Financial companies have quite the uphill battle to face when it comes to marketing their services, especially online. Not only do they have to compete with giant banks, but they also have to compete with other many, many small businesses that share very similar products or services.
Luckily, there are ways to make your online presence even better than the average financial company, starting with a beautiful website and enough exposure to tell your customers or clients “Hey, check us out!” Here are three ways to accomplish just that.
Have a Positive Brand
Naturally if you’re already thinking about having a website set up, or you have one already and need help with it, your brand is of concern as well. But the thing is, for some of us who aren’t an accountant or banker, it’s pretty difficult to identify and figure out the differences between financial company A and financial company B if they’re already providing the same service, such as retirement planning.
This is where solidifying your brand can come into play and really give your company’s online presence a boost. When it comes to applying your brand to your website, you need to really sit down and answer the following questions:
- Who am I?
- What do I want my customers/clients to do?
- What do I have that Jim from next door doesn’t offer?
- How can I ease my clients’ financial woes?
- How’s my customer service? (If it needs work, make sure you address this first!)
These are just a sample of questions to consider. When you’ve solidified your brand, you can move on to the next part of making a great – not just good – financial website, which is:
Produce Meaningful AND Engaging Content
For content, these are a few of the best kinds about financial topics that would be worth featuring on your website:
- Blog posts – always a good thing to have around, especially if there are several layers of subject matter to go through. Hone in on what your clients are struggling with financially, write a blog post to help them out, and get it published on your website so both your clients and Google know about it.
- Videos – not only can you create positive testimonials on your website in a videom, but also you can feature videos that address frequently asked questions from your customers/clients, interviews about you and your company, etc.
- Infographics – sometimes a visual is just what you need to really help someone understand financial information, whether it’s stats on the real estate market, stock information, or the latest findings on age groups with financial woes.
On that note, let’s address pictures for a second. When it comes to images for your website’s content, we’re talking about more than just pretty pictures. Having stock photos is fine if you’re not so great a photographer, but the best financial websites I’ve seen have a more personable edge to them. Bring that sense of personality to your images and videos. They can also be used for the next best way to increase your website’s exposure:
Be Active on Social Media
Let’s face it: if your company is not on social media, whether it’s financial or not, consider yourself doomed as far as getting noticed online is concerned. Facebook and Twitter are naturally good choices, but we actually recommend signing up for LinkedIn if you haven’t already. That’s the more professional social media platform, whereas the others are more for casual businesses (unless you want to be known as a more casual financial company, in which case, sign up already!).
The rule of thumb for meaningful and engaging content applies to social media also – i.e. “content is king”. This doesn’t mean posting the first financially related news article you see in the morning, however – really look at what you’re sharing and make sure if others comment or respond to what you’re posting that you engage with them. A blog post on how to save money for college would be something worth sharing, for example, and everyone’s always trying to figure out how to buy or sell their home. If these kinds of topics apply to your business, then by all means look for one and share it, and if it doesn’t exist, do something even better – get it written and published for your company so you can post it to your social media.
There are lots of other ways to get your financial company more positive attention online, but these three ways are the big ones. If your website is lacking in these elements or you need one outright, look no further than V3 Media for the job. Give us a shout!