Monday, April 23, 2012

Marketing blunders for financial advisors


Analyze This!
The Biggest Blunders on Advisor Websites


People look for information differently today.  They look mainly at your website.  Why?  Because they want to check you out, to see if you're legitimate and could possibly be trusted. And, that leads us to the most horrible mistake you could make on your website:
                                         
The Biggest Blunder - Giving the wrong first impression

A successful website depends enormously on the first impression. And, that means two things: design and content.  If the design and content are not presented (in the right way), your message will very likely fall on deaf eyes.  (There is a tremendous amount of research to substantiate this point.)

The design has value only if it is effective at making the visitor feel comfortable and secure, and guiding the his/her eyes to relevant information.  Consider where that person looks first?  If that position is not inviting and compelling – game over.  The visitor will abort the site.  The look needs to be guided by psychology, but very few graphic designers understand psychology.  Thus, they tend to make a catastrophic blunder.

They build the top of the marketing page around a generic image that is irrelevant to the visitor (your prospect).  An image of a horse or tall buildings might look pretty, but prospects are not looking at marketing hoping to find something pretty.  Research into the eye-movement patterns of people viewing websites clearly shows that those generic photos are a negative, adding zero value to your site. 

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