What’s a tailored and branded website without the content to match? Most visitors to your website aren’t ready to begin a relationship, but good content keeps them engaged and lets them learn about you in a low-pressure way. Plus, when they sign up for a newsletter or to read more, then you know who your prospective clients are.
Content for content’s sake will only hurt your site though. Canned, out-of-date, or poorly written content is at best uninteresting and at worst negatively affects your SEO. Powerful content educates your visitors about financial planning, about you, and what you can do for them. Your site should feature a mix of quality content that falls into the following 4 categories:
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1. Evergreen
Evergreen content is always relevant. It isn’t timely or market-related or based on statistics that change quarterly. It can include firm background, FAQs, how-tos, or lists. Articles like “Why a Fee-Only Advisor is Right for You,” “How to Choose a Wealth Manager,” or “The Top 10 Things You Need to Know for Retirement” are always relevant, meaning you can re-share them and drive traffic to your site for a longer time.
2. Dynamic
Dynamic content responds to each viewer to provide them with the most relevant experience. For example, you wouldn’t want to spend resources bringing a 65-year old homeowner an article called “Buying Your First Home” and you wouldn’t tell a 30-year old entrepreneur about “Choosing Your Retirement City.” Each of your readers should see content relevant for them to increase reading.
Delivering personalized content to each viewer sounds high-tech and resource-intensive, but Vestorly is making it possible for small businesses. Vestorly curates collections of content that live on your website and can be shared through email and social media too. As viewers click to read, the technology learns more about their habits to suggest articles more appropriate for them. If a visitor wants to read about “Choosing Your Retirement City” for example, then the next articles they’d be prompted to read might be about retirement basics, moving, or estate planning.
3. Original
Your original content is written by you or someone in your firm. It can contribute to your reputation as an intelligent thought leader on top of market trends, and it lets you set the tone you want to convey. For example, would you rather appear as an advisor with decades of experience and market knowledge, or present yourself as a younger advisor with new ideas for younger generations? Your own produced content lets you set the tone, brand and ideas, and indicates that you have the experience and knowledge to write intelligently on the topic.
4. Third-party
Original content has its advantages but in truth, financial advisors are experts in wealth management, not content development and marketing. Commit to a realistic monthly or quarterly content production schedule, and in the meantime, supplement your original and evergreen web content with timely third-party articles. Curating the right third-party content is key. Poorly written clickbait from less than respected sources won’t help your cause, but well-written articles or videos from respected publications with quality imagery encourages clicks and shares.
Sontag Advisory, a firm using Vestorly to share third-party and original content, found that the mix of content comes with some interesting results:
“Analytics on content performance have been eye-opening. Often our own musings get far fewer hits than third-party content. This isn’t always the case, but generally, the headlines from third-party articles do a much better job than our white papers at catching attention and giving clients something to think about with respect to their relationship with us. It is no surprise that ‘Sontag Advisory’s 2015 Estate Planning Newsletter’ gets hardly any hits as compared to ‘IRS Grabs $388 Million from Billionaire Davidson Estate’ even though both carry the same message: estate planning is really important and clients need to talk to us about it.”
Interesting content makes a powerful conversation starter, and third-party content often gets the job done better. It does, however, raise some other concerns: do you really want to direct visitors away from your website? It’s great that visitors like your content, but how can you start a conversation if you don’t know who they are?
Sontag Advisory and other firms use Vestorly to solve these problems. Third-party articles shared through Vestorly are displayed in the firm’s own reading portal. As they click to other articles, they remain on the firm’s domain so the advisor can see who’s reading what – the perfect conversation starter.
Visitors to your site can come and go namelessly, or their visits can mark the start of conversation and real-life relationships. The right mix of content supported by the right technology makes it more likely that your website is actively working for you.
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– Written by Anna Huston. Anna provides customer solutions at Vestorly. Vestorly provides intelligent automation of advisor communications and uncovers unique data on your audience. Financial professionals use Vestorly to personally engage their audience with digital content while saving time, remaining compliant and using data to take action