

Unlike web pages, which typically have many goals and encourage exploration, landing pages are designed with a single focus or goal, known as a 'call-to-action' (or CTA, for short). It's this focus that makes landing pages the best option for increasing the conversion rates of your marketing campaigns and lowering your cost of acquiring a lead or client acquisition.

While your website homepage may have dozens of potential distractions, a landing page is super focused. Having fewer links on your landing page increases conversion rates, as there are fewer tantalising clickables that'll carry visitors away from the CTA.

An essential lead driving force for your digital marketing strategy

There are two key elements that every successful landing page must have. First, the headline should be clear and concise and convey the offer or benefit of the service or product being marketed, e.g. 'How to invest to beat inflation.' Next, the page should have a strong CTA, such as 'Click here to learn more.'

Okay, your website homepage looks great, shows off your brand, lets visitors explore a range of services and products, and offers additional information about your firm and values. But from here, a visitor can go anywhere – and won't necessarily take the action you want them to take. And that's the point.

When used effectively, landing pages can become an essential lead driving force for your digital marketing strategy.

Search Engine Optimisation.

"53% of all trackable financial services consumer website traffic comes from an organic search."

Source: Search Engine Journal