IFAs face many challenges. How will you grow your team? Where will your next big client come from?
It doesn’t get any easier on the marketing front. In particular, how can IFAs get the most marketing potential and ROI out of their financial websites?
After all, you’ve spent a lot of money on it. Shouldn’t it be providing you a solid return?
The answer is yes, but it isn’t as easy as it looks. As marketers, we know this all too well. However, it is always worth the effort when the hard work you put into a campaign delivers results for your clients.
What are some of the typical challenges faced by marketers of financial websites?
#1 Producing Traffic & Leads
According to The State of Inbound 2017 Report, marketers find generating leads and website traffic to be the hardest challenge they face.
The reality is, it is difficult to create demand for content. It gets more difficult with each passing year, as competition intensifies for readers’ attention. This is no less true for financial websites.
So what can be done? First of all, you need to ask yourself a difficult question. Is the content on your financial website good enough?
If it wasn’t free on your blog, is it so valuable and compelling that people would actually pay for it?
The answer to this question is important, and you need to be honest with yourself. Are you creating content which actually stands out, which your audience wants, and which they look forward to reading?
Once you know you’re at the level, it’s then time to promote your content. But that’s a subject for another blog post!
#2 Providing Marketing ROI
There’s one big question we get a lot when it comes to financial websites: “How do I know a professional website design will provide a return on investment?”
It’s a good question, and it is vital to answer it if you’re going to appreciate the value of each piece of content produced, each digital marketing campaign you run and so on.
The problem lies in tracking. It isn’t always easy to identify how financial websites generate ROI.
For sure, Google Analytics can get you most of the way there. You can use this tool to see how many people visit your site, and how many then convert from content forms.
However, what if they see your website and then call your company? You can’t really track this easily from the agency-side.
Sometimes the problem lies in a lack of communication between your marketing, and your sales reporting. In particular, your conversions on your website don’t automatically register in your CRM.
Again, what can you do? Consider investing in a solid CRM if you don’t have one already. If you do, make sure it is communicating effectively with your marketing efforts.
#3 Getting the Right Budget
Financial websites need an appropriate budget if they’re going to provide a marketing return. There’s no way about it. It just won’t happen by spending a few hundred pounds on a quick build.
Sometimes you want to spend the money, but you struggle to see the ROI it will produce. Agencies aren’t always the best at communicating value here, either.
The solution here is to establish a viable marketing strategy, which confidently outlines some intelligent forecasting such as:
Who are we trying to reach with our website?
What kinds of digital marketing channels might our website play an important role in down the line?
How much traffic can we realistically expect to generate from these combined channels? What sorts of conversions rates – and therefore what ROI – can we expect to generate?
