by Daniel Smith
Most advisers currently operating will have created some kind of online presence for their business. For many, it is a huge part of how their business engages with new customers and the first interaction between their business and their prospective clients.
But with the fast paced nature of online development, it has become difficult for advisers to evaluate how well their online presence is working to represent their business. This difficulty is something that Russell Hutchinson of Chatswood Consultancy is hoping to solve.
Hutchinson told Good Returns that a great deal of the online presence for advisers currently available can be broken down into four categories.
“The first category is that the adviser may not have a website at all. The second is they may have a site that is pretty much just a business card. Then thirdly the adviser may have a site that offers some sort of service portal – update details or book an appointment, something like that. This is important because as soon as your website has some form of engagement like that, it turns into a completely different ball game.”
The fourth category takes client engagement to a level that compared to the previous three levels, Hutchinson says is “rocket science”.
“These websites have really slick, well engineered stuff that includes a lot of market automation. These sites are the ones that tend to draw in business from clients who weren’t previously aware of them.”
These four categories aren’t about one being better than another, Hutchinson explains, as each stage can be done well or done badly. With compliance and disclosure being key parts of the new regime the details being correct are the key to the website functioning as a proper representation of the business.
“It is hard work keeping sites up to date, especially if you don’t have an internal IT resource. So a good review of the basics is always helpful, but the new service we are offering does a deeper dive than just the basics. When you get to the stage that there is some form of client interaction, you need to think what would a meaningful and sustainable interaction on this website look like.”
“A well maintained business card site on a well managed content platform may actually be superior to a poorly maintained website with a much higher level of sophistication. If you shoot for functionality beyond capability and fail, that is worse than shooting for something simpler and achieving it.”
The service has been spearheaded by Chatswood Consulting marketing officer Jerusalem Hibru after a wide-reaching netnographic survey of the platforms that advisers are utilising to engage with their clients.
The package that Chatswood is offering with this service is a dual offering. There is a simpler service where the firm helps advisers work through a checklist that makes sure they are getting the most out of the web system that they currently possess. As well as a more complicated service in which the consultancy suggests integration and marketing that can help to raise the standard of the adviser’s web presence.
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