4 Web Design Tips Financial Advisors Can Use to Accelerate Sales

Hence, as a financial advisor, your business needs a professional website to survive in this competitive, modern marketplace. Your website is your business’s backbone and will support all your digital marketing efforts.

Nonetheless, if your website generates high traffic and has a high ranking in search engine result pages, but you are still experiencing unimpressive sales, it may be time to look closely at your web design.

Web design is not just about making your website look beautiful, it goes beyond aesthetics. The priority of a website is to get solid conversions. Every financial advisor wants users to sign up for newsletters, follow them on social media, and purchase their products and/or seo packages services.

As a matter of fact, sales are significantly impacted by web design, but you will have to tweak this design in order to drive these sales.

Come along, as I take you on a journey into the world of web design – what it is and how you can use it to drive sales for your financial advisor business.

Basically, web design refers to the design of any website shown on the internet, and is mostly seen as the aspect of website development that deals with user experience and not software development. It is important for website designs not to focus on desktop browsers alone, but on tablet and mobile browsers as well.

Two website design methods are commonly used and work exceedingly well on both desktops and mobiles, namely adaptive design and responsive design.

• Adaptive Design

The website content in an adaptive design is fixed in different layout sizes and designed to match prevalent screen sizes. In order to preserve the trust of users and engage them on your website, you need to ensure that the layout you use is as consistent as possible between different devices.

• Responsive Design

Responsive designs have content that moves dynamically to fit any screen size. It may be difficult to preserve a layout that is consistent between all devices. Consequently, website designers should be careful when surrendering control of the appearance of their work.

Designers who are held accountable for their content will strive to improve their skill set and have complete control of the finished website.

How can you tell whether a website is good or not? It’s easy. A good website is easy to use, classy, suitable for the website user group and will suit the brand portrayed by the website. Most designers prefer to use simple designs so that users will not get distracted or confused by the appearance of unrelated information or functionality.

For a web designer’s work to boost the trust of users, the website should not contain points that may frustrate users. Basically, a website designer’s work covers the layout, appearance, and, at times, the web content.

• Layout: This has to do with the way you structure and categorize information.
• Appearance: This deals with the colors, images, and fonts to be used on the website.

Web development courses can also guide you and help you to refresh your HTML and CSS knowledge.

Your website is like a digital showroom or storefront. In order to encourage people to come to you when they need a financial advisor, you need to ensure that your website is well-organized, clean, easy to navigate, branded, classy, functional, and concise.

If you need help boosting your sales as a financial advisor, these 4 tips are for you.

1. Use Videos

Websites that do not have videos incorporated into their design are missing out on a lot of benefits. Having video content as part of web pages is extremely popular and even trending on social media.

Videos, according to Cisco, are projected to consume more than 80% of web traffic by the year 2020 and 82% by 2021. Also, it is estimated that someday videos will make up 90% of webpage content.

This can be attributed to the efficacy of videos in conveying information compared to other formats used in media. An explainer video of 2 minutes, for instance, can adequately explain something that would take long paragraphs of text. The statistics from websites that are known for sharing videos will go a long way in showing that videos are fantastic website tools.

45% of people globally, spend an hour or more watching online video content every day. Video streaming platforms like YouTube, Netflix, Vimeo, Yahoo! Screen, DailyMotion, Hulu, Instagram, and Facebook have more visits and users because of their video content.

YouTube, for instance, receives more than 20 billion visits every month. Users spend more than 6 million hours just watching videos on YouTube. Every minute, over a 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube.

Videos are the game changers in the digital business world, if utilized correctly. Video content can boost the popularity of your financial website, and subsequently, boost your business in the following ways:

• Boosts Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Social media sharing
• Increases brand awareness 
• Creates a brand identity that stands out
• Improves conversion rates

2. It Has to Be Responsive and Mobile-Friendly

A study published in 2019 shows that up to 37% of adults in the U.S. mostly access the internet using a smartphone. Furthermore, 58% of young people between the ages of 18 and 29 mostly use their smartphones to go online. The percentage of traffic globally generated from the use of mobile phone devices stood at 51.5% in 2019.

If you open a website simultaneously on a mobile phone and a laptop, you will notice that the website instantly adapts to your screen size and your browser to provide a logical and clear display. This can only happen if the website has a responsive web design. A responsive site presents a fluid layout and adjusts effortlessly to the user’s screen.

Responsive web design refers to techniques used to make a website viewable on any screen so that people can easily read the web content and navigate through the website’s pages.

Find out if Google considers your website mobile-friendly or not. The gap between mobile users and desktop users is increasing daily. So, you need to follow the trend by making sure your website is web-friendly.

Here are some features of a responsive web design:

1. Flexible elements like images, texts, layouts, tables, and page background
2. Shows only the content that is necessary
3. They are built for touchscreens

Responsive web design offers the following benefits:

• It will make your website more future-proof: As the number of people surfing the internet from their mobile devices increases, the future of web design dictates that your site is displayed perfectly on different devices. Currently, if your website only has a desktop version, you are most likely losing customers.
• You will save on costs: When you use responsive web design, you will only need one set of pages for all screen types. Therefore, you will not have to create separate pages for tablets, Android devices, iPhones, and others. This means that you will have to code fewer pages, which reduces the cost of development. It also helps you to manage the website more efficiently.
• It is easy to develop: As a web developer, you are not required to learn any new programming language or set of codes. You can use the same HTML and CSS tools you are already familiar with. Alternatively, you can use WordPress or any other content management system to quickly and easily create a responsive design.
• The website will look awesome and attract more customers:  Since people are using mobile devices to browse the internet for products and services, you have to make this virtual marketplace easily accessible to everyone. Responsive webpages can also complement your social media marketing efforts, enhance user experience, and improve your brand image.

3. Use Colors to Increase Your Website Conversions

One of the major decisions you will face when designing a website is choosing your website’s color scheme. This decision can either make or break your website’s success.

Colors play an extremely important role in your website design. The colors you choose can help to increase the recognition of your brand by 80%. If you go a step further to maintain the use of your brand logo colors for your website, your brand will gain more recognition and more people will come to trust your brand.

When choosing colors for your website, consider factors such as the gender of your audience. If your financial website is catering to the needs of a male audience, you should use more green, blue, and black. If you want to reach more women, it will be better to use blue, green, and purple.

Even in our daily lives, colors are linked to your feelings and have become a very powerful marketing tool. With your color choices, you can convey any message to your audience concerning your product or service.

In web design, color plays three main roles:

• Contrast: Contrast, in simple terms, is the distinction between two colors. It serves two major functions in web design, namely establishing readability and drawing the attention of the viewer to a particular element on the webpage. If you are not sure what colors to use, it is advisable that you stick to a very light color for the background, and a dark color for the text itself.

• Vibrancy: This is the mood that each color sets. Color shades that are warm and bright like red, yellow, and orange are very relaxing, while darker and cooler shades like blue, green, and purple are more tranquil and soothing.

• Complementation: A quick look at a color wheel will show complementary colors opposite each other. For instance, the complementary color of blue is orange, while that of red is green. These colors, when used correctly, can help to highlight each other, creating a good color scheme.

4. Design Your Website for Easy Navigation

If your visitors find your website easy to navigate, they will spend more time on it, which increases your chances of getting more conversions. You can make your website easier to navigate by clearly dividing the categories, designing your navigation elements as clickable links, and including a search feature.