Highlighting your brand's identity: A guide for Financial Advisors

Are you an advisor whose digital branding needs a renovation? Are you an advisor who wants to enhance their digital presence to produce more leads? If the answer is a yes, this series of blogs is for you! In the current century (and ever since the pandemic), Financial Advisors’ digital presence has become increasingly important. It is very crucial for advisors to maintain their website viewers’ trust by converting mere visitors into successful leads. Creating a website heavy on content is actually easier than simplifying complexity, and portraying the Who, What, Where and Why of your firm through a rather seamless, neat and clean interface is beneficial.

To put it in a nutshell, envisioning your website through the lens of your clients is the most viable best practice while creating or designing your digitally branded website. Afterall, the User Experience (UX) of your website is the pivot that retains the client’s interest in your firm. Below, I describe the first (of seven) principle UX strategy advisors must consider while creating their website.

Highlighting Your Brand’s Identity

Your website should reflect your firm’s identity. This is achieved by including the firm’s name, logo, brand colors, typography, and visuals that speak to the advisory firm’s goals and objectives. Every advisor would wish to be distinctive and stand out among the rest, but it is also important to align the style of your website to the firm’s brand, its values, mission and the client demographic. Maintaining consistency on the brand identity helps clients to instantly connect with the firm you belong to, thus creating a sense of understanding about your vision and services.

First, Let’s Talk Logos

Imagine you have a fancy logo on your website that does not speak directly to the firm you represent. Or you display your own logo sans the one that represents your firm’s identity. Let’s ponder on this through the lens of your clients – in either cases, apart from violating the brand guidelines, your website’s users would not be able to instantly connect to the firm you belong to, thus creating a doubt of legitimacy.

Considering the clarity of logos is also essential. The best file format is a .png, one that renders images with a transparent background. Make sure that you have access to your firm’s library of logos since every brand has different treatments to the same logo – some styles include all white, solid brand color, or all black. Make sure you follow the brand’s rules of logo placement on your website as well – whether left, center, or right indented.

Next, Let’s Decide on Colors

Brand colors are usually divided into two categories – Primary and Secondary. The colors that you use for buttons, fonts, navigation menus, image overlays all fall under these two categories. If your firm’s primary colors are dark navy and dark gray, and the secondary colors are bright blue and light gray, then it is best to choose between two types of color theories:

• A blue template – with dark navy as the background color of menu bars, image overlays and fonts, and bright blue buttons (either a fill or transparent)
• A black and white template – with dark gray as the background color of menu bars, image overlays and fonts, and light gray buttons (either a fill or transparent)

Maintaining consistency on the brand identity helps clients to instantly connect with the firm you belong to, thus creating a sense of understanding about your vision and services.

 

Then Comes Typography

Every firm will have a font library. This library contains different font styles, including but not limited to: regular, italic, medium, condensed, bold, semi bold, and black. It is important to follow the brand rules of using your font for the right purpose. If your firm’s brand utilizes the Medium font for headings, you must use that font style for all your headers. If the paragraphs are formed in a regular font style, all paragraphs must reflect the same style on a desktop, tablet, and mobile versions.

Finally, A Deep Dive Into Visuals

As the saying goes, visuals speak better than words. It is actually true when you consider the user experience of your clients. Most often, your website visitors scroll through, or simply skim the content you write as part of the website copy. It is the visuals (images, icons, and videos) that actually attract the attention of your client cohort.

If your firm is situated in the hustling cities of Toronto or Chicago, for example, you may want to display a bold hero image of the skyline, so that your website visitors can instantaneously connect to the type of firm you belong to. For every service you provide, adding a relevant icon would be very helpful for the users to identify which service they are actually looking for. Streaming your brand videos through YouTube, Vimeo or even Limelight would add to retaining the interest of your website visitors.

All the above procedures to amplify your website’s user experience can be quite technical and challenging. You can always connect with additional resources like a graphic designer or a UI/UX designer to seek advice on your next journey of digital branding!

I hope you enjoyed the first blog of ‘Reeti Records!’ Stay tuned for my next UI/UX write up. Hint, it may or may not be about relevant content for your website.

–Reeti Mathur 

Reeti is a Product Designer at Veriday. Helping clients ensure their digital solutions are optimal for business growth and retention, she applies knowledge from various prestigious career endeavors as well as two Masters Degrees in Arts Technology and Human Computer Interaction.