Advisor Website Showcase: Braun-Bostich & Associates

Tell us a little bit about Braun-Bostich & Associates (BBA) and the firm’s story.

Amy Braun-Bostich is founder of BBA and as the oldest of three children, she learned responsibility early. After her father’s death at a young age, her mother worked three jobs to support their family. The third job helped her purchase a set of encyclopedias for Amy and her siblings. Amy’s childhood experiences taught her that life is unpredictable. This was the basis and prism through which she saw the world and it formed the foundation for her interest in helping others secure their financial futures. BBA provides the framework to help clients achieve these things and the peace of mind that comes with it. As fee-only advisors we operate objectively, independently and transparently. Amy started her financial planning practice in 1990. Shortly after, she began to move away from commissioned sales toward fee-based advice. As her practice grew, she began to add employees. As associates retired, she was able to purchase their practices and expand even more.

One aspect of your website that is unique is your emphasis on community support. How has your charity work influenced your practice?

The act of giving back in and of itself is obviously rewarding to each employee, individually and collectively. What’s unique is that we don’t go it alone. We invite and stand side-by-side with like-minded clients and friends of theirs and the firms at these events that typically last a half to full day. This mutual desire to serve fosters deeper trust and lasting friendships with people that this firm truly cares about.

 

We have a lot of advisors ask us about including calculators on their sites. How have yours performed thus far, do your clients find this feature helpful and informational?

In the past, as a broker/dealer practice we found that clients and prospects alike find the tool most useful. When initially deciding which calculators to include on new site, we found the list to be too long. Twenty Over Ten helped us hone that list down to the ones that would be most used by the client base we serve.

Your site includes a lot of really great freemiums like your guide to understanding advisor designations. Can you share with us more about the creation of client tools like this and how you’ve seen them perform digitally?

In building out aggregate content for our “new” site, we kept our client base and prospect niche (visitors) in mind at all times―taking great care to not assume all visitors understood everything we were expounding on. We put ourselves in their shoes to anticipate every possible question they might have as they navigate through. The testament as to whether our efforts are productive or not rises to the surface subliminally by way of the questions we DON’T get from those visitors. Anticipating the needs of clients and prospects in advance and putting measures like this in place mitigates unnecessary Q & A down the road.

Your website has turned out beautifully! What advice would you offer other advisors considering creating a new company website?

• Keep your clients and niche prospects in mind always as you build the site
• If applicable, reuse everything relevant from previous website so that clients have some sense of familiarity as they segue from old to new. Then, moving older content out for new over time will be somewhat unnoticeable.
• Take the time to logically think through the flow of content keeping your message(s) front on mind thus interwoven throughout the site.
• Even if it seems like overkill, throw all conceivable content on the table at first. Best to have everything potentially useful staring up at you to sift through rather than forgetting something important―out of sight/out of mind, right?
• Leverage the guidance and outlines provided by designer (Twenty Over Ten) to ensure an outcome that truly exceeds expectation in terms of visitor attraction, client satisfaction and site content that drives new relationships and revenue to the firm.

Tell us about the web design process – what do you feel went well and were there any concerns along the way?

We chose Twenty Over Ten’s “Let Us Do the Work” engagement with Copywriting StartUp package which proved out to be exceedingly productive from a time consumption perspective. Having the luxury of simply collecting and tossing our concept of relevant content over the wall and having it come back in a structure and format that, industry-wise, made great sense was fantastic. Trusting that our Twenty Over Ten team, with its singular focus on the wealth management/financial planning industry, would let experience and best practices govern how they suggested shaping our site was comforting. Note: When the site finally launched, there were multiple post-launch tweak questions that were sent up to the team. Each of them were satisfactorily answered in a very timely manner.

What are your site success metrics? Have you experienced any successes or ROI since launching in June?

Due to our firm’s very recent transition from broker/dealer to RIA and a simultaneous physical office move while the site was under construction, we haven’t had any measurable successes yet. We have though, witnessed a significant uptick in website traffic―primarily due to client transition process and the need to interact within the website to consummate changes. The goodness in all of that is that interaction has led clients to spend time navigating the site and taking advantage of the many resources it now provides.

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