How to Craft Compelling Content for your Financial Planner Website
We presented a free 45-minute webinar this morning, explaining how financial planners can craft compelling content for their websites.
You can watch the replay now here
Within this webinar we described three reasons why it’s so important for financial planners to regularly add quality content to their websites.
The first reason is trust. By creating and sharing relevant content with your target audience, you position yourself as the trusted expert. Creating and sharing this relevant content turns you into an authority in your field.
Reason number two is awareness. If you don’t raise your own profile, nobody is going to do it for you. There is no multi-million pound advertising budget to promote the benefits of working with a financial planner; we all need to take responsibility for raising awareness.
The third reason is discoverability. With more than 1.8 billion websites in the world, and rising, you need to regularly add content to your website in order to be found online.
Our earlier research, looking at more than 500 financial planner websites, found that 40% of those with blogs had not been updated in the past six months. There’s a big issue out there with out of date websites.
Within the webinar we shared several ways to find inspiration for creating new website content.
A good place to start is the news; on a daily basis there are at least two or three topical personal finance stories which can form the basis for blog posts.
Another great place to find content inspiration is noting the questions and concerns raised by clients.
Finally, we shared links to the online tools you can use to find content inspiration.
Once you’ve got your inspiration for creating content, you need a process you can follow to convert it from idea to published article. The process we shared in this webinar starts with crafting an appealing headline, before writing the copy, editing and proofreading, finding a suitable image, and then carrying out some SEO work before publishing and sharing.
We talked about some of the mistakes being made by financial planners with their website copy and how to avoid these.
As well as failing to update site content frequently enough, we often find planners are not personal enough with their websites.
People buy people and disclosing all of your personal financial information, your goals and dreams, to a faceless stranger is not an appealing prospect. So as a bare minimum, you need your name and photo on the website. Better still, get personal in your bio and bring some of your personality into blog posts.
The webinar finished with encouragement to find your own voice when creating content, work out your favourite medium (written word, audio podcasting or making videos), focus your content on your core services, and ask for help when you need it.
