Setting yourself apart from other advisors when communicating with prospects is important to every advisor. Advisors also know the importance of making an emotional connection and communicating who they are in an authentic fashion.
Given that, why do most advisor websites look similar – often with stiff photos of team members smiling uncomfortably into the camera?
Sending the right message
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Dan Richards
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I touched on the sameness of websites in an article last fall. Ineffective visuals are a particular problem, because the look of a website plays a large role in keeping visitors engaged. The Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab asked 2,500 Americans to evaluate the credibility of websites. Almost half said a site's look was the No. 1 way they judged its credibility. The problem doesn’t just relate to your team pictures. Advisor Websites, a leading provider of websites for advisors, says two-thirds of home pages on advisor sites feature “fake happy people.”
Here’s a simple exercise to see if the photos on your website are sending the right message. First, jot down the key qualities about you and your team that you want prospects to take away from your site. Some of these words might be “knowledgeable” and “professional,” but depending on your personal style, they could also include “client focused,” “enthusiastic,” “collaborative”, “caring” and “approachable.” Then, look at your picture and that of your team on your website. Chances are that the pictures are not communicating the essential qualities you want to get across.
Here’s my advice. Ditch the conventional “head and shoulder” shots and the staged photos of your and your team smiling into the camera. Replace them with spontaneous shots of team members interacting with each other and with clients. (To preserve client confidentiality, you can show clients with their backs to the camera.) The key is to make the photos feel real – if you normally take off your jacket for team meetings and to meet with clients, that’s how you should appear in the pictures.
And don’t hesitate to have fun – within the limitations of professionalism, there’s nothing wrong with letting visitors to your site know that you enjoy what you do.
Letting your personality shine
The pictures on your website also give you a chance to let your real personality and humanity show through. Some examples:
- If you run client events, ensure that you take candid pictures of your staff and clients interacting. (While you do have to get client permission to use their pictures, this is seldom a problem.)
- If you coach a soccer or football team, you could show a picture of you on the sidelines with a couple of the players (with their parents’ permission).
- If you hold leadership roles in community and charitable organizations, communicate this with photos from an event for a charity with which you’re involved.
- If you host retirement parties for clients, hire a photographer to take photographs. You can send the images to clients and their friends and also put them up on your website and in your office.
- One advisor i know has been supporting a foster child in Bolivia on behalf of her clients for 10 years and sends clients an update in her annual holiday card. Two years ago, she met the young woman (then 18) during a holiday to Latin America. She sent clients a picture of the two of them hugging when they first met and posted it on her website, which generated a great response.
- For the last five years, I’ve helped organize groups of advisors to climb Mount Kilimanjaro to raise funds for a children’s home in Tanzania. Some of these advisors have pictures on their websites showing them at the top of Kilimanjaro and interacting with children at the home. Many of these advisors tell me they get more comments on these pictures than on anything else on their sites.
Making everything genuine
A very successful veteran advisor I know gave me some advice about communicating in a genuine fashion:
I’ve always believed the old cliché that people do business with people they like, and part of that stems from the values I communicate to clients. When I began in the business, my office was sterile. I began with one of the Wall Street firms where it was pounded into us that the paramount thing was to communicate our expertise and professionalism. But while those are obviously important, clients also want to know us as people. That’s why the biggest pictures in my office are the ones of my wife and me at our grandkids’ birthday parties, where they have chocolate ice cream all over their faces. That’s a picture that everyone can relate to and enjoy.
Along similar lines, I do a lot of insurance business and often get invited to trips for big producers that insurance companies put on. In the past, I would get the standard “grip and grin” photos with high-profile speakers, often recognizable celebrities or former politicians, that I could put on my office wall. Then I came to the conclusion that pictures of the two of us shaking hands smiling into the camera looked fake. ... Now I simply ask that the photographer take a candid shot of me talking casually with the speaker, and I think those pictures of me talking informally with a high profile personality look much more genuine and as a result are more impressive than the two of us staring into the camera with frozen smiles. “
There is no formula for effective communication. For a website or any other form of communication to work, it has to be rooted in your personality and approach. As you think about how you tell your story, consider whether you’ve fallen into some of the traps outlined above and what you can do to deliver your message in a more engaging, spontaneous and genuine manner.
Dan Richards conducts programs to help advisors gain and retain clients and is an award winning faculty member in the MBA program at the University of Toronto. To see more of his written commentaries, go to www.danrichards.com or here for his videos.
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