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Is your website lost in a sea of blue?

Although the financial services industry focuses on providing personal service and generating results, firms typically neglect their websites – that is a big mistake

Pull up your website. What do you see? What does it say about your firm? Does it celebrate your intelligence and tell the world what makes you special? Does it make you proud of who you are and what you represent? Or does it look like most every other financial services website on the planet — the same tired words lost in a sea of blue?

Although the financial services industry focuses on providing personal service and generating results, firms typically neglect their websites. That is a big mistake.

Your website is your anchor. It is the first place that prospective clients go to check your credibility — and believe me, they are using the power of the Internet to judge your trustworthiness and compare you with your competition.

You have only one shot to get that first and everlasting impression just right.

So how do you know if your website is working? How can you tell if it simply needs a tuneup or requires a sweeping renovation?

My advice is to put your ego aside for an hour and take a good, hard, objective look at the state of your current website.

Focus on the following:

Overall impression. Does your website say what you want it to say about your firm? Does it express your level of professionalism and expertise? Is it crystal-clear? More than just looking pretty, the big- picture view of your website should reflect an accurate snapshot of your brand. It should tell viewers what you want them to know about your firm and reinforce their decision to trust you with their assets. If it doesn’t, the resulting disconnect could undermine faith in your service capabilities.

Imagery and color palette. Are the colors you use appropriate for your values? Are the images on your website tired, overused and clichéd (for example, do you use images of handshakes, columns, compasses, lighthouses and/or the sands of time)? Does everything work together to express the correct feeling about your firm’s investment philosophy, personality and reputation? The visual choices you make are the underpinning of your message. They give the viewer emotional cues about how to feel about your firm. Make sure that you are sending the right signals.

Organization. Is your website easy to use? Is information housed in intuitive category buckets? Is there a clearly delineated and rational hierarchy of content? A website structure that is confusing and hard to navigate sends a warning to investors that your company itself is disorganized. And who wants to work with a complicated mess of a firm?

Content. Do you describe what you do the same way as everyone else? Is your content actually worth consuming? Would anybody want to tell a friend about the material or about you? Is what you are saying heavy, laborious and boring to interact with? You need to produce compelling content that grabs the attention of your audience. If your web content is poorly written and easy to dismiss, your firm takes on those characteristics, as well. Today’s investor needs no confusion about who you are, what you specialize in and why you are different. So talk about that — and in plain terms.

When you are through taking a critical look at your website, take time to process the results and then make some comparisons. Go to the websites of your top 10 competitors.

My guess is that most of the sites will look and sound eerily similar. I am also willing to bet that eight out of 10 are lost in a sea of blue (somewhere in the history of financial services marketing, some expert discovered that medium to dark blue is the most conservative and least offensive color on the palette; today it is also the most boring).

Do you also see lighthouses, handshakes, columns and timepieces?

Build a dime-a-dozen website, and you become another dime-a-dozen financial firm. If you want to stand out from the crowd and be seen, heard and even get some phone calls, you have to be different.

That means investing in the right people and tools to get you there, as well as digging down and deciding who are you are as a firm and how you want to represent your distinctiveness. There is huge opportunity for firms to make significant impact in their competitive landscape through superior design and clear messaging, but you must commit to a consistent and professional path.

Remember, today’s website is yesterday’s business card.

Douglas Heikkinen spent 24 years in the financial services industry before becoming president of Riley Weiss, a branding firm.

For archived columns, go to InvestmentNews.com/marketingstrategies.