How can you differentiate your investment firm – when you have to appear really professional, adhere to compliance rules, and where there is no room for “quirky-ness”?

We’ve had many clients over the world who’s businesses are geared around managing money. Their marketing challenges require additional considerations. On your website and on your other marketing, you have to:

• Win enough trust so clients give you enough control over their financial investments so you can help them
• Convince clients your advice is sound
• Be fully compliant and professional in all interactions (online and offline)
• Show your track record
• Adhere to industry compliance rules

And, on top of this, you have to show what makes you different!

In this article I will outline our tips on how to differentiate your investment firm online.

How would we know how to differentiate your investment firm?

Through referrals and partnerships (and 20 years in business so far) we at Top Left Design have extensive experience with financial firms. We’ve worked investment firms, wealth managers, financial consultants, and IFAs. Some are fairly new clients who’s websites we’ve launched recently. Others have remained clients for over 10 years with us! We’re keeping their websites up to date, fresh, secure and compliant, and we do all this without templates. And even though we have multiple clients, we take the task on to help investment firms differentiate.

Differentiation: clear beginning

Your website’s homepage is a good place to begin. Brainstorm keywords and draft one-sentence descriptions – it takes a few rounds of editing to get something that feels that it represents you.

In the examples below – from 2 of our clients – one chose a strong statement and the other chose a 2 word statement.

Show your firm’s people

The real reason people choose to work with you is who you have working with you – and if you’re the owner of the business, often your own personal values permeate to become the culture of the business. Identifying the strongest positive characteristics of your teammates may take some word play, discussion and interviews. If you have a clear answer as to why your best clients are attracted to working with you and ,what makes you choose the people who work with you, it will make prospecting and hiring so much simpler. It’s always a good idea to have a clear indications of your team’s best qualities.

Highlight the little details

Within each project, we often choose something that is special and create detailed visuals to help showcase these. Unique, branded diagrams and maps help tell the story at a glance. They make the website more interesting. They can be used in presentations, in PDFs, in email signatures, and as explainer visuals during meetings.

Each page needs attention

We believe in taking the time to consider the message and purpose in each page of the site. Together with our clients, we’re putting energy, thought, and focus. This is why we design each page separately, according to a clear brief, and show you for discussion and feedback. We use colours, typography, icons, and short sharp sentences to get the points across to the target audience.

Stories, blog, media

However busy you are, websites don’t work as well for you if you keep everything “static”. We don’t mean you have to have flying animations, but there must be pages that are updated regularly. It helps with SEO, encourages return visitors, and people can see you’re on the ball. So, it’s more than worth it to have a dedicated dynamic area for blog articles, media, press mentions, team news, insight, industry opinion, client tips, and success stories. When we create these for our clients we provide training on how to keep them up to date, both technically and with special workshops on tone of voice, headline writing, etc.

Beyond your website

The process we follow for creating websites is designed to extract all the things that make your investment firm unique. But that’s not all that needs consideration – there are elements of you that will exist outside of your website – and your presence on LinkedIn is a big part of this

For example, we created an animated video for one of our clients all about their impressive sustainability activities, as well as an infographic.

Differentiation matters

Like many industries, yours is a competitive market. The stakes are high. There may be any amount of perfectly good firms, doing a great job, that will offer your clients the same type of service (so it seems).

Can you communicate to potential clients you are the best choice for them? How can you differentiate your investment firm? Hopefully using the tips above – and with our help! Because our projects are bespoke – we welcome you to chat to us specifically about your firm and how we can work together.