The Importance of Calls to Action for Financial Advisors

So your advisor website is perfect, you’re using social media and search to gain traffic, and yet the conversion rate is still disappointing. What more is there to do? The one item you may have forgotten on your checklist is to create a strong & compelling call-to-action (CTA). When executed correctly, a CTA can give visitors an extra nudge to get more information about your advisor business, and if done right, can turn that traffic into promising leads and clients.

What is a Call-to-Action (CTA)?

A CTA is text or a graphic strategically placed on a website to entice visitors to take a proactive step in engaging with your business. It should consist of a short phrase of only 3-5 words and create a sense of urgency. For example, you can add a “schedule a meeting” button, tell visitors to your newsletter or download or white paper.

No matter what action you’re promoting, CTAs can help with lead generation, increased engagement and lead capture.

 

In the above graph, you can see that 70% of small business websites lack a call to action. It’s so important to have this on your homepage to give your visitors that push that they need to take the next step towards becoming a customer.

The Purpose of a Call-to-Action

The purpose of any CTA is to convince visitors to engage with your brand. Although traffic is something we all strive for, high website traffic doesn’t necessarily mean you’re converting leads. CTAs can help determine how many people are actually interested in your service and can help you reach them individually.

As a financial advisor, you probably have clients who are referred to your site in some way but may not yet be ready to engage your services just yet. If you can engage those visitors through your blog, have them sign up for your newsletter or download a white paper, you can keep your business front of mind for them. This way, when they ARE ready to work with a financial advisor, your firm will be the one that comes to mind first.

Call-to-Action Best Practices

CTAs should always be benefit-centric, NOT feature-centric. If you make your CTA sound like too much of a sales ploy, it can make the potential client loose trust in your firm. You should always emphasize what the lead is gaining from taking the action. Overall, a good CTA should be:

• • • Straightforward
    • Stress the benefits to the user
    • Visually eye-catching that compels the visitor to take action
    • Located in an easy to find spot
    • Action-oriented using verbs like “download” or “register”
    • Large enough to see but not too distracting

Call-To-Action Worst Practices

With all of these tips in mind, it’s also important to not make your CTA overly-aggressive. If it’s too obnoxious or flashy, it will turn clients away. Ultimately, a good call-to-action will start a trusting and natural relationship, which can’t be done through marketing that’s too pushy. Your CTA might be overly aggressive if you use:

• Neon colors
• All caps
• Multiple exclamation points
• Text that is bolded, underlined and italicized

Before you publish your CTA, look at it in the eyes of a potential customer and see how it’s coming across. If it’s too much of a sales pitch or so aggressive that it takes away from the rest of your site, you need to tone it down.

Call-to-Action Uses

The location of a CTA is just as important as what the CTA directs. CTAs should be located on your site in places that are easy to see. For example, the right or middle side of the homepage are two places we recommend. Even placing the CTA directly in the header is a great way to capture the viewer’s attention. While CTAs can be used in more than one place on your website, they should also be utilized on your:

• • Landing Pages
  • Blog
  • Email Marketing and Newsletters
  • Social Media
  • Guest Articles (your featured article on another website)

You should also be placing CTAs strategically throughout the copy of the website. As visitors read about services that could help them or the bio of an advisor, they may be more likely to take action then instead of when they first land on your site. By logically placing CTAs throughout the copy, scheduling a meeting or signing up for a newsletter becomes easier for prospects.

When to Use a Call-To-Action

A CTA is viable marketing tool for any firm, no matter the stage or size. Maybe your business is just taking off and you want prospects to learn more. Maybe you have a distinguished financial services brand and a full team so your goal is to have prospects schedule a meeting with one of your advisors. In any case and at any time, CTAs can help move visitors in the right direction for your business.

Using the Call-to-Action Tool In The Twenty Over Ten WYSIWYG

Adding a CTA to your Twenty Over Ten site is easy and quick to do. Once logged into your Twenty Over Ten account:

step 1:

Select a location to place your button and give your button a title.

step 2:

Highlight your title and select the link icon to open link upload menu.

step 3:

Paste the link’s URL.

step 4:

Click the box in the lower left-hand corner to open the link in a new browser tab. After you have made your changes, click the insert button.

step 5:

To style that link as a button, click on the link and select the wand icon to open the button’s style menu.

step 6:

You can manually choose the button’s style between a list of preset options. These are additive properties so in addition to selecting ‘button’, you should only select primary OR secondary (not both) to assign a specific style to that button.

step 7:

After you have selected the button of your choice, click the Save Changes button.